Tag Archives: miniatures

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.

The War Game of Norman Bel Geddes

I somehow missed it about a year ago when The Believer ran a great piece on the wargaming obsession of famed American designer and futurist Norman Bel Geddes. While his name may not resonate outside circles of early 20th-century design enthusiasts, Geddes is responsible for much of what we commonly think of when terms like “Art Deco” and “streamlined” are used. Most of Geddes’s fame today is linked to his design of the General Motors-sponsored Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and an iconic Art Deco radio commemorated with a US postage stamp in 2011.

Much of Geddes’s work — including the Futurama’s “world of tomorrow” display — was achieved through his obsessive and highly-detailed miniatures modeling. As featured during his life in such varied publications such as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Life Magazine, Popular Science, Ladies Home Journal and Arts & Decoration, Geddes poured an enormous amount of time and thousands of dollars of time into military scale modeling. Utilizing his extensive library of military books and journals (now held in the University of Texas archives), thousands of ships were crafted from brass with exacting detail and enormous topographically-accurate sea and land playing tables were constructed by Geddes in his family’s Manhattan apartment.

Geddes moved in prominent 1920s-40s New York social, professional and intellectual circles, which led to his hosted sessions of what was simply referred to as “The War Game” to be celebrated events reported on in local papers. Movie stars, socialites, politicians, foreign dignitaries and even rumored retired military brass are said to have been frequenters of the intense gaming sessions. The weekly games ran for months on end, used a rules system Geddes designed himself and were documented in immense detail on record cards, charts and maps run on the printing press Geddes kept in the house. The archive at the University of Texas just hints at the wealth of information on how The War Game grew over the two decades of play among Geddes and his circle.

Like the games played among H.G. Wells and his friends recounted in his book Little Wars, time spent reading through the many articles now archived online of Geddes and his games reveals a vast little-known era of gentlemanly wargaming in New York City. As I look ahead to another weekend of gaming with the Metropolitan Wargamers, I can’t help but feel the rippling tradition of small and obsessive battles waged in the basements of the city to this day.

Favorite Tabletop Games Kickstarters of the Month (May 2013)

Earlier this week, I wrote about how I believe Kickstarter to be the latest incarnation of how gamers have contributed to the decades-long conversation on who truly “owns” our hobby. This had me delving deep into what’s current on Kickstarter’s Tabletop Games section.

To date, I’ve honestly only contributed to one tabletop games Kickstarter project. The modest fundraising drive for A Las Barricadas which brought in just under $10,000 for a game that has since been delayed but promises to be shipping soon. While I wait for this little game of street protest pitting Occupy Wall Street-like demonstrators against the police to arrive, I thought I’d share a few projects I’m watching this month.

Moby Dick, or the card game: Like any good English Literature major, I’m a fan of Herman Melville’s epic American tale of one man’s obsession with a whale. On the flipside, I am not generally a fan of card games. That said, this card game of the high seas boasts some truly marvelous woodcut-like artwork and what looks to be an entertaining game of the best recruited crews trying to survive in their quest to spear the Great White Whale.

All Quiet On The Martian Front: Showcasing 15mm miniatures of Martians vs. early 20th-century human armies, this game uses the H.G. Wells sci-fi classic as a jumping-off point to imagine a world of humans locked in protracted combat with alien invaders. The models look fantastic, mining the very-popular steampunk trend in gaming today. Supporters of the game (particular those pledging in the hundreds of dollars) will net a lot of cool looking stuff with its funding.

Canterbury: Nothing gets me going like a great Euro-style worker placement game, so this is particularly enticing. The game places you in the age of Saxon Kings, and your aim is to build the greatest of cities starting with only a well in the wilderness. Managing your growing population, resources, culture, military and ongoing construction of buildings, the game claims to be one of pure skill and planning with no luck factor whatsoever. This one looks like a beauty and I’ll be anxious to give it a play when it is published later this year.

 Wargaming Terrain for the American Frontier: I don’t play games in the period, but the latest from Acheson Creations presents more than a dozen wonderfully-crafted 28mm buildings from the pioneer, settler and Native American era of 18th-century colonial America. I particularly like the longhouses and wigwams, possibly inspired by the local tribal history of the Western New York and the Rochester area where the creators (and I) hail from. The blockhouse, fort wall sections, barn and cabin models also look great and could easily be used in other eras or in fantasy gaming scenarios, too.

Civil War Toy Soldiers: This final project has less to do with gaming and more to do with the special spot in my heart for the toy soldiers of my childhood, especially around the holidays. Cast in soft plastic and a large 54mm scale, this new line of Union soldiers have been launched to compliment Cunnyngham Collectibles’s existing Southern troops. The poses, liveliness and equipment details on these guys make for some really cracking personality. A few bags of these fellas on the floor or in the tall grass and I’d be transported back to when I first fell in love with little plastic men nearly 40 years ago.

Zulu War: British 24th of Foot Regiment in 28mm

One of the big goals I set for myself this year was to have at my Anglo-Zulu War era project in 28mm. Most of my gaming interest has a US tie-in — American Civil War and WWII — but I am just fascinated by the dynamics of the in late 19th-century British campaigns of invasion fought in Sub-Saharan Africa . Now, after a few months of on-again-off-again toil, my British forces are looking pretty sharp and battle-ready.

I first picked up a couple boxes of plastic Anglo-Zulu War era British from Wargames Factory at a convention flea market for just $8 each (quite a deal from the $20 retail price). At 25 figures per box, these run under a buck per soldier at full cost. The sprues come with head and arm options for firing, loading, advancing and at-the-ready pose variations. The casting is a bit chunky, all figures are standing fully upright and no command figures are available, so there are some trade-offs for the relative value of these figures. Wargames Factory’s Anglo-Zulu War line is also very limited in that they only offer this one box of British and another of Zulus. Still, they’re a great bang-for-your-buck option, especially for an era that requires fielding a lot of soldiers on the table.

For variety and comparison’s sake I next bought a box of British infantry from Empress Miniatures and Warlord Games. Their expanding “Anglo-Zulu War 1879” line offers a nice mix of plastic and metal British, Zulu and allied forces along with terrain, artillery, cavalry and other nice models. Their British infantry box runs about $32 for 24 figures making their cost-per-figure a bit pricier than the offering from Wargames Factory at over a dollar each. However, their figure sculpting is a fair amount finer and the pose options allow for more variety. The boxed set also includes crouching figures, making double-ranked firing lines a possibility. Along with twenty plastic infantry armed with rifles, the box comes with four metal command stands which fill a basic need for most Anglo-Zulu War gaming. I’ve rounded-out my force with an additional 16 metal figures in various crouching poses and four more metal officers from Empress Miniatures in poses that vary from those in the box set. The metal figures run more than $2 each, but by spreading them among the less expensive plastics I’ve achieved what I think is a nice variety.

In sum, my first round of modelling the 24th of Foot will net me 76 infantry stands commanded by 8 officers. This will give me a nice Company-sized British force broken out into two Platoons of two Squads each of 20 figures (including command).

Here’s a couple work-in-progress photos:

       

My challenge now is to tackle my Zulus which are typically fielded in a ratio of (at least) 3:1 to British figures in many gaming systems. I have a few Zulus already painted shown along with some of my new British below, but it looks like I’ve got many hours of painting still to go in the coming months.

Gaming Wars In The 21st Century

I was pleasantly surprised to open the back page of this past weekend’s New York Times Sunday Book Review section to an article on the 100th anniversary of H.G. Wells’ “Little Wars.” The book’s Edwardian-era style, classism and occasional not-so-thinly-veiled sexism is mixed with the mechanics of a gaming system which makes it a relevant read even today.  Before “Little Wars,” wargaming had largely resided in Europe’s war colleges and in the parlors of the ruling elite. Even with its English intellectual, upper-crust trappings, “Little Wars” sought to expand the popularity of wargaming. As the article points out, “Little Wars” is an important foundational document and should be required reading for those who are interested in how we’ve arrived at the business of gaming on the tabletops and screens of the world today.

“Little Wars” is widely available for free online and for e-readers today, and “ownership” of gaming is largely the subject of a post today on BoingBoing about Dungeons & Dragons retro-gamers. Whether driven by nostalgia or as a reaction to corporate ownership of a beloved game of their youth, “old school” D&D gamers stress what they believe to be a truer game style more focused on role-playing and less-so on action-driven play. To stay relevant to a new generation brought up on CGI special effects, so the argument goes, the now-owners of D&D Wizards of the Coast have increasingly made the game more combat-heavy (read: more like video games). In reaction to this, retro D&D gamers have created an increasingly-active community of story-driven gamers who look to old rules for inspiration. The ability to share thoughts, opinions and out-of-print rulesets online has only fuelled the movement.

Old school gamers are just the latest combatants  in the war over gaming. The history of wargaming rules development winds its way from military schools and H.G. Wells to postal games and strategy boardgames in the mid-20th century. Games and rules were more fluid in the 1940s-60s where there was little profit to be had in wargaming, and a big part of the gaming community was in the debates over what rules were the most realistic or playable. With a few exceptions, ownership in those days was based more on pride and ego than copyrights and profit. This timeline is well-documented in Jon Peterson’s “Playing At The World” which finally arrives at the early days of D&D.  Even before D&D made the great leap into a world-wide phenomemon there were arguments and accustaions over copyright and ownership. Peterson’s recent analysis of a transitional draft of D&D (the Dalluhn Manuscript) not only adds greater nuanace to the development of the rules themselves but I think also provides another chapter on the concepts of evolutionary, intellectual and legal ownership of games.

Much of the digital conversation today — whether about games, photos, movies or music — hinges on the topics of openness, control and copyright. Along with the free and independent gaming forums and sites, we’ve now been given a new frontier of games on Kickstarter. What used to take years (or even decades) of slow development and debate by word-of-mouth fanzines and postal newsletters, Kickstarter achieves in weeks or days. Players vote with their wallets in support of games which can now easily garner six and seven-figure funding levels, all but guaranteeing a fanbase that literally buys-in at the ground floor. Sites like BoardGameGeek can help make or break the success of a new game and then go on to serve as R&D for game expansions, rule variations and subsequent editions.

A hundred years after “Little Wars” pulled the ownership of wargaming out of the fists of Europe’s elite, we’re still warring over our games. Copyright laws, digital distribution and individual financial investment will continue to shape the next hundred years of the ownership conversation, but gaming is certain to remain a very personal investment for some time to come, too.

American Civil War: ACW Artillery in 28mm

I spent this past Sunday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and caught the absolutely spectacular “Photography and the American Civil War” exhibit which runs through September 2, 2013. The hundreds of photos cover a bit of the same ground as past exhibits, documentaries and books, but there’s a lot I had never seen before, too. What spoke to me most were the dozens of simple individual soldier photos. The contrast between the dressed-up idealistic pre-war studio portraits and the devastatingly gruesome prisoner of war and hospital images is wrenching.

Aside from the portraits occupying the bulk of the show, one of my favorite photos from the show was the one shown below by Timothy O’Sullivan from 1864.

Titled “Pennsylvania Light Artillery, Battery B, Petersburg, Virginia,” O’Sullivan’s small photo (maybe 3″ x 9″) purports to give a rare glimpse of a full artillery battery either drilling or possibly in actual combat. The mass of guns, crew and equipment shows the full size and complexity an artillery section brought to the fields of the American Civil War 150 years ago.

My go-to favorite miniatures company for my American Civil War 28mm gaming is Perry Brothers for both their sculpting and reasonable cost in both their plastic and metal ranges. I have three artillery teams painted up  from their metals line, but more guns would always be better. However, each gun team currently runs me about $12. At this price, modelling realistic large-scale batteries like those in the O’Sullivan photo from the Met has seemed pretty cost-prohibitive.

Well, over at the Perry Brothers Plastics Workbench section of their site, they’ve just recently teased a few plastic sprues of artillery which will include carriages, limbers, multiple barrels and crew. The flexibility of the soon-to-come set will allow for modelling of different crews — North and South — as well as rifled and smoothbore gun types.

 

There’s no release date for this set as of yet, but in the meantime there are some nice work-in progress shots I’ve shared here. With a few of these assembled and painted up on each side of my tabletop battlefield, my games will get an added boost of realism captured timelessly in the hundreds of photos currently on view here in New York.

New Game Weekend: Fortune and Glory

By the time Raiders of the Lost Ark hit the theaters in the summer of 1981, my newly-teenaged brain was already well-steeped in the concept of high-adventure cliffhanger movies and serials. For most kids, Indiana Jones kicked-off a mini-rival in interest in the danger-thwarting, jungle-hacking, mystery-unraveling and treasure-seeking characters that populated decades of Saturday afternoons in local movie theaters for my parent’s generation and earlier. The elements of cliffhangers are so ingrained in our pop culture to this day that I challenge you to find a popular TV show, action movie, comic book or video game that doesn’t borrow some element from the genre.

One of the best things about the gaming hobby is that you can pretty much be guaranteed there’s a a game (or several) that aligns with a just about any thematic interest. So, this past weekend at Metropolitan Wargamers I had a chance to try out taking on the role of an international adventurer with 2011’s Fortune and Glory from Flying Frog Games.

The game takes place in the between-the-wars period of the 1930s where mobsters and Nazis vie for international control while your adventuring character roams the world searching for fantastic objects of great value and power. Players take on one of eight fantastically-named personalities such as Li Mie Chen, The Duke, Jake Zane, Sharon Hunter, Dr. Zhukov, Shelley Hargrove, Jacques Moreau and Cartwright (all pictured below, left to right and top to bottom). Each player character comes with their own set of special abilities and attributes such as Cunning, Lore, Combat and Agility. These attribute strengths come into play as characters roll dice to resolve their success during certain encounters within the game adventures.

     

     

The game begins by placing artifacts in random locations around the globe. Players move their characters toward these objects and upon encountering them, roll dice in a three-part attempt to resolve their quest. The thing that makes Fortune and Glory so entertaining is the random mechanic of drawing cards to create objects of the quests and the adventures themselves.

For instance, in our game (pictured at right) a quest for a magical sword unveiled an adventure that involved solving a mysterious puzzle, a high speed car chase and a final airplane chase. Failing to roll successfully against the high speed car chase challenge wound up in a “cliffhanger” on the reverse of the card which led to the car going over a cliff. All this detail is related on the well-illustrated adventure cards and left to the players to dramatically read aloud, often to great mirth around the board. Other encounters during our game included a shootout in a nightclub, a case of malria in the jungles of the Amazon and an unsuccessful encounter with a Yeti in the northern steppes of Russia. With hundreds of cards available in the game, there is endless variety to the how each adventure will play out. All this contributes significantly to the high replay value of Fortune and Glory.

Aside from all the cards, there are over 150 miniatures included for character adventurers, Nazis, mobsters, temples and a zepplin which randomly drops new Nazi henchman around the board as the game progresses. Plastic gold coins mark your progress toward gaining “fortune” and may be spent to further outfit your adventurer with guns, maps and even an airplane. In the end, collecting blue plastic “glory” coins points the way toward victory for our heroes or the villains.

We played the game collaboratively, allowing us to work together with each of our own abilities contributing toward our march toward glory and victory. A competitive set of rules options is also included which completely changes the dynamic to duelling adventurers questing toward individual glory.

Fortune and Glory carries a hefty retail price of about $100 but can be found for around $75 online. However, the investment in this big, heavy box is well worth it with the gorgeous design and endless randomness to the game providing a hugely entertaining world of cliffhanging adventure. Fortune and Glory is certain to keep you on the edge of your seat and may  even cause you to spill your popcorn if you’re not careful.

New Game Weekend: Zombicide

My weekend of gaming started with a regular meeting of the Metropolitan Wargamers club where new members — including myself — were inducted. With a couple dozen guys in attendance, it was great to look around the room and feel the fellowship with a group with decades of gaming passion in them. I’m looking forward to years to come with these guys and the inevitable newcomers who find their way to the club.

After the meeting, groups split off into a variety of board and miniatures games. I teamed up with four guys for my first playing of Zombicide. Anyone with a pulse knows zombies have been a huge trend in the culture for a few years now with the popularity of the The Walking Dead TV show and comic book series, as well as countless other books, movies and video games. Tabletop gamers haven’t been immune to the trend with a variety of popular zombie-themed miniature and boardgames rising in popularity. I’ve enjoyed playing Zombies!!! and a few of its expansions with my kids for a couple years now, and Last Night On Earth has become a mainstay for zombie gamers.

Zombicide is the latest to break into this gaming trend pitting survivors against undead hoards. The game was launched via a Kickstarter campaign just about a year ago that brought in over $750,000 from over 5,000 backers. In March of this year, the first expansion set for the game — Zombicide: Season 2 — raised an additional $2.250 million from nearly 9,000 funders. Needless to say, in a year’s time Zombicide has ridden the zombie wave to incredible heights of popularity with a rabid fan base.

My first run through Zombicide was a tough introduction to both the goofy fun and extreme challenge of the game. Each player takes the role of survivor of the zombie apocalypse with its own card outlining their particular abilities and a personalized miniature. A streetscape of wonderfully detailed and gory cardboard tiles is laid out according to one of the ten scenarios included in the base game. To complete the set-up, areas are predefined where zombies enter the game, doors are set in buildings, objectives are placed, and, depending on the scenario, special pieces such as a police car is strewn throughout the town. Over 60 zombie miniatures in four varieties — Walkers, Runners, Fatties and the Abomination — start the game at the town’s edge, just waiting to sink their teeth into a juicy survivor.

Players work collaboratively using a base three actions to move, search and/or fight zombies both on the street and in buildings. Searching allows a player to draw cards to find weapons, ammunition, gear and other special items which increase their chances of surviving the zombie onslaught to come. Since each player starts with only a frying pan as a weapon, searching for weapons is a focus from the start. Players manage what items they carry in their hands or on their person, and players may also choose to trade or simply give items to their compatriots to increase the group’s overall chances. Certain items are used in combination, adding a scavenger hunt aspect to the game. For instance, a scope added to a rifle creates a more accurate and deadly long-range weapon, and a can of gasoline combined with some empty bottles makes for a devastating molotov cocktail.

It’s when the zombies start filling the board at the end of a round of turns by the players that collected weapons and other gear become critical. Melee weapons like baseball bats, axes, machetes and chainsaws are used for close-quarters fighting with zombies while ranged weapons such as pistols, shotguns and submachine guns come into play with longer ranged combat. Certain characters or weapon types allow for weapons to be used in each hand, doubling the survivor’s visciousness when tangling with the undead. In other cases, powerful weapons like shotguns or a molotov cocktail are critical when trying to destroy more powerful zombies like Fatties or the enormous, shambling Abomination.

As the turns elapse and zombies are killed, the players advance in experience which gains them the bonus of extra abilities. The downside from this gain in experience is that zombies begin coming onto the board in greater numbers. Because of this, players need to work together to balance the team’s experience level against the amped-up presence of zombies. Zombies move en masse toward noise created by gunshots or doors being broken down, so players also have to make smart decisions as a group on when to take a chance in making noise and attracting the growing hoard of zombies. Getting attacked twice by a zombie means almost certain death for any survivor on the board.

The rules to Zombicide are pretty simple, but the game gets wild very, very fast as the streets and buildings quickly fill up with the undead. It’s one of the better collaborative boardgames I’ve played in recent memory. Players working in tandem or even sacrificing themselves for the greater good gives the game its spice and replay value. In my first game, three of the five of us were felled quickly by the zombies while the other two players managed to trick out their survivors with a plethora of weapons and fight on.

The combination of beautiful design (only improved by painting the miniatures as in the photos from today’s game above), simple rules and pretty steep odds stacked against the players has made Zombicide popular. We were kidding around during our game that if a real zombie apocalypse were to come, sticking close to our fellow members of the club might just mean the difference between life and death. After a couple hours running and slugging away at zombies in Zombicide today, that notion seemed more real than just mere joking speculation.

New Game Weekend: Star Wars X-Wing

One of the big instant hits to come out of last year’s huge GenCon gaming convention was the new Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game from Fantasy Flight Games. I finally got a chance to play it a few times in the past couple weeks with members of the Metropolitan Wargamers club in Brooklyn. Then, my brother brought me a starter set of the game over this past Easter holiday weekend. As both a lover of all things Star Wars and well-designed games, I’m hooked.

SWXW is the one of the latest fan favorites to appeal to both experienced and new gamers wanting some gaming right out of a box full of easy rules, well-designed components and beautiful pre-painted miniatures. The starter set offers two Tie Fighters and a X-Wing model, rules, movement templates and dials, cards, specialized dice and scenario markers for about $30-40. A few beginner scenarios are also included with the starter set, allowing two players a pretty solid and varied intro to the basics of the game.

In a nutshell, SWXW is a dogfight game where ships chase and fire at their opponents while maneuvering to avoid their own destruction on a typically 3′ x 3′ playing area. Play starts with each player pre-assigning movement to each of their models with a special movement dial. The dials are particular to each class of ship and allow for combinations of straight and turning moves. Since movement is planned in secret from your opponent, guessing which way the enemy will move and how you should react is key to the strategy of the game.

After ships move, firing lasers and other specialized secondary weapons occurs using special dice. Modifying “focus” or “target lock” actions increase the ability to hit enemy ships while “evade” actions increases a ship’s ability to avoid damage. Ships take damage to their hulls or shields, and destroyed ships are removed from the table. The game moves fast, and a basic game can be accomplished in well under an hour.

While the starter set allows for some fun intro games, players will soon want to grow their fleets and options. Like the Star Wars Universe itself, SWXW soon proves to be as expansive as players (and their bank accounts) allow. Single ship expansion sets of Tie Fighters, Tie Advanced Fighters (pictured below, right), Tie Interceptors, X-Wings, Y-Wings (pictured at right) and A-Wings retail for about $15 each (cheaper online). With these, players gain greater choice in fielding larger Rebel and Imperial fleets.

Each ship expansion comes with specific cards indicating pilots, astromech droids, secondary weapons and other special abilities which may be used in combination with that model or, in some cases, other ship types. So, an X-Wing can be fielded with Luke Skywalker, Wedge Antilles or Biggs Darklighter at the helm and R2-D2 or some other astromech droid along for the ride. You can assign Darth Vader to the controls of a Tie Advanced ship and then assign addition weapons and abilities to the ship. The latest expansion wave offers two large-sized ships — the Millenium Falcon and the Slave I — which are certain to be a huge hit with fans anxious to pit Han Solo against Boba Fett in an intergalactic duel.

Players wishing to get into SWXW will do well by themselves to get a couple of the basic sets plus some expansion ship packs. Once you’re quickly beyond the beginner stage, games are typically fielded with 100 points of ships on a side. Points are assigned according to ship class, pilot expertise and other add ons, allowing for lots of replay value and experimentation with combinations of forces. While the game is still new to me, I can see this one coming out of the box and onto the galaxy of my gaming table pretty frequently in the months ahead.

New Game Weekend: Leviathans

Saturday night at the Metropolitan Wargamers allowed me the chance to try my hand at the latest game sensation that’s making it’s way through the club’s membership. Recently produced by Catalyst Games Labs, Leviathans is quickly growing in popularity with its late 19th-century steampunk alternative reality of airship wars battled out in the skies over Europe between France and England.

Steampunk In Popular Culture

Anyone who has been aware of sci-fi and fantasy fandom over the past few years is no doubt aware of the rise of the popularity of steampunk. Broadly, steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction involving a vision of the world from the Victorian era through the early years of the 20th-century where anochronistic modern mechanical technologies, often powered by steam, create an alternative history of science, exploration and warfare.

In popular culture, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are usually viewed as the grandfathers of steampunk. Aside from the Victorian visions of Verne and Wells, my earliest exposure to steampunk was with reruns of the 1960s TV show Wild, Wild, West. The show followed the exploits of James West and Artemis Gordon, two US government secret agents travelling the Old West of the post-Civil War era equipped with retro high tech gadgets. The show made its way to the big screen in 1999 with a much-maligned film adaptation starring Will Smith, Kevin Klein and Kenneth Branaugh. What the movie lacked in character and story, it more than made up for in capturing the steampunk ethos of monstrously destructive weaponry wrapped up in a 19th-century Old West plot.

In the 1980s, underground comics writer Dave Stevens introduced the Rocketeer, a barnstorming stunt pilot and reluctant jet-packed superhero. Set in 1930s NYC and LA, the Rocketeer did battle with Nazis and crime syndicates armed with all manner of fanciful lasers, transported by airships and other might-have-been rocket technologies, and conniving with evil plots of world conquest. The comic eventually found its way to Hollywood and a beloved 1991 live-action film adaptation by Disney. Both the movie and comic capture an aesthetic of sexy and functional design bridging an Art Deco look with an alternative pre-WWII era where secret agents vie for control of fantastical emerging technologies.

Jetpacks and high-flying airship battles also figure prominently in the 2004 Japanese anime film Steamboy. Set against the backdrop of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park in 1851, the story follows a young inventor boy from the mills of England’s Industrial Revolution to a showdown over technology which threatens the balance of worldwide power. The classic Victorian England setting provides the stage for an ultimate steampunk-themed battle with a massive metal castle-like flying fortress, robots, jet-packed paratroopers and British soldiers fighting to preserve the fate of the British Empire and world peace ahead of the Great War in the coming decades of the early 20th-century.

The interest today goes far beyond the pages of comics and TV and movie screens,  and the examples above are just a few of my particular touchpoints in steampunk. There are steampunk cosplayers, conventions and even bars and meet-ups where like-minded fans can live out their steampunk fantasies.

Like so many fantasy interests, steampunk has also made its way to tabletop gaming in a big with a number of gaming systems over the past few years. The thematic historical “what ifs” and opportunities to let the imagination go wild with miniature modelling makes steampunk a particular draw for gamers.

Leviathans

Leviathans is the darling of the moment for steampunk-minded gamers. Produced just this year, Leviathans is a complete board and miniatures game that comes in an incredibly well-designed package containing rules, charts, game boards and detailed plastic airship models which are ready to go straight out of the box for about $100. The core set comes with massive French and British battleships along with smaller destroyers and other ships which levitate above the game board on clear plastic stands. The ships are armed with all manner of guns, turrets and torpedoes manned by crews who furiously fire away at the enemy while working to keep their airships aloft.

Each ship comes with a card detailing the armaments, engine power, stabilisers and other equipment particular to each class of ship. Players take turns manuevering their ships and bringing their weapons to bear on the enemy. Combat results are determined with multiple colored dice which factor in the strength of firing weapons, the durability of an opponent’s armor, the placement of hits and the presence of crew. As ships take fire, their effectiveness in movement, combat and the ability to make repairs is affected. Multiple hits to the same area of a ship may result in a hull breach and the ship crashing to earth in a hulk of flame and twisted steel.

The scenario I played involved my side’s two damaged French battleships attempting to flee off the far side of the board while moving at half speed and being swarmed by my opponenet’s smaller British destroyers. The quick manueverability of the British ships was initially no match for the powerful guns of my French fleet, and two UK aircraft were quickly blown from the sky. Further damage to the already slow French engines eventually made them sitting ducks in the sky, and my team’s French ceded defeat as evacuation to the far side of the table became impossible.

Popularity of Leviathans is spreading quickly with a few new French and British expansion ship fleets already available. A new German fleet is also under development, as is an online version of the game. The game is being produced under a Creative Commons license, allowing for a free distribution of rules and also encouraging fans to collaborate openly on the development of the game. With the quick rise of Leviathan’s popularity and the continued gaming interest in steampunk, I’d expect this game to rule the sky for quite some time.