"To boldly go where no campaign has gone before..."

I mentioned recently that we'd been playing a bit of Star Trek: Attack Wing, a Wizkids game based on the same design mechanics of the excellent X-Wing from Fantasy Flight. Although broadly similar there are a few significant differences between the games which makes for a significantly different game experience:

• Instead of being dogfights between individual fighters, this game focuses on battleships and so tends to have less maneuverability but more firepower.
• Captains (instead of pilots), crew and upgrades are interchangeable between the ships and even the different factions leading to more fleet tailoring (mixing factions is not something we're that keen on, but it is possible).
• Being Star Trek, there are more factions available than just Rebel/Empire, so currently you can get Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Dominion ships, and Bajoran and Independent crew. The planned releases include the Borg, Kazon, Species 8472 and Vulcans,
• The games makes more use of scenarios, drawing on the films and TV series' for inspiration, and each ship comes with a new scenario.
• The miniatures are not in scale with each other and aren't as nicely painted as the X-Wing miniatures (this is probably the major negative of the game).

As this is a Wizkids game there is a heavy emphasis on tournaments with a well supported organised play schedule with limited edition resources, terrain and ships as prizes. This is great for those who like the cut and thrust of tournaments and finely tailored fleets, however for those of us who don't have the time, temperament or money required for preparing for these kind of events it leaves you needing to find a different form of motivation to prevent this game becoming a bit repetitive (which is the only downside of X-Wing).

Hence the campaign...

Pete, Wes and Matt have all acquired the starter set and have swapped between them to begin fleets for the Romulans, Klingons and Federation respectively. Which left me playing catch up and buying ships from the Dominion faction which features a mismatched collection of Cardassian, Jem'hadar and Breen ships. I have to confess that many years ago I stopped watching Deep Space Nine before the Dominion War stuff happened, so I'm not entirely clear on who these people are. I was also a touch disappointed when beginning to search the internet about Dominion tactics to discover that the general consensus was something along the lines of: "the Dominion SUCK!!!"

The Dominion Logo - Interplanetary Branding

This campaign might hurt...

Using the map from Star Trek online, I've used a variation of the Flames of War Firestorm rules for the campaign. Broadly speaking, games are played as and when, with a dice roll to determine who is attacking to capture the enemy territory. The defender has the option of choosing a scenario for the game and if the territory being attacked contains a space station, the scenario is 'Destroy the Space Station' from one of the Klingon ship packs.

Fleets can be created by using any available cards for your own faction (we've ruled that the Bajorans are part of the Federation in case Matt manages to get his hands on the Defiant and Kira Nerys), but once unique cards are used they are committed to a fleet in a particular territory until you specifically withdraw them the next time you use that fleet.

After a battle, if the attacker wins, the capture the attacked territory and the defender must retreat to a neighboring territory. If the defender wins, the attacker goes back to where they came from. If the retreating side cannot move to an adjacent territory, the entire fleet counts as destroyed. Any unique ships, captains or crew destroyed in the game  must roll an attack dice, on a damage result they are injured and cannot be used in the fleet's next engagement, on a critical result, they are gone from the campaign.

And that's pretty much it...

Each faction has a different goal:

• The Federation, must control all of Federation space and all other space station territories.
• The Dominion, must control more territory than any two other factions.
• The Romulans, must control more territory than any two other factions.
• The Klingons, must deliver the killing blow to an enemy faction.

Yesterday, we played our first games:

Game 1 - Dominon vs Romulan

The Dominion attacked the Romulan home world (you can attack via Nebula or Star Clusters, but count as cut off if you lose) and despite initially out flying the cloaked War Birds, an ill judged suicide attack by a Jem'hadar Attack Ship achieved nothing and left the Dominion severely out-gunned. The Romulans finally got their act together and blew the Dominion ships back to Cardassian space. To add injury to insult, Gul Danar, one of the Cardassian captains was killed.

Imagine this with miniatures...

Game 2 - Federation vs Klingon

With their eyes on the prize the Federation went after space stations in the Alderbaran Sector. Although able to to avoid the guns of the space station, the Federation's flagship was funneled into the powerful phasers of the Chang's Klingon fleet. Jean-Luc Picard was injured in the engagement, but the Enterprise made it to safety.

"Run away!"

Game 3 - Romulan vs Federation

Brimming with confidence the Romulans took advantage of the Federations reversal against the Klingons, crossed the Neutral Zone and attacked the Argelius Sector. A scratched together fleet of little known Galaxy class ships flown by captains of little repute managed to swamp the Romulan fleet and crippled their ships, killing Captain Tomalak in the process.

"You called for reinforcements?"

Game 4 - Klingon vs Dominion

Feeling the call of battle in his blood, Chang took his fleet deep into Breen space and caught the Dominion by surprise. Blasting clean through the hastily assembled fleet they pushed the Dominion forces back into Cardassian space without suffering any losses.

"Cry Havok! And let slip the dogs of war!"

After those games, the situation looks like this:

Klingon Fleet 1 - I.K.S. Kronos One, Chang ("Once more unto the breech"), Kerla

Federation Fleet 1 - U.S.S. Enterprise D, Jean-Luc Picard (injured), Clark Terrell

Federation Fleet 2 - Nobody of Any Importance

Romulan Fleet 1 - Donatra

Romulan Fleet 2 - Mirok, N'Vek

Dominion Fleet 1 - Kraxon, Gul Ranor

Dominion Fleet 2 - Glinn Telle

Overall, it's been a fun start to the campaign. I've discovered that I have to find some way of dealing with cloaked ships if I'm not to be utterly destroyed. Matt's discovered that bog standard ships with unnamed captains can be effective as a swarm. Pete's learned that not going to cloak early can cost him. Wes has discovered that Klingons are filth!

"I'll get you next time you pasty-headed and pointy-eared,
cowardly-cloaking, more uniformly appearing fleets!"

Happy Christmas!

I won't get a chance to post this tomorrow, so I'd like to wish everybody out on 'tinterwebz' a happy Christmas (insert other seasonal greeting appropriate to your language, culture or religion as you see fit).

And for those of you opening presents tomorrow with relatives who query why you're still getting toys for Christmas, I'll leave you with one of my favourite quotes from C.S. Lewis as a suitable retort:

"When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the desire to be very grown up."

Have a good one!

Firestorm: Lorraine - No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy

The last couple of weeks have been busy at work and home, leaving me little time for painting and most of my playing time has been taken up with a few games of Star Trek: Attack Wing (more on that in the coming weeks). With one thing and another, I've only just got round to sorting out the campaign map since our last game of Flames of War.

In brief, I was the Germans fighting Matt's Americans, who for once managed to actually gain the initiative and decided to attack Arrancourt across the Moselle. I decided to surprise him by taking an almost totally infantry force as a counter to his laser tanks. I wanted to give my Nebelwerfers a run out for the first time, and backed up by my PaK40's a borrowed Flak 88 and a shedload of Panzerfaust-toting infantry, my plan was to dig in and blow up the American Armour as it rumbled into view.

Matt dutifully picked an armoured list and all would have been well had we not rolled up the Counter Attack mission. Suddenly, I found my swarms of infantry penned into one quarter of the table needing to get out of their foxholes and engage in a footrace with Stuart tanks in an attempt to secure the undefended objective on my flank. What's more, I had no units suitable for being in reserve behind Matt's positions.

All in all I made a fairly good fist of a bad situation. I managed to repel an assault on my defended flank by two platoons of Shermans and a unit of infantry, and in the process, got myself into a position where just one more platoons destroyed would cause Matt to have t make tests. However, despite sending three platoons of infantry out to secure the other objective, only one and a half made it there. I did manage to secure the objective and kill a few tanks, but time was on Matt's side and a combined assault from Matt's armour finally broke my pioneers and won the game for him.

It was closer than I thought it would be, but I think I was always on to a loser. Matt, didn't rush or make any silly mistakes with vulnerable platoons and so didn't really ever give me a chance to destroy that final platoon, and by the end I was relying on either a very lucky artillery strike or a really unfortunate assault from Matt.

As you can see, this result saw the American open another hole in the German lines and push towards Strasbourg. There is now a gap in the US lines which a German general could exploit to cut off the US spearhead, however, the campaign appears to be tipping in the Americans favour.

Batvember 5: The Mighty Quinn

My final entry for Batvember is, as promised, Harley Quinn (aka the ridiculously named Harleen Quinzel...no, I don't know what they were thinking either), the Joker's right hand girl, main squeeze and one third of the Gotham City Sirens.

I have to admit that had I not seen the second hand lot on eBay, I would never have bought this model as if already painted a Heroclix Harley. However, I'm glad I have her as the model has bags of character and was thoroughly enjoyable to paint. However, seeing the picture above I've realised that I haven't painted the diamond on her legs, so she's not quite finished.

So that's it for Batvember, it's been pretty productive and has seen not only the arrival of new models, but a full game table and the arrival of a third faction for the game.

To celebrate the end of the month I've been playing with Comic Life (which has an iPhone app I hadn't heard if until today) and produced a comic strip of the game I played earlier in the month as an experiment.

I suspect that more of my battle reports will be using Comic Life in future.

Enjoy...

Batvember 4: She's Out Of My League

As promised, the next of my little windfall of purchases: Talia Al Ghul. I was pleased to be able to pick her up cheap as I was never intending to pay full price for her as 'leather-clad chick with sword' is actually really easy to find alternatives for and the scale issues are not so important with female characters as women tend to be shorter than men.

Once again, my photos seem to let down what is, for me, a pretty satisfactory paint job.

This is actually a better model than the image on the Knight Models website let on. However, the is a lot of very fine detail which meant that I really had to work hard on getting the face right first time because several layers of paint would begin to obscure detail. It's not as bad as Mr Freeze's face, but it was still a bit nerve-wracking.

As well as being able to join Batman, Talia represents the official arrival of a third faction in my games, the League of Shadows (or Assassins, depending on your preferred source material). She can lead the three Blackgate Prisoners against Joker, Harley and the two clowns or my massive Police Force. She adds flexibility and variation to my games, which is good.

Finally, I've done a small piece of terrain (I've been busy alright). A couple of oil drums cut from the display stand that my Batmobile came on. Nothing fancy, although I'll probably add some labels when I get round to getting the printer out.

Next week is even busier for me so I'm not expecting to produce that much, however, the plan is to get my official Harley Quinn done and to add a couple mor small pieces of scenery. We'll have to see ho that goes.

Batvember 3: Who are these clowns?

So, I've had a bit of luck.

I was perusing eBay the other day and came across something that you don't see very often; second hand Batman miniatures which aren't 'pro-painted'. The lot included Talia Al Ghul, Harley Quinn and two of the Joker Crew.

Now here's the rub. The models were assembled, undercoated and without bases and cards, none of which are obstacles to sale. However, the Joker henchmen were from the box with Clown Prince which meant that a) anybody who had bought or was going to buy the Joker (in other words everybody) wouldn't really want them, and b) they were of particular use to me as I already have a Joker that I like and would struggle to justify buying another one to get the henchmen.

As you've probably guessed, I leapt at the lot and won it for roughly two thirds of the cost (including postage) if two characters and a pair if henchmen.

So, to cut a long story short, here's two if the four as this week's offering for Batvember.

Yes, there are three of them. We'll come to 'Chuck' in a bit.

First up, the Ringmaster. This is a chunky model and very sturdy compared to most of the Knight Model sculpts I've seen. I'm very happy with the colour I've got for the hat and epaulettes, but the mask probably needs a bit of highlighting work.

Secondly 'Auguste' (or Contra Auguste, I can't remember). This guys positively simplistic compared to the Ringmaster. I chickened out of putting the Arkham logo on his top, but I am very happy with his mask.

Finally, Chuck. This model has been bodged together with parts from several models: legs from a Clix henchman; upper body from a Clix Ra's Al Ghul; hands from the Bolt Action Russian sprue; blades from 40k; and the head of an Ancient German. He'll be used as the High Security prisoner from the Blackgate box, and I call him Chuck because he looks a bit like Chuck Norris (to my eyes anyway). Frankly, if Chuck Norris was in prison, he would be HIGH security...

So that's it for this week. It looks like next Sunday will be ladies night with one or both of Harley and Talia making an appearance.

Batvember 2: Street Skirmish

As I've finally got enough terrain to fill a table, I decided to have another go at grappling with the rules of the Batman Miniatures Game from Knight Models.

I decided to keep it simple and have a Rep of 130 for the game pitting Batman against Killer Croc and two Blackgate escapees.

The scenario was a Skirmish, which is pretty much a pitched battle in other rule sets. I didn't bother with enigmas or objectives, but I did use lamp posts and sewers. Admittedly I forgot all about the effects of light, but in the end, the fact that Batman can see in the dark and the bad guys had no weapons which could shoot beyond their vision range meant that the light sources were irrelevant.

This was a solo game to learn the rules so don't expect anything too tactical.

Here's the board. Batman began Behind the building on the right near to the Batmobile. The convicts were in the warehouse, probably looting it, whilst Croc began in the sewers. I hadn't put the sewer grates on at this point so if you see any two pence pieces later, that's what they are.

Alerted to a break in at a warehouse, the Dark Knight uses his Batclaw to take to the rooftops to survey the scene.

Unaware that they are being watched, the two crooks make for the exit with their stolen goods.

Suddenly a caped figure swings down into the street and hurls something at the villain with the gun, striking him on the head.

With a bellowing roar, a huge shape erupts from the sewers. It seems that the Caped Crusader has swung right into a trap.

Shots are fired as the villains charge. Batman is hurt but manages to knock down on of his assailants with a swift sweep of his legs.

Realising he is outnumbered, Batman swing back up to the rooftops, hurling a Batarang as he flees, further injuring one of the gang.

Having assessed the situation, Batman attacks again: fists, claws and weapons fly in a flurry of attacks, blocks and counter attacks.

Batman hands out a beating to Croc's gang, knocking one of them out. Seeing that they are overmatched, Croc and his companion flee for the safety of the sewers.

Batman won, mainly because his high defense value and counter attack ability make him damn near impossible to hurt. I  also threw him into combat to test the rules, but it's clear that his ability to see and shoot round corners in the dark means that he could just snipe his way to a small win.

I liked Croc as a character, he's pretty straight forward, but starting in the sewers and able to pop up anywhere is a nice touch. The mooks were mooks, meh.

The game works and I like a lot of it, but there are a lot of fiddly rules which need to be repeatedly referenced I'm not sure are necessary. I'm not entirely sure that beyond the alternating activations, this game delivers anything that can't be easily replicated by something like  Necromunda.

I'll continue to give the game a go as it has some charm and the work on building the characters has been done for me. I've also got a few people interested in a game. I can easily do gangs of 300 points, so that's the next game I'm likely to play, and I'll try to bring in other rules like enigmas.