2024 Enfilade - eye candy post

 Enfilade lost it's venue in early 2024 (redevelopment of the hotel into condos) and they managed to find an alternative venue in Tacoma. The main game room was pretty snug, and as a result very loud. Vendors were in the hallway just outside which hopefully didn't affect their sales too much. The bring and buy was surprisingly full.....hard to know if it was because of a different room configuration or actual greater volumes. 

GdC Battle of Occana - Enfilade 2025 Napoleonics Game

 At enfilade this year my friends managed to host games in all slots so snared a table all weekend. It made setup breakdown and storage a lot easier. Saturday midday we ran Ocana with Guard du Corp rules (a convention ruleset made by Doug and Seth). 

Ocana is a rare battle where the Spanish fight the French in large numbers with no support. The Spanish have taken strategic initiative and are advancing on Madrid from North and South. The French don't notice the Southern approach at first and a mere 35 miles from Madrid there are some initial encounters that have the Spanish counter march and daddle. Soon the French have raced reinforcements to counter this thrust. 

The day before the battle sees a huge cavalry action where the Spanish come off poorly. This is important as the right wing of the Spanish army is a VERY brittle cavalry formation facing enthused and strong French cavalry. The line of defensive was well chosen as on the right was a gullied river that blocked the Spanish from advancing on the Left wing. 

 

Enfilade 2023 Picture dump

As per my last post, I headed down to Olympia, WA at the end of may for Enfilade. A lovely convention held each year on memorial day weekend. I hadn't been since before covid, so this was literal the most people I have seen in a room for 3 years...by a long shot. 

It was great to see familiar faces, and get some gaming in. I did a fair amount of running around taking pictures of various cool looking games. I thereby present them in a pictorial essay to follow. Minimal comments will follow as mostly I didn't know what the games were (or bother to spent time to figure out). 

 

The theme was 'War in the Desert'.

Blogger was cursed me by loading the pictures in reverse chronological order and I'm not willing to reorganize them....enjoy!

Enfilade 2023: Friday Easy Play Trafalgar (sails of glory)

Once again I made the pilgrimage down to Olympia, WA for enfilade. My organizational skills were miserable this year and I was punished by terrible traffic, and limited options for gaming (the best games get scooped early via pre registration). I found myself playing Trafalgar on Friday night with a gaming friend, Bob, who I mostly see at Enfilade yearly. Bob prefers to play the French, and notes that if you lose it's historical, and if you win you get to gloat.

 

 The setup for the game narrowed the action to where the British were cutting the French line. A significant chunk of the French line ended up out of the battle due to the wind and the remaining French got pasted by the better British ships with local superiority.

To add insult to injury the French are sailing VERY close to the wind and can't make a left/port turn without having a very good chance (~70%) of stalling (caught in irons). Problematically the French were so close to the edge of the table that they couldn't really turn to the right/starboard much either, or they'd run off the board. Easy play indeed....the scope for decisions was VERY limited. It might have been better to have the french run on auto pilot in some way. 

Napoleonic French Young Guard & Guard (Empress) Dragoons

I realized as I was working on my New Year post that I don't have any (*ANY!*) pictures of stuff I painted this year. Mostly I haven't painted much, the stuff I have done was mostly prep, or partially complete. I did finish a whack of napoleonics for Enfilade back in May that I never documented. I hope that means I finished other stuff but didn't take photos, but who knows...




These figures were part of a mystery lot I got off TMP that were aggressively priced. Conveniently they ended up being a mix of elite and regular line. The elites I peeled off to use as young guard, mixing in the last 20 figs from a victrix box of guard (the previous 40 parceled out to old and middle guard).






I only needed 4 units (~10 men each) for the convention game, but I decided to make 6 bases to future proof my young guard for other campaigns.








I had most of the other figs I needed but was short some empress dragoons (guard dragoons). I already had a box of perry french dragoons but the saddle furniture and braid is different so I attempted a conversion with green stuff putty and some suture material for the braid.



 I wasn't super pleased with the result...looking closely you can see that the 'scales' at the front of the saddle furniture and a bit too variable, and that the 'lay' of the braid loops is a bit too flouncy. I was under the gun and it meets the 2 foot table top standard so good enough.
It also helped with the excess number of dragoons I'd probably otherwise have.

Enfilade 2019 pt 4 - picture dump

My enfilade gaming was cut short by a vicious bit of sickness. I suddenly felt like I'd been hit by a truck, archy, feverish, sore throat. I ended up skipping the evening session and fell asleep till the am (with a brief sortie to retrieve my figs from the convention). The illness made the trip back north with the family pretty delightful too. It's not a vacation if you don't get sick at some point I suppose...

Picture dump after the jump....

Enfilade 2019 pt 3 Saturday Afternoon - Battle of Hoth (Airwar C21)

Saturday afternoon (second block) I joined in with the Battle of Hoth (how it should have been). This was an "air combat" game using airwar C21. I see this ruleset come up for conventions fairly frequently but I have never played. It seems fairly quick to play, easy to pick up, but I can't comment on how 'realistic' it is.

I was on the rebel side attempting to guard the ion cannon and powerplant for long enough for the transports to get away. Our assets included a line of turrets (fairly short range and poor accuracy), some ground troops (to get shot at by storm troopers), 4 y wings, and maybe 6-8 xwings. By the strange randomness of conventions one fellow (Victor maybe?) and myself ended up with our 2 y wings on the left flank flying directly at the imperials, while the balance of the rebels swing across the table diagonally from the right, creating a bit of a flanking furball when they arrived.

The imperials needed to blow up the power plant and ion cannon OR capture the base with their storm troopers. They had a fairly huge host of empire bombers (4-6?), 2 tyderian shuttles with storm trooper squads, and a few tie fighter escorts (4+).

The GM had done a good job setting us up with cheat sheets and tracking records. The rules seem pretty easy. Unfortunately with the noise, a bit of ambiguity of the cheat sheets, and a pretty light touch on explaining rules up front there was some confusion about how shooting worked. This didn't end up mattering too much before we figured it out, but it did affect how the rebels used their missiles.

Turns out that gunfire does 1 points of damage per hit, whereas a missile hit does 1d10. The Y wing pilots all largely ended up cooking off their missiles ASAP believing they were in flying coffins and it was better to have used them then not. The GM kept shaking his head about why we'd use them on lower value targets like the escorts. We were thinking "my guns do 2d10 damage, why wouldn't I use the weaker missiles".....ooops.

I feel quite bad for one of the empire flyers who was flying a couple of the tie fighters who was tabled *very quickly* as 'missiles away!' and the thought that we'd be better off chewing up the bombers once the screen was gone. He walked away obviously irritated and I can't blame him at all.
As we figured out how guns actually worked we discovered our turrets were barely a speed bump and the tie bombers (with a ton of missiles that only attacked ground targets) were destroying them left and right.

The rebels managed to down a shuttle, forced the other to drop their stormtroopers early, and cut the empire bombers down to 2. Alas two bombers with bays full of 10 missiles each did short work on our infrastructure. *BOOM*

Well played imperials, well played.

Interestingly the GM noted this was the first time the imperials actually won. The big difference being they usually spread their forces across the table or on two corners. This time they were concentrated on one flank (far from our own heavy flank), and we simply couldn't do enough damage in time with the target rich environment. Clever play rather than simple luck on this one.

I'd be willing to try airwar C21 again to get a better sense of it. It'd be good to hear from those who play more air games as I've only played CY6 (and Cy6 jet age) and it's definitely a more crunchy realistic system (with the resulting increase in playtime/decrease in flyers required).

Enfilade 2019 pt 2 Saturday Morning - Battle for Dresden GdC

Saturday Morning has the big battle of napoleonics that Doug organizes every year. There is a pretty usual roster of guys who agree to paint parts of the OOB in order to guarantee a spot at the game. There's usually another 2-6 commands for those who haven't painted a force. This year Ian and Craig (?? I'm gapping on his name) BoB were late to arrive and didn't have a game to play so they took over the Russians and Prussians facing my forces on the french left flank.

Dresden sees the allies trapping a large french army and preparing to crush it with numbers. Suddenly Napoleon shows up and throws the allied command into indecision about whether to attack or not (the plan to attack everywhere that Napoleon wasn't had been agreed upon earlier). It sounds as though the attack went in as there wasn't enough time/organization to stop it.....but the allies held back a huge amount of their forces. Good for ensuring a french victory historically.

Enfilade 2019 pt 1 Friday - Cruel Seas

A rare shot of this years painting

My life so far this year has been consumed with a growing infant, multiple sicknesses (most probably arriving from the illness skunkworks that is daycare, and some requiring antibiotics). I was also prepping a large contingent of french for Dougs (dots of paint) annual big naps battle at enfilade. True to form, most of us were finishing the figs at the last moment. I was not the worst, but I finished flocking 20 minutes prior to the drop dead time for loading the car. I still haven't taken the glamour photos that will document the real work.

The addition of the wife and 20 month infant slowed the trip dramatically so I missed the early afternoon session and arrived for the evening session having checked in and loaded up on groceries.

I was booked to play 'cruel seas' a fairly new offering from Warlord games. I hadn't realized it had only been out since December. My side took the German S boats against 3 British freighters and a armed trawler and a host of small escorts. It was a flank chase and there was opportunity for lots of torpedos flying across the table and, my word, ships can suddenly disappear under fire (one of my boats was hit by two hits by 3inch artillery pieces on the freighters....under 5% chance (my attacker rolling two 1's to hit). All I could do was laugh hilariously as my ship took a crit, caught fire (1 roll of 6 on a d6 for a diesel boat) and disappeared just as it had closed the distance to fire.

The figures are beautiful, and the rules were.....okay. Hilariously there was a steady stream of folks dropping by to check the game out who all voiced their dislike for the rules. It sounds as though the two key problems are: 1 - rushed into production there was insufficient playtesting and balance and the hardcopy rules have been revised into uselessness already. 2 - ships turn based on their speed. Moving faster gives MORE moves (i.e. flank speed = 3 turns, slow = 1). A slow boat (like a cargo ship) can crank in HUGE turns over a short distance compared to a 'highly maneuverable' fast boat which has it's turns happen over a much longer range. While not much of a problem in this scenario I can see it was an obvious issue. Pretty easy to fix though.....

I only managed 2 pics of the cruel seas game. I think there was a fair amout of 'not that interesting to photo' going on. Picture dump of other games in the same time slot to follow.....

A 2 page home brew tank system. It seemed to play pretty fast and was pretty bloody. Great convention fare. I wished I'd had more time to peruse the rules. 

The host put on a great post apoc game last year. I forget the rule set, but the presence of the ufo suggests a 'historically inspired' scenario.

Indians vs colonists in North America. Musket era. Not sure the ruleset. Looked pretty. 

Fair number of big napoleonic battles. 

Good number of star wars inspired games over the weekend. Pod racing on a nice looking board. 

Doug's "retreat from Moscow" game. I think the Russians were rule directed and endlessly cycled on while the french attempted to escape of the board.....maybe with some treasure/rations/supplies? 





Dougs earlier writeup of the playtesting sounded pretty hilarious as the french engaged in some friendly fire at least once. I doubt it happened at the convention but I will admit to hoping for lightning to strike again.