He did it to me AGAIN!

Hoi,

Not so long ago I promised Jan-Willem (aka Pijlie), I'd participate in a game of "Fistful of Kung-fu". This is a rule-set of the Osprey Series and I can now say: a lot of fun! This game of his took place at the last Ducosim Gaming Convention in Amersfoort in the Netherlands.

J-W and I had been discussing the game for some time and I had asked him whether I could use my Mystery Inc figures again since I wanted to give them another airing. He graciously allowed me to use them and so I packed them up and went on my way.

J-W is know in the Dutch gaming-scene for his great tables and easy-going nature as a games master and this occasion sure was no exception. Due to the public transport, I was late at the convention and had to pass on the first game of the day, J-W hosted 3 games in all that day. In the second game I played with 3 other guys and our mission was as follows:

At the end of the city-scaped table a Chinese mansion was located, the home of the director of a grand restaurant chain, but really an Mysterious Magician. He had acquired a valuable ancient statue which all the players (and their gangs) wanted to get hold off. The Yakuza thought it a valuable antique, the coppers had it down as a way to smuggle narcotics and the local biker chapter thought it contained money (or something like that, I actually forgot). My Mystery Inc gang ended up there cause Shaggy and Scoob were hungry, just my luck.

 We deployed our gangs in the 4 corners of the target building. J-W explained the basic rules of the game and boy are they basic: they're dead easy! 

It seemed to me to be a smart move to let others go in first, kill the Magicians minions for me and then I could steal the statue and get away. Luckily for me the other players more or less obliged me in this: the coppers and bikers got into a grudge-match ending with the Bikers being gunned down by the SWAT team which also took care of a lot of the Magicians stooges. In the meanwhile one of the Yakuza members (the boss I think) stole a car and tried to drive it straight through the mansion's wall. He was entirely absorbed in doing so, that he almost forgot I was there...

Cautiously I edged the gang up to the compound and when no one was looking I jumped my leader (Velma, who else?) over the wall easy as that! A bungle of the dice prevented me from jumping in the rest of the gang so they had to wait till the next turn. Velma, using some free moves gained from other players bungled rolls, hijacked a car standing in the compound parking lot and backed it over one of the magicians minions.

 The Yakuza and the SWAT players both got some figures into the building and when all my figures were inside the compound, Velma drove the car right through the screen-doors and into the mansion proper.

Now in the picture above you can see two warrior statues (J-W claimed them to be Ming Dynasty Terracotta Warriors, but clearly they're fake because they're obviously not terracotta ;-) Velma had the nasty suspicion they were not entirely what they looked like, so revving the engine she drove the nearest one to shards.

Meanwhile the other players, all except the bikers who were down to two figures and madly trying to get revenge on the cops, were inside and even fighting the Magician and his minions for the statue. The Magician waved his hands in a complicated Chinese gesture and made the warrior statues come to life... Velma changed gear and swooped the last warrior in the room down while turning the car around to take her into the Magicians study which was filled with bullets, statues and blokes trying to kill each other.

In a great stunt Velma then wheelie-ed the car through the study-door, unto the Magician's desk and ... smashed the statue; jinkies! 

Since this brilliant move brought the mission (retrieving the statue) to an indecisive end we all looked up to J-W for directions and I became aware of a dreaded sight: J-W started to smile menacingly from ear to ear and conjured up a model of a huge Asian Red Dragon... The statue had apparently been holding captive the spirit of a great Red Drake and it now escaped the stone prison it had called it's home for the last thousand years. The mission objective had now become "Kill the dragon" oh and by the way chaps it has 5 wounds.

My turn had ended and I really needed to answer the call of nature I ...erm...well I did and left the table with instructions for J-W to get Velma out the room when she would get any free moves. While doing business with Mother Nature I thought up a brilliant way to tackle the dragon, no puns intended.
 In my absence some nitwit with a gun blew up the remains of my car creating havoc and slightly wounding the beast, but luckily Velma had seen fit to get clear of the blast. In the picture above you can see the Bikers had hijacked a bulldozer which they had driven through the Mansion's walls just before I knocked over the statue. As soon as the dragon manifested itself, they got out of the engine and went for freedom and tried to get off the table. A wise decision in hindsight.

The dragon went on a rampage through the mansion and it's path took it past the spot Velma was hiding out. It had been shot some more and had 3 wounds remaining. Since Velma had a great plan and a chainsaw in case the plan didn't work out, I asked J-W whether I could perform a stunt. I figured Velma had guessed that the Magician was basically a fraud and the dragon actually was 3 guys in a dragon suit. I proposed to him that if I managed to roll my stunt successfully I'd taken down the dragon. J-W concurred and I had to roll a stunt with 3 successes needed, I rolled a 6, 5 and an 1... the dragon continued it's rampage and we all had to get it's 3 remaining wounds to go away.

In the meantime the rest of the gang had gathered in the courtyard and I needed to get my priorities straight, the most sensible thing to do was get out and that would totally be in sync with what the Mystery Inc guys and galls do each episode: run away a lot! But the game was nearing it's end and I decided to go for the dragon.

The Yakuza boss had sneaked out of the compound and appeared behind me. He promised not to attack the gang if I in turn let him be. Stupidly I agreed, the cops gunned down the dragon's next two wounds and just before Velma was in range to get the chainsaw in play, the dastardly Oyabun shot it down claiming the win!

A great game with lots of real movie moments. So J-W did it to me again: I need to get me that rule-set!

Cheers Sander

Listening to:

Mystery Inc. Part II

Hoi,

While these figures already partook in the battle at the Ducosim and are thus shown in the batrep of said battle, I will show the Mystery Machine and the ladies here in more detail. Partly because Anne specially asked for the pictures ;-)

First a group-shot:

Here are Daphne and my all-time favourite Velma.

Some separate shots of the van. The model is from Armour Cast and most of the bits used to upgrade it are GW and Ainsty vehicle parts.

Somewhere on the unpainted pile are the regular, unarmed, Mystery Inc team, but I will be painting other stuff before I start on them.

Cheers Sander

Listening to: "Royal Blood" by Royal Blood

P.E.W.-P.E.W. Game 2

Hoi,

As promised, here's part 2 of our Pew-Pew game at the Ducosim games convention. While we played the first game with only 2 players (Jan-Willem and me), the second game had a 3rd and later 4th player. This gave J-W the chance to play the roll of games-master. I had the chance of playing my Mystery Inc gang. That said the other player (Mark, a great and sporting chap) and I, were having quite a lot of fun running round each other trying to snatch the much-vaunted container, which by the way, Mark and his Cannibals had. J-W. played Plisskens Commando's and his para-drop put one of them right in front of Scooby-Doo, who had an extra move and an attack-modifier... I charged Scooby right in, to be shot down for his effort in turn one!

After this I had to put 3 of the team members together to kill off the lone commando. As the Mystery Inc gang only entailed 5 members I had to find a 6th. As my Post-Apoc miniature collection is 5 figures large, I included a Freebooter Lara Croft mini as final member and she made short work of the commando in the end.

The chief of the Cannibals, carrying the case, foolishly came too close to my gang and with all might I tried to take the container from him but this only resulted in Freddy getting killed.

From this point on the 4th player, a woman with great enthusiasm, joined in the game. And strangely all the actions she wanted to make were approved by the GM and succeeded even if  they would have been impossible had Mark or I tried the same. Her mini's jumped across entire streets, she drove a camper down a street ramming down no less than 3 of Mark's mini's and more of tis kind of silliness.

Due to bad luck in shooting I conjured up some zombies which took a lot of my fire-power to put down and the T-Rex conveniently conjured up by another 1 on to hit rolls from the lady, made it even harder to gain the objective.

In the end the lady did kill the Cannibal leader and got away with the booty... well done that missus! Afterwards J-W made this "brilliant" picture of me, I couldn't keep it from you.

Cheers Sander

Listening to:

P.E.W.-P.E.W. game 1

Hoi,

Yesterday I played two participation games at the Ducosim game convention in Amersfoort. Jan-Willem put up a demo-game using his P.E.W.-P.E.W. ( Pijlie's Everyman's Wargames Protocol for Every War) rules. The game was set in Post-Apocalyptic Amersfoort where a team of Commando's had to drop in and get away with a container full of valuables. The team was led by Arie Plissken and consisted of 6 troopers. The link above gives you a lay-down of the scenario and part of the rules. In today's post I'd like to show you a BATREP of how the first game went.

Even though I had brought my own Mystery Inc miniatures we decided to let me play with Plisskens team because, well there was nobody else playing along. Therefore J-W played 3 (of the 6 available) gangs to whit: bikers, Gangstas and Cannibals. The bikers had taken the container and the other gangs had to get it and exit on the diagonal opposing side of the table.

So let's take a look!

The table showing the demo-clock (designed for TAZ but usable all the same)

J-W dropping the commando's by throwing Army Men Para's down on the table

The photo's are all a bit sketchy because I couldn't get the git to stand still...

The dropped Para's looked like someone had covered the table in garbage bags...

The game gets under way

I tried to concentrate my spec-ops team in order to get to the bikers, but on half was dropped on the other side of the table so I sent them round to head off the bikers on their way out of the combat zone.

I lost a lot of troopers to fire from the Gangsta's, bikers and Cannibals who all targeted them repeatedly.

Plissken and my sniper (his 2nd in command)  cornered 3 of the bikers including their leader, who carried the container in a crater.

After shooting down the two thugs protecting the leader, things got tense on the other side of the board where the cannibals and Gangsta's where converging on my poor troopers.

my troopers tried to find some hard needed cover in nearby buildings. There they were besieged by the gangsters.

The silvery thing is a kiwi container J-W painted silvery to represent a drop-pod. My troops used it conveniently as cover from the Cannibals.

When rolling a 1 to shoot players need to draw a disaster-card from a specially made deck, and just my luck that I drew the awakening of an nuclear altered giant lizard in the next building...

Somehow the Gansta's managed to get hold of the container by shooting down the biker-boss while Plissken was in hot pursuit.

 Plissken and his sniper (the only survivors of my team) shot up the remaining gangers, those not eaten by the Dino or shot down by the Cannibals and also eaten.

Plissken called in de evac chopper and they made good their escape!

A great game with some deceptively simple rules, beautiful terrain and a lot of fun.

Meanwhile on the table next to us, Michiel and Toby played an Epic Game of X-wing, which I would like to have partaken in but I had too much fun playing PEW-PEW.

After our first game 2 other players turned up and so we played a second game in which I used my Mystery Inc mini's more of which in Part 2 anytime soon.

Cheers Sander

Listening to:

The Golden Lion

Hoi,

Last Saturday I participated in a great multi-player game of Dystopian Wars at the DUCOSIM Spring Con. JW or Pijlie was taking the role of GM and had devised a very entertaining scenario. 5 players would try to find a treasure located on a central island in an archipelago.

 The treasures was hidden on the Island which held an exotic temple with six tiers, each step would take a token in order to make sure no booby-traps went off.

In order to get those tokens players had to land forces on the other Islands roll a D6 and see what happens. On a 1 you'd find a deserted island and get a token for free, on the others you'd get nasty surprises in the form of challenges. In order to land on the Isles each fleet could carry along Small Tank Tokens and could use it's Marines (Assault Points).

Now as said we had 5 players in no particular order: Gerco playing KoB, Michiel playing EotBS, AM playing the always annoying COA, Robbert playing KoB and me doing the same.

I wanted to try out my Vanguard subs and in the end got to ram one Japanese frigate which was cool but got me into a prolonged fight with Michiel which was too costly in the end.

I landed some troops on an island in order to get a token and lo and behold a mass of prehistoric monsters awoke and attacked me. It took me about 3 turns to get rid of most of them because I had to divide my attention and forces between them and Michiel who attacked me as well. In the end AM killed the beasts off and got the token.

As it happens I was the only one who had actually read the scenario rules up front (and perhaps Gerco whom I haven't actually spoken to all game because he was either on the other end of the table or flashing the bejeezus out of everyone with the flash of his sturginium camera.) and it was at this point I came to the realisation I didn't really need the token to get to the top of the pyramid: if I unloaded all my AP's onto the island and onto the same layer of the temple at the same time it would only coast me 1D6 casualties each time I didn't have a token so I could reach the treasure with a lot of AP's anyway... I have a cunning plan says I..

Meanwhile all hell had broken loose, everybody was shooting at everybody everywhere accept for Gerco who seemed to be sailing along nicely and getting ignored. So to cut the long story short: I got a reasonable amount of forces to the island ( a battleship, 3 cruisers and 3 frigates: carrying 21 AP's) and got the troops to the temple.

 Before this happened I had to roll to see what kind of challenge I would be having: oh dear.. 3 sea-monsters emerged from the depths and I had to get rid of them to earn a token.

In the end I finished off two again with some help from AM and on ahead I went again. AM had an all flyer COA army and got some STT's and thus AP's onto the temple  as well, but I was one step ahead, the race was on!

We started playing around 11.00 o clock and it was now 16.17, the con was about to close at 17.00 so JW decided we'd only play out the race to the top between AM and me. Now in the end we reached the top, I had 13 AP's left and AM 2; guess who won the fight for the Treasure? So I ended up with the Golden Lion and a very nice day as well.

I know I have left out heaps of action and people and their battles but it would take 10 posts to cover the thing decently so sorry chaps!

Thanks to AM for the photo's and the movie, he sent me far more then the ones shown here but again for briefness I left some out. Michiel and I used our own fleets, AM played with JW's COA and Gerco provided his own and Robberts KoB fleets. Terrain was all JW's with some of my buildings added for the events and challenges rolled.

Cheers Sander

Listening to: My son testing his vocal cords... by me and the missus