Congo was one of these games. A local gamer said he was interested, and I saw a screaming deal on figs on TMP (many years ago) so I bought a lot of three forces. I believe most/all of these figures are foudry. The zanzibari's have previously been photographed.
Next up we have some young warriors, (blue shields) and warriors (with the head dressings. Missing from my stock are the cannibals....which is mostly differentiated by painting. So that may not be too hard to fill in if I want to expand.
Broadside Empires of Steel is a print and play game that kickstarted many years ago. I thought it'd be a good entry into naval (which I've been vaguely interested in, but put off by the crunchiness of many rules and the steep learning curve).
In principle the ships could be printed in FDM, but my original printer (Ender 5) didn't really give me satisfying results. So I waited till I was dabbling in resin, which I don't really like to print with (too stinky for my space and too much post print clean up....with stinky cleansers).
Doug visited a couple weekends ago and I dragooned him into playing a game with me. There are rules for creating point based fleets and missions, but I don't have that many ships and my space is small. I decided to go for a small scenario based on a kriegspiel the mad padre ran, Swan of the East.
In the game I had a command of 2 ships (The HMAS battlecruiser Australia and the HMAS light cruiser Chatham. I was blockading Rabaul to try and catch the german raiders (this was a ww1 game). The Australia was in close blockade with the Chatham over the horizon (or vice versa). Wireless from the base ended up summoning the sister ships (armoured cruisers) Scharnhost and Gneisenau, looking for some easy kills. In the campaign one of the German ships took a critical hit and started to spin, the other one retreated, but not before Australia was sufficiently damaged to sink over a few hours. I wanted to replay the encounter to see what might happen. Amazingly the points values were almost identical.
I played in this game during Trumpeter Salute, hosted in April in Burnaby BC (in Greater Vancouver). Dennis was the host and had painted up some lovely figures over the year. My opponent was Malcolm, who often takes command for Napoleon in the napoleons battles games featured elsewhere on this blog.
Our game started off similarly. I was able to steal the march on the Austrians and hurtled most of my troops towards the ford, and hill with the objective. Ahistorically, Malcolm/Austria launched a strong counterattack across the river. The Prussian command was split, and faced a bit of a challenge of how many troops to leave on their side of the river to threaten the village, but not denude their drive on the objective too much.
While the game looked nice, and I have (in the past) enjoyed Honors of War, there was a bit off. Some changes were made by the GM (I think in the interests of time and convention realities) and I think he wasn't too solid in the rules. There were some options for 'pass through' fire (overwatch/reaction fire) that could have made quite a difference but we were told it wasn't a thing in this game. After the weekend I checked my own rules and let Malcolm know, as he was (rightly so) a bit disappointed by the rules and the outcome. I do think it would have made a major difference.
In general, the Prussians were able to sort themselves out on the hill in a strong defensive position. The two armies cavalry forces were slightly overlapping, so a cavalry vs cavalry charge quickly morphed into cavalry vs infantry attacks (which are very iffy in this time period). Some good rules by the Prussians vs some ugly roles by the Austrians quickly made the writing on the wall clear and the battle was resolved in a timely fashion within the block.
I didn't feel like I'd done great generalship, but a combo of lucky roles, & some missed reaction fire opportunities ended the battle early. The pressure was definitely on my leave behind force, and I suspect the hill battle could have been fairly interesting/close had the cavalry action not been so decisive.
I feel like this is was one of my somewhat typical convention experiences, where you play with pretty figs and terrain that someone else has made, but the actual gaming experience isn't the most uplifting. It seems churlish to say it though and I don't think it's really a function of the GM (in most cases). I think that the convention setting and time constraints, vs the rules that are available (specifically the complexity and time requirements), make for a challenge that often is imperfectly solved. I think my expectations for conventions have gone up as it's hard for me to get to them. The time and monetary costs are balanced vs the other things I could be doing (gaming or visiting with friends) often means that what would otherwise be entirely satisfactory games are seen through a more critical lens.
