Summer Summary

Computer problems and then summer business kept me from posting since May. But I did get a couple of games in and do a couple of crafts. 

Full Sail

I made up a scenario for Full Sail involving three pirate hunters pouncing on five pirate ships anchored in a small bay; again using ships from the Pirates of the Spanish Main game. I'm experimenting with translating thrust and movement rules written for spaceships to suit sailing ships. Haven't quite hit something that I feel works, but I think I'm on the right track.

Anyway, the pirate hunters consisted of a single-mast, a two-mast, and a three-mast headed to the mouth of the bay with the wind advantage (entry side, wind direction and speed was set randomly). Pirates were arranged at random with random facings inside the bay, all starting at anchor (4 two-mast and one single-mast). I rolled for each to see if they notice the hunters coming in, three succeed and try to get underway. Hunters have to capture or sink as many ships as possible. Pirates just have to get away.

Mid-game (the only picture I took). The three-mast hunter is about to fully engage and board one of the pirates (background). During the previous turn, the small hunter in the middle had just dropped off a boarding party to that capsized ship behind it, which was immediately sunk by the dark-sailed schooner making its getaway.

Of the five pirate ships, one is captured, one is sunk, three get away. One of the escaped ships loses almost all of its crew while repelling boarders, before breaking away from the grapple.

5 Parsecs: Bug Hunt (2nd mission)

Nik and Gwisom (Treen is in the infirmary) led a fire team and science team out to investigate an abandoned cargo ship and an alien plant causing problems in a storage compound. Nothing incredible happened, the mission was low priority so razor lizards came at the troopers in easily manageable intervals and numbers. Only near the end did one one of the fire team soldiers fall prey to the aliens.

Some razor lizards eye up the party of troopers and scientists trying to get to the extraction zone.

Full Thrust: Star Wars fighter craft

I got to introduce my two brothers to Full Thrust via the Star Wars fighters modification. They enjoyed it. They took Imperial TIE fighters (2 each) and I had an X-wing and a B-wing. Scattered a bunch of asteroids to make things interesting. They slaughtered me in 5 rounds.

ACW gaming

I used the paper American Civil War soldier stands I made for a simple battle using rules found in One Hour Wargames. The battle over a bridge ended in a stalemate after heavy casualties on both sides. I still want to try playing using more detailed rules. I'll get there.

Miniatures

My D&D group is starting a new adventure and I'm trying a halfling cleric. Modded a Heroclix Puck sculpt to represent the character.

Painted some more Tyranids and a Tusken raider I located after a couple years of being lost. Also started painting some computer kiosks for terrain/objective markers. Also there were some other minis prepped for painting. Pictures likely to show up later.

Not game related

I volunteered my time to make a wooden sign for our local village-owned ice cream parlour. Used a found piece of plywood. It had two coats of paint on it; a kind of cream over a really light blue. Sanding revealed some of the bottom coat.

First Play: Five Parsecs: Bug Hunt

During early pandemic days, I purchased the Five Parsecs From Home rules (2nd Edition?). It's been upgraded and is now available as a hardcover. Either way it's worth checking out. I played set up a crew and played one battle, wrote up an AAR and haven't played again.

Last month, I bought the spin-off Five Parsecs: Bug Hunt. This game is a little more similar to the Vanguard title I wrote so many AAR's for; try and get something done before the alien threat gets too great. Only this title adds that higher level of off-table crew management I enjoyed in Five Parsecs From Home. I rolled up a team (you get a team of three to keep track of in Bug Hunt, but they have a chance at pulling in special teams or weapons to assist in each battle).

I started a spreadsheet file to keep track of everything happening off-table. Will it help me get more games in? I don't know.

So the first mission is on an Earth-like planet and takes place at a historical commemoration site where a couple of old buildings are preserved along with a working lumber yard. Reports come in stating a disturbance in the area. The Anti-Xenomorph Extermination Squad (A.X.E.S.) is sent in to investigate. They are Nik, a space fleet marine; and Treen and Gwisom, two infantry soldiers. 

Our sleepy little out of the way museum of olden-days construction and forest exploitation. Image is pre-generation of objectives (secure west building and hack museum kiosk on south side of display enclosure).

What a good scenario I had: over the course of the game I must have rolled in a grand total of over thirty aliens (used my trusty Tyranids). I rolled well to set up a team of my three heroes, the customary fire team of 4 soldiers, a sergeant, and a team of two engineers (high Tech score for hacking). Also got an incinerator, which I gave to one of the soldiers.

I didn't keep track of turns nor did I get any pictures until it was almost over.

The team encountered aliens right away as they came in on the south east and crossed the road toward the kiosk and the large building. Two blips located among the buildings turned out to be around 11 aliens (I rolled razor lizards). Treen did an outstanding job holding them off while Nik tested a tactical location that opened up a force shield and he and the engineer team got in it. Treen was wounded and put out of play.

Gwisom went for a tactical location among the lumber piles. All he found was a device to distract the six aliens he found for a while. But it gave him time to make his way back to the fire team. They decide to run to the museum courtyard to help clear a path for the engineers to get to the kiosk (a vital objective). 

At this point, Treen, the sergeant, and a fire team soldier are out. The engineers (bottom-left) succeeded in hacking the kiosk and the fire team are about to secure the west building. The dark circle is the marker for the triggered force shield that kept everyone alive while they cleared away all the aliens that were hanging out among the buildings. So many more blips coming from the north!

West building secured! Evac called in! It's a race to the jump ship!

That incinerator is a welcome addition to this mission.

Post action line-up: (left to right) Engineers, surviving Fire Team, Nik, Gwisom, and casualties Treen, sarge and trooper.

In the post-mission phase Nik and Gwisom got their XP and Treen rolled up a torso injury landing her three days in recovery, but I awarded her the bonus XP for her mighty stand against overwhelming odds. Can two agents accomplish get through the next few tasks? We'll see next time on Five Parsecs: Bug Hunt!

This was a great and engaging game! The blip system keeps a person on their toes, I didn't dare approach them because I kept rolling high numbers on contact. The only thing I can think of at the moment that is lacking is a battle area generation system like one sees in Five Klicks from the Zone (which I've yet to play) as I find it hard to just come up with a battle map.

First Play: Warstuff

The following is an old entry that was being drafted as the motherboard went kaput on the computer I was using. Played in November, I'm just getting back to it now.

Looking through lists of free wargame rules, I was really looking for air combat stuff, but I ended up on One Page Rules. Their new starship combat rules (new to me, have not been on the site for a long while) had come up in a list of free wargames I found. Scrolling through the sight, I happened onto Warstuff. So, where their other rules are pretty much written as alternates for some well-known popular wargames, Warstuff is a very generic game to be used for any models or toys one might have lying around their house.

The game is very accessible; needing only a print-out of the rules, some minis or toys for combatants, some six-sided dice, and a pencil and paper for writing out the army lists. I made a 150 point army in about 15 minutes then helped my 9 year old son make one in about 20 minutes. I set up a table and we played a game in less than an hour.

Building units

Warstuff is a points-based army builder. The rules suggest a game of 150 points and provide a very easy unit building process. 

Start with a model/toy/minifig you want to use in your squad. Choose a unit quality level for it; what number does the unit have to roll on a d6 to succeed at something, mainly shooting and dodging or landing hits in melee, but easily expanded to include testing for other perils. It costs though. For example: a low quality grunt costs 5 points, but only hits on rolls of 6+, where a higher quality troop succeeding on 3+ is 20 points.

Next step is to assign up to three of the 26 special features, which also cost points, to your units. Features consist of things like Frenzy (reroll a failed melee roll) or Shooter (make a ranged attack). 

Mix and match quality, features, and number of units until you hit the game's point level. So you could have a force of ten low quality (6+), medium range shooters (call it a squad of Imperial soldier goons). Or go for two high quality (2+) guys with the max number of high-cost features (perhaps some armed and armoured bounty hunters). Hmmm, that's a game I should try running myself - Does quality stand up to quantity?

Rules

Super simple rules provided for movement, shooting, and melee. Easy to add on anything more you need. The download on the website now is actually different than what I downloaded, though I haven't compared the two versions.

Gameplay

As mentioned, I played with my son, who's 9. We had two games using Lego minifigs as our combatants. I played both games with a team of five: a dwarf warrior, Maui, an undersea being, and two random gun-men. It's been long enough since I started this post, I don't remember any stats except that Maui had the Large feature.

My glorious Warstuff team.

My son tried two different teams. Team one was Sith Anakin and a collection of clone troopers. Second was a pilot Anakin and some Ninjago guys.

He really liked the game, even though I won both rounds. We'll probably play again soon.

Lord Garmadon perches himself on the building, ready to huck some dynamite my way. This is where we had to improvise some rules for jumping/falling off of things.

We had some morale rules and Anakin's team lost a morale check at this point. I think only Master Wu and R2-D2 remained standing. Besides the dwarf, seen here, I had lost one of the gunmen.

First Play: Pulp Alley with Solo Deck (Part 1)

As sometimes tends to happen here, I'm going to ramble about how I came to actually play this game before I actually show anything about the game. To see the game, skip until you see pictures.

During the Christmas break, I downloaded and put together a bunch of stands of American Civil War figures from Junior General to try out one of those types of games. Had it all set up on the table, watched videos on how to play the rules I had chosen, moved some of the Union soldiers forward, and quit because I just felt confused by what I thought should happen next compared to what the rules said I should do compared again with how the person in the video did it (in exactly the same scenario, no less). I just felt dense. 

I hope to revisit ACW gaming in the future, perhaps with a different ruleset. But as I put the soldiers up and out of the way, the old blue Pringles can beckoned once again to be brought out to play.

"Why a Pringles can?" you may ask. Well, that's where all the figures and cards I printed and put together to play Pulp Alley have been sitting since I made them back before we moved into our current residence 4 or 5 years ago.

I purchased the rules for Pulp Alley about seven years ago because I thought it looked cool: rolling different dice types, custom characters, pulp stories theme, easy to learn and play, and more. Got cards and figures put together and it all went into a Pringles can and sat. All this time, the can has sat, begging me to play. The one time I did take it down was to add the Solo deck after purchasing that PDF and printing it out.

Well, it's finally happened! I finally played Pulp Alley. Did it with the solo deck, which comes as part of an add-on package sold separately from the core rules. 

What I quickly found is that this game is as much about the story around a scenario as it is about playing it. The solo deck comes with a campaign to use, complete with ready-made leagues for you to use, but I went about starting my own story.

My first move was to put together some leagues. A couple of leagues came together nicely using the paper figures in the can. A couple others needed some additional figures and I went on a hunt for the same ones that I printed out so long ago. Well, a person can no longer get those figures. At least not in the same image quality. I could only find a link to the archived pages of the now defunct website. So the additions I made look fuzzy compared to their friends. I might have the files I downloaded so long ago, but they'd be on one of my external drives, which I cannot conveniently access since my laptop died and we are only running on a Mac right now (wrong format). Oh well, we must go on. So yeah, the leagues. Well, I got four completely assembled (the Leader being the left-most character followed by the Sidekick, then Allies and Followers):

The Shadow's Agents - Cranston and Miss Lane head up Moe, two agents from the '90s movie, and Trixie is a Follower I made up to fill the spot.

Anastasia's Heroes - as in the surviving Romanov girl, now in her mid-30s, with a band of displaced Tzarist troops hiding from the Bolsheviks and making their way in the world as mercenary adventurers. A Russian A-Team.

Military Occultists - The ones we all love to hate. They're bent on seizing something that will help them achieve world domination, even if it means waking some ancient horror.

The Fortune Hunters - Most comfortable in a cockpit and raiding some luxury zeppelin, but there's more than one way to make a fortune and sometimes it doesn't require a plane.

There are other leagues in the works, just not fully assembled yet. Each league also has a League Perk.

I started up a spreadsheet to keep track of things. So using the resources I had at hand and the scenario-building tables in the core rules, my first scenario was born. I randomly chose the contestants and it ended up being me playing the Fortune Hunters against the Military Occultists and this short narrative came to mind:

Nathan Zachary receives a telegram from an old army buddy he knew during the war. The telegram begs for him to come to Casa Blanca with friends. Once there, Nathan learns that his friend had recently returned from a trip, part of his return was aboard a zeppelin crossing the Sahara Desert, during which he saw strange ruins uncovered by raging winds. He marked the location and noticed a shady-looking man in strange military attire doing the same. Sitting close enough to overhear the soldier whisper to his female travel companion, he deduced that they are part of an occult relic-hunting team and they were obviously planning to return there. 

Feeling that he couldn't trust anyone else with the potential importance of whatever the occultists could be interested in, Buddy turned to his old squadron-mate. Nathan's response: "I learned to always trust your instincts during the war. If you feel like something's fishy, we'll go investigate. At the very least, we'll make sure there's nothing for your creepy couple to find."

Pulp Alley uses objective markers, called plot points, to drive the game. It's a contest of who can grab the most plot points before game end (turn 6, under normal circumstances). There's always a main plot point. The main plot point here was the Purple Death Receptor. The location of this objective would be revealed at random in one of three possible locations after someone acquired the plot point "exhaust valve". Two plot points were treasure ("smuggled diamonds" and "booby-trapped diamonds"). The final plot point was a torn letter. I think the letter and/or the receptor could lead whoever possesses it at the end of the game into another scenario.

To be continued...

Or desktop computer crashed and it's a doozy. Symptoms point to motherboard fault. So I'll just stop this write up here and tell the game story a little later on.

Review: 6x6 Tales

Scrolling through my list of blog posts, published and otherwise, I realized that there's a very enjoyable game I have yet to write something up for. Now:

Do you like rolling dice? Do you like mapmaking? Do you like following a hero along on their adventure? Do you like free stuff? If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, then do I have a deal for you!

I browse Wargamevault and DrivethruRPG quite a lot now, looking for deals on things I'm interested in. Some of the things I've purchased have been sitting in my library, unused but waiting for the day the print button comes for them. Not so for 6x6 Tales!

6x6 tales has been played often enough that I cannot label this write-up as a First Play. Heck, just thinking of writing about it, I've printed another to play again (though truthfully, it's been a few weeks since the last time).

What You Need to Play

- The PDF downloaded from DrivethruRPG (maybe available elsewhere?)

- Pencil

- Eraser

- 2 d6 that are distinguishable from each other (different colours; one with pips, the other numerals; whatever)

The Downloaded Package

The download provides three game sheets that can be printed differently depending on your preferences, standard and "pocketmod". I elected to print the pocketmod version. Maybe a reader is familiar with this layout, but I was not. The pocketmod essentially results in three tiny booklets that could fit in most pockets, making this is a very portable game. Both print options have tiny print, so if that's a problem, add "magnifying glass" to the list of necessities.

The first booklet is the Rules. Pretty straightforward, written in a way that you can just follow the steps as you play.

Second booklet is called the Events Booklet. This contains bits and pieces of the story all mixed up so you can't quite read ahead. Also, the there are multiple paths with multiple endings, so it's unlikely that you play the same story twice.

Third booklet is called the Journal Booklet. This is where you keep track of your hero and the story. there's the hero's stats, a map, quest log, day tracker, spells, fight tracker, dungeon tracker, and game-end scoring. This is the booklet where all of your writing goes as the story plays out.

All you need to play!

The Hook and Playing the Game

The hook is very simple. From the front page of the Rules Booklet: The King approaches you, "Welcome to our small island. We need your help, hero. Our island is terrorized by monsters, please help us..." 

I mean, what more do you need? You're gonna play the game, right?

First you build your character. Four peoples are available with a special, innate quality about them. You might be a human and start with extra gold. A dwarf or elf to start with stronger hits or more accuracy, respectively. Or be a hobbit and start with a pie. Give your character a name, draw their portrait, and fill in their stats. 

Then you roll the dice to randomly place the castle (your start point) and draw it on the map. You are now ready to adventure! 

Following the same roll and write process, you move from square to square to reveal the roads and terrain of the map. As you go along you'll discover villages, meet monsters to fight (or run from), take on side quests, level up your abilities, make a name for yourself, and find clues to progress in the main quest: learning the secret of the great evil that holds the island in its grasp and halting its terrible work.

Maps at the end of these games. Top is the one my son drew as I helped him play. Bottom left: my lesser decorated map. Bottom right: a more detailed map of the island (and completed too).

When you fulfill your destiny, whatever your fate, you add up your score and discover your ranking. Points are earned for quest completion (main and side quests), gold collected, fame earned during your travels. The total dictates your hero status; does your name take its place with the heroes of legend or will it join the legions of the forgotten. Either way, there is a space to write in the Title of your hero's journey.

Some more details from Journal Booklets.

My Take

Whether it was The Incredibly Underwhelming Adventure and Death of Jankah, a Dwarf or the famous Elfis, Slayer of the Bone Dragon, I have had a blast with this little game. Honestly, drawing up the map and coming up with a fun title at the end are my favourite parts. But all the parts work really well together for a simple, fast-paced story-telling adventure. Well, it's fast if you don't spend time illustrating extra detail into the map.

My first three character journals.

I can see the results of 6x6 Tales being some good material for an RPG game master, play the game a few times and you now have some legends with which to spice up your world-building or base a side quest on, heck one might even build a whole campaign on one of these (how about The Disappearance of Luke into the Unknown). Even something like Clara the Mango Delivery Girl is Killed by a Giant Rat, my most recent adventure, can be imagined into something to add flavour; perhaps it is a tale of warning told to children to dissuade them from venturing into the woods alone.

I've kept each Journal Booklet in a drawer, it's how I've had these titles to bring up as I write. Reading the titles brings back memories and maybe I will incorporate them into some future gaming endeavor as an inside joke for myself. As for right now, perhaps I can enlist Clara's twin sister Sara to take on the adventure and perhaps drive the evils scourge from this island! Because who's completely satisfied by only having played two turns before dying?

My Shipyard

I've been told that some of my ancestors were ship builders in Norway. It's possible that some of that quality has been passed down to me, at a smaller scale anyway.

I haven't posted much, but each time I post on a social media group about my scratch-built ships, someone is interested in how I built the models. So this will be my how-to post. Follow along as I make another ship.

Step 1: Blueprints

This is easier than you might think. There is a website called the-blueprints.com. First thing is you'll want to head over there. Find the "Ships" section in the database (link). Ships are arranged by classification and country, so if you know what you are looking for, this can be helpful.

For this example, I am going to make the Japanese armoured cruiser, Izumo (aka Idzumo). Click on "Cruisers (Japan)" and we get a listing of names of Japanese cruisers, through which we scroll until we find Izumo. 

Keep in mind, this listing contains all kinds of cruisers from different eras and maybe not all cruisers ever built, so mileage may vary. Also watch the check boxes on the right, they indicate whether the image being called up has top view and side view or just a side view. Both views is ideal.

So here we have top and side views of Izumo. Download the image.

2. Scaling the Image Download

I chose 1:3000 scale for these ships, but this will work for other scales, just insert the scale factor where I have 3000.

Do a web search of the ship and find it's Wikipedia entry. 

In the column on the right, you can find all kinds of info about the ship. For this, we just need length. Izumo is 132.28 meters.

Using a calculator, divide the ship's length in meters (132.28) by the scale factor (3000). We get 0.04409m, or 44mm. This is how long the model will be.

Open an image editing software, I used PowerPoint. Import (paste) the image onto your workspace. Crop the left and right sides of the image to the bow and stern tips of the boat. 

Resize the image length to the model length (44mm in this case). Make sure the image height is locked in with the length so that it scales both directions.

Repeat as desired for other ships. quite a few will fit on a letter size piece of paper. Print the ships.

3. Basic Ship Construction

Cut out the top view. Note where the superstructure rises above the hull of the ship. use the side view to help locate the extent of the superstructure. With these lines in mind, use a glue stick to apply glue to the bow and stern of the ship, leaving the superstructure glue-free. Affix cutout to a craft stick (like a popsicle stick).

Using a knife and the glued-on cut out as a guide, carve the ship shape from the stick. For these battleships at 1:3000 scale, there is generally no need to worry about the thickness of the stick if using popsicle sticks.

With the ship shape complete, use a sharp knife to carve the lines of the superstructure. As it isn't glued down, the superstructure cutout should just lift away (if it did get glued and the glue is not totally dry, it may still peel off using the knife blade and some care). Then glue superstructure piece to craft stick and repeat the shaping process. 

Finally, glue the superstructure to its place on the hull. I use Tacky glue for this. Write name of ship on the underside if doing multiple ships assembly line style. 

We could call this ship done at a couple steps above bare minimum and skip to basing...or we could delve into the land of high-fiddliness.

4. Intermediate Ship Construction (or A Reason to Use Some Special Tools)

Note funnels (smoke stacks) and masts on the ship (see side view). Find some metal or plastic rods of similar thickness. I used some worn out metal anode rods from some laboratory tool my brother uses at work for the funnels and paper clip wire for the masts. Cut pieces of rod/wire to their respective length in the side view plus the distance to the waterline (on some drawings, only the ship above waterline is shown, others show the whole boat, so watch for that). File off burs, bevel one end and flatten the other.

Locate the masts and funnels on the top view paper layer of the model (compare to side view if unsure). With a pin vice and appropriately-sized drill bits, drill holes through the model for the funnel and mast rods/wire to fit. Slowly so as not to split the wood.

5. Basing

Cut a 50mm length of a wider craft stick - mine are 20mm wide - and glue the boat onto it. Write the name of the ship and indicate which end is the front on the underside.

Press rod and wire into the holes, beveled side down. With the base there, they'll stop close to the right hight. Glue if needed. File funnel tops to the same level if applicable.

Paint or stain base if desired. The sticks I used were already blue.

Affix national flag on rear of base and write name of ship. Alternately one might print, cut, and glue name along with flag to the base. Consult underside of base to double-check which end is the rear.

And that's it! We now have a smart-looking model for wargaming.

Edit:

Oh wait! I forgot about the turrets.

Find a cylindrical object roughly the same diameter as the turrets on the top view. Things that work might be a bamboo skewer or a toothpick. a piece of plastic spru, etc. Cut a slice and glue it on. Or cut a tiny circle out of a thin bit of plastic, like a bread tag, and glue it on.

First Play: Quickfire

Another thing that's been on my mind a few years and I have now gotten to the table; some kind of pre-dreadnought game.

Pre-dreadnought type ships have almost a romantic quality all their own as they fill a relatively short gap between fighting sail and the modern battleship. Having been developed during that turn of the century heyday where discovery and invention seemed to take such frequent leaps in so many directions, the warships of the era abound in differences as theories in engineering and armament are tested, built, then discarded. I think it's why these boats fit so well into the steampunk sort of genre, if you're in to that sort of thing.

I looked into buying ships, but I ended up making my own and I quite like how they turned out. Using drawings downloaded from the-blueprints.com, I looked up ship sizes and scaled the drawings to fit 1:3000 scale on a PowerPoint slide (one can fit a number of ships at that scale on an 8.5 x 11 slide). I cut out and glued the top views of the drawings to popsicle sticks, stacking superstructure portions to roughly match the side view drawings for height. Funnels and masts are made up of metal rods and paperclips, respectively. Large turrets are sawed off ends of bamboo skewers or cut circles from bread tags. The boats are glued to tongue depressors cut at 5cm lengths (luckily, some of these I found in our craft drawers were blue). To finish things off, the ships' names are written on and a little flag glued to the depressor.

Three Japanese battleships. From left: Mikasa, Asahi, Yashima. Not pictured: armoured cruisers, Asama and Tokiwa.

Russian ships. Front to back: battleships Tsesarevich, Retvizan, Potemkin, Rostislav, and protected cruisers Zhemchug and Izumrud. 

The 11 ships mentioned in the above captions are all I've made so far, but I wanted to play with them, so I found a ruleset to use online called Quickfire. It looked like the right mix of detail and quicker play I was looking for. 

Initial setup of my game. Russians on the left, Japanese on the right. At the ship scale and the size of my table, these fleets have just come into range of each other.

I got stat sheets filled out and for the sake of easiness I decided to have the boats start single file with the position and approach angles decided at random. I didn't take many pictures or really keep track of much of the battle, so I don't really have an after action report like I've done with other games. This game would take me about a month to play out as I took a turn or two or three on days I could spare the time.

Although I deliberately chose to start with Japanese and Russian ships, I just randomly picked which ships I made, so the match-up seemed a bit uneven when I got the stats all figured out. Although it was six Russian ships vs. five Japanese, in this game the Japanese cruisers are rated almost as powerfully as the battleships and the Russian cruisers were useless for firing anything but torpedoes (which have a range of only 4 inches and even then rarely hit anything).

Mikasa is set afire early in the game as battleships head right and cruisers go left.

Around turn 7 or so, the Japanese boats seem quite organized. The Russians less so, with their battle ships splitting left and right as the cruisers race through the middle.

It's a close call as Rostislav maneuvers to pass behind the cruisers to join Retvizan.

The ships remaining after turn 20.

End of turn 23. Yashima is the only Japanese ship still afloat, but is adrift. Izumrud has had its speed reduced to where she cannot turn, her ability to launch torpedoes is nil. Rostislav has only her primary weapons operational, but is still in good shape for maneuvering. I ended the game here proclaiming a minor Russian victory.

I keep saying, after playing games like this, that I should be using some kind of moral check. I'd have thought the rules for this game would include something along those lines. Probably would reduce the number of turns in a game like this. As it was, I had no other motive for either side than to shoot each other up and that seemed to take quite a long time. Here's the stat sheets at the end:

Stat sheets used for Quickfire. Pretty simple stuff, considering other games I've played or seen.

It took ten turns to sink the first ship (Tsesarevich). The first two sunk were Russian, it was looking bad for them until Retvizan made an improbable hit on Asahi, triggering blast damage that reduced her speed and started fires that caused even more problems next turn. It was amazing how often Asahi was ablaze before finally sinking at turn 17. Turn 15 saw an amazing torpedo hit on Tokiwa by Izumrud, sinking her that turn. It was the only damage dealt by either Russian cruiser the whole game.

Thoughts on the Rules

I rather enjoy these rules. However, I think I would enjoy them more playing against someone who isn't me. There were times I wonder whether I targeted the right ships in a turn, thinking someone else might have acted differently, but I'd just put that into the downsides of playing solo.

An interesting part of these rules is the division in gunnery and armour. If a ship fires using primary (heavy) guns, the receiving ship uses a heavy armour rating that is compared to attackers heavy gunnery rating to decide the hit value needed. The same ships have different ratings for secondary (light) guns, which are compared against a light armour rating. The variety of ratings and rates of fire of the ships is also interesting.

The firing process is different; one d6 to see if the guns put enough shots in the air to do any damage, then if they do, total two other dice and compare to the value needed to count a hit based on the gunnery/armour comparison (on a chart), on a hit total all three dice and cosult a chart to se if blast damage occurs. I caught on pretty good and found less need to consult the charts later in the game. A cool sounding optional rule is for the player to guess the range, then measure to see if they hit (I didn't do this).

Movement seems scaled well enough, it took about half the game for ships to get into short range (which increases the possibility of blast damage and explosions) and over half the game for any ships to get into torpedo range. Moves at the scale I used are measured in millimeters, the faster ships on my table topping out at 80mm per turn. An optional rule is to double movement, which would get ships into short range and the increased possibility of blast damage quicker, might have to try that.

In any case, Quickfire turned out to be a pretty good game. Building the ships was enjoyable and I think they look good for their simplicity. 

Have fun!