Friday, June 24, 2016

Fistful of Lead: Wasteland Warriors Playtest 1

I am blessed with a large and diverse game group; newbies, grognards and everything in between. I thought I would document some of the process and progress of Wasteland warriors.
There are a lot of great Post Apocalyptic rules out there, but as I've mentioned it before, Wasteland Warriors will be be different in several ways. It uses the tried and true Fistful of Lead system as well as it's methodology. This is not the dark, gritty world of Book of Eli, or the Road, or even Mad Max.

You can definitely use these rules if that's your vision of the future, but you'll leave a lot of fun by the wayside.
In a wargaming world full of gritty, dark post apocalyptic rules I present a weirder, and somewhat goofy take on the end of the world, shaped by hours watching Thundarr the Barabrian, reading Kamandi Last Boy on Earth, and playing Gamma World.

It is a world populated by talking plants, machine gun toting giant squirrels, killer robots and techno-necromancers. Strap on your blaster, take your anti-radiation pills, and hop on your giant grasshopper mount. Things are going to get interesting....



Last night's game was play testing the basic turn sequence. If you are familiar with Fistful of Lead (and I hope you are), it uses regular playing cards as the turn sequence. IN the original Wild West rules, some of the cards had additional Special features available to models activated by them, such as One-Eyed Jacks giving a bonus to Shooting rolls. For WW, every card has a special feature you can use them for. This makes decisions about which model to activate when even tougher.

This was also a playtest of the scavenging rules. Each player (this time there were 6) placed a scavenge marker showing the location of possible food, goods, weapons or lost tech (represented by the card suits: hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs). Face cards are dangers. As usual, you can use regular deck of playing cards with a chart to show what you got, or, of course, I'll offer specialty decks. Then, they diced for entry point. That scavenge marker you placed might be across the table now.

I don't have a lot of ruins just yet, so this battle took place in what was decided was an old swim park that happens to have an active volcano in it. A lot of weird stuff happens when a comet hurtles between the earth and the moon, unleashing cosmic destruction.....

The game started with Orange Crush and his Deadly Darlings headed straight for a marker while while the SIN-thetics (an android gang) took long range shots at them. The next turn, Orange and his gals fired back, but robots and androids ignore pin results, having no sense of self preservation. They flip side of that bonus is they are easier to hit for the same reason.


One the other side of the board, a group of shotgun armed green skinned mutants found a cave with a scavenge marker. They were the first flip a card and see what it was. BOOM! a booby trap. Three mutants were caught in the blast, but only one injured.

Next, and mixed mutant and mutated animal gang climbed the volcano to grab their own loot and lucked out with some food. The two other, mostly human gangs managed to avoid most of the gunfire streaking across the table.

Some well used uses of the Special abilities of the cards helped players recover from wounds and pins, close combat and shooting. Soon, everybody had a least some scavenged goods. All items scavenged have a trade value associated with them which is essential for feeding and maintaining your gang between outings. These can also be used to increase you Renown and help eventually win the campaign.

One outcome of the playtest is that "Out of Action" models can be looted. This added an unexpected element to the game. Now your downed gang members become objectives to grabbed before the enemy. This helped get rid of the hunker down mentality that dominated earlier sessions.

All in all, things worked great. Orange Crush and his crew, and the androids were wiped out. Scrat the Rat and his gang grabbed what they could and beat it. One of the human gangs made off with a coveted luxury food item (Twinkies).

We got to try out some of the new skills like Two Gun Terror, and weapons like the B.A.G. (Big ass gun).

Next game will introduce mutations and more lost tech of the Ancients.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Custom Cards pt 1

Here's some cards for the custom deck to Fistful of Lead: Horse and Musket. The Jacks:
An 18th century French Musketeer, an AWI British officer, a Marlburian era Dragoon and an American Rifleman from the War of 1812.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Weekend of Gaming at Warlord-Con

I had the opportunity to host a game of Black Powder at Warlord Games Warlord Con in Oklahoma City this weekend with good buddy Chris "Cluck Amok" Cluckey and the Boy. Chris is responsible for the amazing terrain and 54mm miniatures. I just ran the game. Black Powder gets a lot a grief for being vanilla sometimes, but with all the color added for French and Indian War, this proved to be far from it. We ran three games over Friday and Saturday, and everyone there was great. Now, for pics:













Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Cards for FfoL Horse & Musket

As I'm working on Fistful of Lead: Horse & Musket, I just had to do some new custom cards...

Friday, June 10, 2016

15mm ACW with Black Powder.

A nice little game with miniatures I painted 20 years ago.







Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Scenario Book now available

The Scenario Book offered in the Fistful of Lead: Reloaded Kickstarter is now available as a pdf through Wargame Downloads here.
This is the same book available to the folks who ordered miniatures, and includes the 10 free scenarios that everyone got who participated in the KS, plus 10 new ones.
A grand total of 20 Action-packed scenarios for the Fistful of Lead, Wild West wargaming rules.
Included are:
- 2 multi-part linked scenarios
- lots of one-off, stand alone scenarios
- 5 character driven scenarios
- and the special "Revenge of Boot Hill", which allows you to add a little "weird" to your Wild West.
All for the low-low price of $6!
So, if you're one of those poor suckers who didn't buy into the FfoL Kickstarter, you can at least get some scenarios.

Friday, June 3, 2016

Getting caught up with BP and acquainted with SW Armada

I'm helping run a game of Black Powder with Cluck Amok at Warlord Con next month, and I thought I needed few more games under my belt. Using John's terrain and soldiers we set up a rare Saturday game using the Black Powder ammendments for ACW (Except the "Whipped" rules which I don't see a difference with existing rules).

I was small game by most wargaming standards, but I gotta say, it was a lot of fun. Some of the best games I've played have been with fewer units, but come game time it's hard to resist the pull of throwing it all on the table.
We each had three infantry units and a pool of two guns. This would mean brigades getting knocked out as soon as two of those three were shaken or destroyed. Management of a unit's hits would be paramount.
I managed to get my Rebs safely behind a wall, but some nice die rolls and concentrated fire by Lead Addict had one of my regiments beat up off the bat. It took efforts most of the game by both the Brigade Commander and the Big Boss to hold them together.
There was a nice back a forth to the game that reminded me of my first ACW love, Fire & Fury. But seeing as we didn't have 6 hours to play, F&F would have to wait. The new rules that only allow firing it you move once gave a more period feel.
We ended up with destroyed brigades on both sides, and one reb unit so banged up it couldn't finish off the Yankees. A slight victory for the Union.

Last night we tried Star Wars Armada, the big brother to X-Wing (or Wings of War in space). A lot to keep track of, but not a hard game. Yes, it has the Space Opera feel more than SciFi. It feels more like a sea ship battle in space but that's OK. If I had known the ships better, I might not have lost the biggest, baddest ship on the board so quickly. This is definitely a "know your troops" type of game where repeated plays with the same ships comes in handy. That's not my thing. e rarely play back to back games of anything.

I would also say 4 players was pushing the max. You might be able to play 6, if everyone just had one ship. As I mentioned before, there's a lot to manage.
The ships are of course, beautiful. I was seven when Star Wars came out and it changed my life. I am what I am (an artist and geek) because of it. That being said, I have a hard time playing games set in that universe, or Tolkien's for the same reason. It's too close. I can't fly the Millineum Falcon or play Darth Vader. Han didn't die in that battle, Darth didn't fly that type of TIE fighter.
To me it's like having an a-historical ACW game where General Lee is leading a cavalry charge. I can play as anonymous pilot A, it for mythical Squadron B. That's about it.
Other than that. great game.