Tag Archives: Metropolitan Wargamers

Flames of War: Fielding the Sd. Kfz. 7/1 Anti-Aircraft Gun

Wars are filled with big, heavy equipment, and the 8-ton German  Sd.Kfz. 7 served as the longtime workhorse throughout World War II. Short for the Sonderkraftfahrzeug (German for “special purpose vehicle”), the Sd. Kfz. 7 half-track was widely used as a transport, towing vehicle and the basis for self-propelled anti-aircraft gun crews. AA configurations of the truck featured either quad-mounted 2cm Flakvierling 38 guns on the Sd. Kfz. 7/1 and the Sd. Kfz. 7/2 with more cannon-like 3.7cm FlaK 36 guns.

For my Flames of War AA gun team, I’ve chosen to model the Sd. Kfz. 7/1 in its two variants – one with its open cab and one with an armored engine and driver’s cab. After gluing-up the metal and plastic pieces, I left the gun turrets unglued to the truck bed so the crews could rotate 360 degrees as they did in real life. As with most of my German armor, a flat black sprayed primer coat was then dry-brushed in a dark grey. Guns and details were picked out with a bit of gun metal and the bench seats were painted to resemble a reddish-brown leather. The crew and driver were finished to match my usual infantry models with flesh and equipment details finished off with a watered-down brown wash.

For now, I’ve got the open cab version finished and I’ll post again once the armored one is complete.

Having recently finished my P-47 Thunderbolt for use as air support for my Allied forces, I only thought it fair to even-out the German side with some anti-aircraft protection. As in actual combat, the FOW Sd. Kfz. 7/1 model is as equally deadly against aircraft as it is to ground forces. With a big day-long FOW day coming up on July 20th at Metropolitan Wargamers in Park Slope, Brooklyn, rushing these guys to the tabletop front to hold back the Allied invasion should be key to striking a gaming balance.

Flames of War: Fielding the P-47 Thunderbolt

The P-47 Thunderbolt was a big, heavy, expensive and deadly plane with .50-cal machine guns and a bomb payload of 2500 pounds. Rushed into development and production near the dawn of World War II, these American planes saw their first use in Europe in 1942. By the late war period, the P-47 was being widely used in Western Europe and proved to be among the most effective fighter aircraft in both air-to-air and air-to-ground combat operations. During the Normandy landings in June 1944, the German Luftwaffe was a virtual no-show and the P-47 Thunderbolt ruled the air in support of the massive Allied invasion below.

I’ve been modelling and playing with the 15mm World War II Flames of War miniatures wargaming system for a number of years now, but until now all my gaming has been with tiny scale boots, wheels and tank tracks firmly planted on the ground. With a full afternoon of large 2500-point late war period FOW games being planned in July at Metropolitan Wargamers in Brooklyn, I decided to supplement my existing US Airborne force with some new air support with a P-47 Thunderbolt model. Armed with its wing machine guns and laden with bombs, I’m pretty excited about adding the P-47 and a whole additional dimension to a game I’ve gotten pretty familiar with over the years.

Choosing a paint scheme for the model was the first decision I needed to make in my project, and there are hundreds of historical variations to be found. While the silver fuselage seemed to be among the more commonly-modeled versions of the P-47, I opted for a simpler olive drab body. The green base coat was followed by a grey underbelly and some boldly-colorful red details at the nose and tail. The windowed canopy “glass” consisted of some flat black and white dry-brushing. Along the seams in the body of the plane I wiped fine lines of rusty metal to show wear on the plane. The decals included in the kit completed the model, albeit with a fair amount of struggle with near-miss tears.

While my first shot at modelling a plane for FOW may not be 100% historically accurate, I’m pretty satisfied with the visual impression it makes. At some point I’ll even things up with a German plane, but for now I can’t wait for my P-47 to take off in my next game.

Gaming With the Stars

Aside from my love for games, comic books, movies and associated hallmarks of geekdom, I’m a longtime fan of AMC’s Mad Men which wraps up its sixth season this coming Sunday. One of the much-maligned characters on the show is the media buyer and TV man Harry Crane played by Rich Sommer.

What the average fan of the show probably doesn’t know is that Sommer is one of the increasingly-prominent stars of the small and big screen who has a deep passion for gaming. Although currently on hiatus, Sommers until recently posted frequently about his gaming exploits on his blog Rich Likes Games, and he has appeared on a number of webisodes of gaming sites like Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop. Wheaton’s show will soon be premiering new episodes featuring a new crowd of writers, comedians, actors and other creative friends with the common love of rolling dice, playing cards and out-strategizing their opponents across the table.

The ability for gaming to bring together diverse groups of people, the famous and not-so-famous alike, is one of the wonderful things about the hobby. There’s an oft-told tale of Vin Diesel introducing Judi Dench to Dungeons & Dragons on the set of The Chronicles of Riddick, leading to Dench dungeon-mastering subsequent games for her grandchildren. There are all sorts of stories out there and extensive lists of celebrities who place themselves among the worldwide population of gamers. Among them are Stephen Colbert, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Mike Meyers, Robin Williams, John Favreau and Joss Whedon. Go back further and there are stories of the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., King Vidor, Cole Porter, Harold Ross and Amelia Earhart partaking in gaming.

What I’ve found in my own experience is that gamers come from all walks of life but share a commonality in creativity, reason, knowledge, problem-solving, logic and alternating collaborative and competitive natures. These are obvious traits to be found in people who occupy prominent positions in the culture but also in the regular folks I game with on a regular basis. I find this every week at Metropolitan Wargamers club in Brooklyn where different combinations of ages, background and experience come together to play.

I recall being at a gaming convention a few years back watching a young guy with a mohawk, lipstick, piercings and dressed in head-to-toe black speaking passionately with a retired buttoned-down US Army veteran about some tactical minutae of a WWII engagement. Thinking back to that scene, it serves as my Diesel-Dench moment where those of us who share nothing and everything randomly encounter each other in our worlds of gaming.

Flames of War: Fielding Easy Company

I’m not unique in being a World War II gamer and a big fan of HBO’s Band of Brothers miniseries from 2001. I also finally got around to reading Stephen Ambrose’s same-titled book on which the series was based. Both works follow the exploits of “Easy” Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division from training to D-Day to the end of the war. The story is absolutely riveting and presents a dramatic account of how the collective action of individuals contributed to the Allied victory.

I’ve been working away recently at finishing my long-overdue modelling of Easy Company and a large US Airborne force. Nearly two years ago I purchased and painted up an entire company of Command Decision Paratroopers from Old Glory Miniatures, including command, machine guns, mortars, bazookas and parachute artillery support teams. This past week I’ve wrapped-up the small plastic parachute rifle company from the Flames of War Open Fire! starter box set I received this past Christmas. To this collection of troops, I’ve added the excellent Easy Company set from FOW containing a number of the real historic US servicemen portrayed in Band of Brothers.

While the casting is a bit skinnier and lacking in the detail of the official FOW miniatures, the value of the Command Decision models can’t be beaten at the low price of $15 for a hefty bag of 50 solidly serviceable figures. At under $70 online, the big Open Fire! box is a real deal for all the troops, tanks, artillery and other stuff included. The FOW Easy Company set itself runs about $12 for the few specific personality figures, and fielding these models is going to add significantly both to the look and effectiveness of my force on the tabletop battlefield.

With a good mix of FOW and Command Decision models painted-up, I turned to the “Nuts!” campaign book to put-together my order of battle for Easy Company. The book focuses on the 101st Airborne’s involvement in late 1944’s siege of Bastogne and other Battle of the Bulge engagements and then on to the German border and the eventual Allied victory in 1945.

In creating my list I wanted a highly-mobile and playable 1500 point force heavy on infantry with just a bit of tank support. In the FOW rules, the parachute rifle company is rated Fearless/Veterans, making them hard-hitting and tough to chase from the field. Their special use of Gammon bombs enhances their impact in risky infantry assaults on otherwise-intimidating German tanks. Adding the special characters from Easy Company makes for an even more resilient and daunting force, reflecting the historic bravery these men brought to the late war European campaigns.

I’ve modeled my infantry pretty simply with a quick coat of flat green primer, lighter brown on backpacks and equipment bags, a contrasting watered-down brown wash and some equipment details picked-out. Finally, the shoulders get a dot of black and a dab of white to mimic the famed Airborne eagle insignia (shown at the top of the page).

The first photo below shows the specific men of East Company which come packed with a lot of individual personality. Leading the platoon is Capt. Richard Winters and Capt. Lewis Dixon (front row, center) with the Nixon model taking a swig from a bottle as he was known to do. Pvt. Eugene Roe (middle row, far left) is shown patching-up an injured comrade. Corp. Darrell “Shifty” Powers (top row, far left) is hunched aiming on a barrel and ready to take out his German target. With so many generic models in my force, these guys are all a real treat.

And below is a look at the plastic Airborne platoon included in the Open Fire! box set:

In July, I’m organizing a big FOW day at Metropolitan Wargamers with two simultaneous 2500-point games of Soviets vs. Germans and US Airborne vs. Germans. To the above list I’ll be adding some significant artillery muscle and I also hope to have a new P-47  Thunderbolt air support model ready to go. With Easy Company ready to lead on the tabletop, I can’t wait to get my new Airborne force into action.

New Game Weekend: King of Chicago & RoboRally

Friday night at Metropolitan Wargamers in Park Slope, Brooklyn had a decent crowd of six of us collected in the back with a few other people up front continuing play of a multi-week and fairly dense American Civil War battle. Coming to agreement on an ad hoc game together for a half-dozen guys is a challenge on its own, but we managed to settle on two games which are standbys at the club but pretty new to me.

King of Chicago

Produced in Denmark in 2005, King of Chicago takes place in the Prohibition-era Windy City where each player takes on the guise of gangster looking to rule the streets by creating and breaking alliances, building their empire and whacking the competition along the way.

The game begins with each player owning a gangster, a car, $1000 and a few resources. Resources in the game are booze, henchman and girls, and additional resources are picked up in various landmarks spread throughout the city. Combinations of booze, henchmen and girls in your gang allows you to build bars, casinos and brothels which create income at the completion of four turns in each round of play. At the end of a round, players collect income, new gangsters are put into play and resources get set on the board. Bidding takes place for gangsters to add to your mob, gaining you bonuses of speed, income, protection and lethalness. Players also bid to bribe the cops, controlling them through the next round of play.

The game offers a lot of strategic play in how a player chooses to build their empire and also in managing relationships with the other mob bosses on the board. Drive-by shootings, shutting down competing businesses and sending the other guys to the hospital or the morgue makes for a lot of opportunity for deals to be struck and double-crosses to take place. Certain cards cause “events” like police raids to be played and others send players on “jobs” which net substantial sums of income. The player who quickly amasses ten points from money, businesses and influence wins the game.

The game looks great with simple components and a wonderful collection of historic photos from the Chicago gangland days depicted on the cards. The many paths players can choose to build their mob empire adds significant replay value to the game.

King of Chicago was released with a limited print run and can be hard to come by in the United States. However, for lovers of gangster movies and the period when the underworld ruled Chicago, chasing down a copy is well worth the effort.

RoboRally

After a couple hours on the mean streets of Chicago, we had a seventh player show up. Our second game of the evening took us in a different direction with the hilariously chaotic RoboRally. The game was originally published by Wizards of the Coast way back in 1994 but was created a decade earlier by Richard Garfield who would go on to design the insanely-popular Magic: The Gathering card game.

The game takes place on a factory floor with each player’s tiny robot attempting to navigate through a set number of flagged gates. This seemingly-simple mission is hampered by moving conveyor belts, rotating gears, solid walls and laser arrays spread throughout the factory. Robots controlled by other players also wreak havoc on your path by bumping into and zapping your robot with their lasers.

At the beginning of each round, players draw up to nine cards each with directional actions such as left and right rotations, u-turns and movement backward and forward. Players secretly place their cards face down in front of them defining their robots’s moves for the round. In turn, players reveal each card and move their robots in order of card value and according to the movements selected. The fun and craziness comes in when well-thought plans quickly go awry as robots beginning bumping into each other and throwing each other off course. Just when you think you have a direct route neatly plotted out to a flagged gate space, some other robot (or two or three) ram straight into you, sending you wheeling off in some other direction.

Lasers cause damage to your robot, reducing your movement choices in a round and only made better by spending a turn shut down repairing. Occupying repair spaces can also provide fixes for damage, and even special robot upgrade cards. The truly unlucky robots will find themselves bumped off the board, returning to their last starting point at the beginning of the next round.

The more players who play only contributes to greater chaos on the board. Our late night seven-player game stretched to nearly two hours of mechanized madness until one player managed to get through a few gates and away from the crowd. My sad little robot, on the other hand, wound up spending the game unluckily bumping into his mechanized comrades and finished the game exactly where it started.

RoboRally has won multiple awards, and its many versions and expansions have ensured its continued love among gamers for nearly two decades. After the cold-bloooded and calculating play in King of Chicago, it was great to end the night on a much more lighter but no less challenging game like Robo Rally.

Flames of War: Fielding the Grenadierkompanie

I got the Flames of War Open Fire! set this past Christmas and I’m finally getting around to painting-up all the stuff that comes packed in the box. At under $70 online, this big package is a real deal for new and experienced FOW gamers alike. The set includes over 100 plastic Allied and German infantry, tanks and artillery models, plus the full FOW rulebook, dice, markers and some other goodies included. A couple guys at Metropolitan Wargamers also picked up the set and are just getting into FOW. If you have any interest in gaming WWII at all, this set is the place to start.

First off, I’ve finished the German Grenadierkompanie, including anti-tank 7.5cm PaK40s, a Stug G tank platoon and two platoons of infantry. These will supplement the pretty extensive Grenadier and Fallschirmjäger infantry I already have. The Stugs will also add to the large collection of Panzer IV, Jagdpanther and Konigstiger platoons I’ve already got on the shelf.

The plastic models all glue together quickly, but handling them has to be a bit delicate so as not to snap off the tips of the gun barrels. For the infantry, I spray prime everything in flat black and paint the uniforms in a mid-dark grey. All the details — guns, boots, equipment and skin — get picked-out with quick dabs of paint. Everything gets a very watered-down brown wash in the end which gives the uniforms a more accurate grey/green muted finish and also tones-down the flesh.

My camouflage painting abilities are honestly pretty atrocious, so my default is to go with a more generic grey paint scheme on my armor, artillery and vehicles. For the Stugs and PaK40s, the flat black primer was hit with a quick dry brushing of mid-dark grey.  After the dry brush coat, tank cargo and other details were then dabbed on. The platoon commander got some special attention with white detail on his cuffs and collar, plus some detail on the radio headset he’s wearing over his hat. Finally, I applied some wet-transfer decals and then dry brushed some light brown mud in the areas most likely to see some splashing on the tracks, sides and fenders.

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With my Germans from Open Fire! complete, I’ll be posting soon with an update on the US Airborne and allied models from the set. Along with the Germans, a set of special FOW models from the famed Easy Company and a bunch of my existing models, there’ll be some major action from the Normandy campaign and beyond coming soon.

New Game Weekend: Love Letter

Heading into a weekend visit to Metropolitan Wargamers, I often don’t know what kind of game I’m going to be jumping into. It could be a re-fighting of a World War II D-Day scenario with hundreds of finely-painted miniatures. It might be a gory zombie apocalypse boardgame. Maybe it’s a sci-fi deck-building card game. Or, it could be an abstract Euro-style game where great world civilizations are built over the course of a couple hours of play.

This past Saturday night it was Love Letter. Released in 2012 in Japan and quickly moving into multiple international versions, Love Letter is a seemingly unlikely game for a group of hardcore gamers crowded around a basement table. The game is comprised of just 16 playing cards, 4 reference cards and 13 tiny red square cubes — “tokens of affection.” Everything comes in a crimson crushed velvet drawstring bag with “Love Letter” embroidered in flowery yellow script. The simplicity of the game’s packaging, design and minimal components hides a pretty compelling strategy card game which even the most battle-hardened gamers will find engaging in just under a half-hour’s play.

In Love Letter, player’s vie for the affection of Princess Annette of the imaginary kingdom of Tempest. Players are dealt cards with values of 1 to 9, each depicting a courtly character with a specific ability. In turn, each player then draws and plays one card. Guards (value 1) allow you to guess a card in another player’s hand. The Baron (value 3) has two players compare hands with the lowest hand eliminated from the round. The Prince (value 5) forces a player to discard their hand and draw a new card. The remaining six cards reveal different types of actions, and some cards are plentiful while others are unique. After a round of play, the last player holding a card or the player with highest-valued card wins a cube and a new round is dealt. The first player to score four cubes — “tokens of affection” — over a number of rounds of play wins the hand of Princess Annette.

The trick of the game is to attempt to follow which cards are in the hands of other players and still in the draw pile. Love Letter is thus a game of memorization, strategy and deceit. The most powerful cards, while best at the end of a round may make a player a target early in the round. Playing cards may reveal information to you, but also allow your opponents to possibly infer who is holding what cards. Players may gang up on a leading player to force them from a round, leading to shifting alliances from hand to hand.

Despite its courtly conceit, Love Letter can turn into a bit of a raucous and cut-throat game, as ours did among four of us Saturday night. The game would be perfect to keep tucked in the bottom of your bag to pull out among a group of friends at a bar or around the table during dessert. Given that entire ancient battles have been fought and historic treaties struck over the union of two fated lovers, Love Letter provides a quick and challenging chance to play out the ultimate game of royal affection taken to extremes.

American Civil War: Perry Miniatures ACW in 28mm

About a year ago I got back into gaming the American Civil War.

My first miniatures wargaming experience back in the 1980s was with 15mm ACW played with the Fire & Fury rules. I wound up stepping away from gaming for the 1990s, but with the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Civil War and some ACW gaming with the Brother Against Brother rules at a convention I decided last year that now was the time to get back to the ACW.

Having spent a couple years playing WWII in 15mm, I very much ready to try another era but I also chose to go bigger with another scale at 28mm. Fortunately, Perry Miniatures offer a line of well-sculpted and very reasonably-priced plastic and metal line of ACW figures which I’ve used exclusively to this point.

Without going into the details of assembly (relatively easy) and painting technique (also quite easy), I’ve got about 125 figures painted up now on each side. I’ve also completed some mounted and infantry command, artillery batteries and casualty figures. All figures are based on metal washers, and I also made some movement stands for each unit with magnetic sheets adhered to balsa bases.

First, some of the boys from the South…

    

    

And, some of the boys from up North…

    

    

Now that I’ve got a decent set of figures with which to play, I’m looking forward to setting up a real nice game with the Metropolitan Wargamers in Brooklyn this summer. Just in time for some key ACW anniversaries, I’m really happy to see my Blue and Grey hit the tabletop again.

Memorial Day 2013 in Brooklyn

Memorial Day in Brooklyn saw a crowd of the guys gaming and grilling at Metropolitan Wargamers, but I chose to spend the sunny day with my youngest son retracing the historic military past in my own backyard.

I live about a 15-minute walk from Green-Wood Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark celebrating its 175th anniversary this year. The cemetery occupies a 478 acre hilly, picturesque landscape traced with winding roads and paths. It is a who’s who of New York City and American history, and the design of its entry gates, grave markers and mausoleums provides a visual history of how Americans have celebrated themselves in the afterlife across three centuries.

What we celebrate today as Memorial Day began as Decoration Day when freed slaves decorated the graves of Union dead following the American Civil War. Green-Wood’s marking of the war is found with 1869’s Civil War Soldiers’ Monument (photos below). The pillared monument ringed with four bronze statues was restored and re-dedicated in 2002. The re-dedication kicked off interest in documenting and marking the Civil War dead interred at Green-Wood, and to-date the Civil War Project has identified some 3,300 residing for eternity in the cemetery.

    

    

The Civil War Soldiers’ Monument sits along Battle Avenue and atop Battle Hill, the highest point in Brooklyn. The hill won its name for its important strategic role in 1776’s Battle of Long Island as Colonial forces held off multiple attacks on the far left of the invading British line. Standing on the hill today, you can clearly see the military importance of the hill with its broad views of the sloping land down to New York Harbor to the west and the island of Manhattan to the north. The battle is marked with the Altar of Liberty (photo at right), a 1920 monument installed as part of the plot of Brooklyn India ink magnate Charles Higgins. The bronze statue of Minerva raises her arm to the Statue of Liberty standing in the distant harbor, making the view from Battle Hill on a clear, sunny day one of the most breathtaking vistas in the city.

Next, we wound our way toward the center of the cemetery and to the family plot of Abram Duryée (photos of Duryee and his monument below). I’m a fan of Duryee and his command of the 5th NY Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. Known as “Duryee’s Zouaves,” these Manhattan men saw action throughout the war at such battles as Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg. I’ve made the 5th NY with their baggy red chasseur trousers, dark blue jackets with red braiding and fezzes with yellow tassels a big part of my 28mm American Civil War painting project this past year, so it was great to stop and pay tribute to him at his final resting place.

    

Our final destination of the afternoon was to the grave of General Henry Wager Halleck, a relative of mine (photos of Halleck and his monument below). Halleck served as General-In-Chief of Union forces for about two years of the Civil War before being replaced by the much more famous General Ulysses S. Grant. Known more for his intellect than his military exploits, Halleck was nicknamed “Old Brains” during the war and spent his years after the war as a lawyer and author. While by no means a household name, I was glad to have the opportunity to visit his grave again after many years.

    

As a wargamer, my hobby wouldn’t exist without wars and the men and women who fight and die in them to this day. On this Memorial Day, it was a good change of pace to put down my dice, step away from the tabletop and venture out for a few hours visiting the monuments to those who have paid the ultimate price throughout American history.

New Game Weekend: Dust Tactics

The long Memorial Day weekend was as good a time as any to roll up my sleeves for a big day of wargaming, and the Dust Tactics Regional Tournament at the Compleat Strategist in New York City on Saturday May 25th was the place to be.

I signed up my son and I for two slots in the small tournament organized by a fellow club member at Metropolitan Wargamers in Brooklyn. The two of us were newbies to Dust Tactics but I had certainly read a lot about it since its release last year by Fantasy Flight Games. Dust Tactics is an alternate reality WWII-era game where alien technology is discovered by Germany in the late 1930s and goes on to shape a world of warfare between the Axis and Allies throughout the 1940s.

As is expected with FFG releases, Dust Tactics is a gorgeous game ready to play straight out of the box for about $80 retail and cheaper online. The core set comes with a dozen infantry forces for each side plus heavily-armored walkers. The box contains two two-sided fold-out gaming mats , special dice, rules, a scenario guide, reference cards and a few rudimentary plastic terrain pieces. There’s a large variety of additional accessories, campaign expansions and army packs available in the price range of $15 to $45. All this makes Dust Tactics very collectible and flexible as a gamer’s interest expands and wallet can abide. The models are gorgeous and mostly pre-assembled at a hefty 1:48 scale with a visual appeal bridging interests from WWII into a dystopian sci-fi theme.

For the tournament, we rolled-off to choose our armies and then paired-up with other players for the first round of three games. The organizer of the tournament is way into Dust Tactics, and he hauled along his extensive collection of miniatures for players to choose from. My son chose to play as the SSU (aka Soviets) and backed his ground troops with a monstrously deadly helicopter. I chose to play as the Axis (aka Germans) with laser-armed ground troops, a huge four-legged walking gun platform and a squad of weaponized gorillas.

Dust Tactics plays pretty easily and fast. After the board is set and a scenario is chosen, players take turns performing two actions with each of their units. Combinations of move/fire, fire/move or deadly sustained fire are the most common actions. Range and strength of weaponry is clearly listed on each unit’s reference card. Special dice with hits on two sides and misses on the other four resolve combat, damage and saves from taking damage in cases where troops wear special armor.

Each game was timed at an hour with a maximum of eight turns per game. My son (above left) and I were easily beaten in the first round by more experienced players. What we both quickly learned was a lot of the game outcome could be pre-determined by the forces chosen by a player. Too much reliance on our heavy mechanized forces had also led to quick defeats for the both of us once they were destroyed in the first round.

In the second round, my son and I played off against each other with a bit more knowledge of the capabilities of the forces on the board. We each scored lucky shots early in the game, again knocking out each other’s heaviest armaments. After that, the game settled into a really enjoyable cat-and-mouse between buildings and barriers as our infantry, snipers and smaller mechanized walker units dueled it out to my eventual victory by a slim margin.

For the third and final round, the tournament organizer and house expert on Dust Tactics played against my son. Failing to focus early on destroying my son’s massive helicopter gunship drifting eight inches above the table, my son managed a solid win by picking off the tournament organizer’s ground units from the air with his multiple weapons. I got crushed in my final game as I faced-off against another Axis player who had stacked his forces with fast-moving zombie and gorilla units. These savage figures ran right over most of my ground units and even my artillery platform was eventually torn to pieces by the ape squad.

So, we didn’t do so well with our first go-around at Dust Tactics but we did have a good time. Dust Tactics is a fun little game that looks fantastic and plays pretty easy. The common criticism I’ve heard and experienced a bit today is that the game looks better than it plays. A detailed knowledge of all allied and opposing units is pretty necessary in fielding an effective force in the game. A few poor moves or die rolls can also pretty much end a game in an opening turn, making for some frustration I myself felt in my first game today.

There does seem to be a glimmer of future hope for a next stage of Dust Tactics. An announcement was made this month that Battlefront Miniatures will be taking over publishing and distribution of the game and the tabletop version, Dust Warfare. Battlefront’s past success with its Flames of War WWII gaming system had fans hotly debating the possible outcomes that may bring a bit more finesse to Dust Tactics over time. For now, the combination of some high-style miniatures with a somewhat less-than perfect set of rules still makes Dust Tactics more than worth a rainy day play.