Secrets of the Third Reich

One of life's little rules should be "do not start a new game system until you have mastered all the ones you currently play".

Then again it is said that rules are for breaking....

Yes, you have guessed it, I have been tempted by the thought and sight of shiny new metal, not to mention the smell and touch of a crisp new rule book. I do like the smell of a new rulebook, it smells of potential victory.

So the latest rule system to find its way onto my shelf is "Secrets of the Third Reich" (SOTR) and the latest army is Soviets..

SOTR is a game system from West wind games and is based in Europe in 1949 with the assumption that the second world war is still ongoing, must European and some American cities have been "nuked" and almost every army are now using zombies and some have ventured into werewolves, mechs etc.

It is a platoon level game and looked quite fun when played by a few guys at my club.

I opted to go for the Soviets mainly because no-one at the club was using the Russians and partly because I always like to use the underdogs.

First glance at the rules indicates a game system built around a bit of fun. The artwork is generally poor and the rulebook looks difficult to interpret in some areas so I am not sure if they could ever successfully be used in a Tournament. However, having said all that it looks fun and played quite well....

So a few Russians have been based in readiness for undercoating and painting.

The figures are all westwind and are quite nice. The heads are supplied separate from the bodies, which in theory should give a fair amount of variety. In practice there is not a broad enough selection of heads to choose from so they all repeat quite quickly. I have therefore brought a head pack from Berlin or bust game system (also west wind) to make up the pack.

Not all heads appear to fit the bodies very well, but it does not require a lot of work to get them in soundly.

The figures are roughly 26mm scale and look quite fun. Time to see how well they paint up.....

Warhammer Fantasy; first play and the world cup....

England’s participation in the football world cup has now come to an end, so after a few weeks of 24/7 television watching and a suitable period of mourning I have re-entered the world of wargaming.

My local Games Workshop store had organised an evening of gaming with my wargaming club this week. We all brought along a 1000 point army and the store brought along the new rules and guided us all through an evening of version 8 mayhem.

It was a good evening with 8 of us playing.

I took along a strange little 1000 point list built around 1 Lord, 2 vampires, 20 ghouls and 20 units of skeletons. All legal under the new system.

My first thoughts are as follows.

1.         Magic is interesting. It is now possible to cast some of the very strong spells with relative ease. However, about a third of the time (11 out of 36) the opponent has only one less dice, so you only end up with a 50/50 chance.

2.         I opted to have forbidden lore on a level 1 Vampire. This meant he had every spell in a lore available to him and the option of using up to 6 dice to cast a spell. Potentially very powerful.

3.         Most of our guys had played a fair amount of Flames of war, so we were very used to pre-measuring, so we were quite used to this. I like this as a rule change.

4.         Large blocks of infantry become powerful. I managed to grow my ghouls up to 40 strong and they easily withstood a charge from dragon princes and destroyed them in the next round.

5.         Missile troops look quite useful now. Woods no longer block line of sight and I defy anyone to withstand a blast from 20 dark elf corsairs. Wow.

6.         The changes to artillery appeared to have very little effect. My group of players had got very good at guessing range anyway.

 All in all a good nights gaming and I look forward to a vast pile of FAQs and re-writing all my army lists.

 Great fun….

Overrun by russians: FOW v WFB

Recently dusted off my Flames of war mid-war Italians to have a game against russians and had a great time playing. This set me to thinking about which particular aspects that I enjoy so much in the FOW rules and if any of these would or could be reflected in the up-coming warhammer fantasy rule changes.

Yes I know that they are very different games looking at very different types of battle, but at the end of the day they are both turn based wargames, one v one played out in a couple of hours. Understanding makes one game good might be of use when thinking about what you want to see in rule changes to another.

 So I got to thinking about what I so liked about the gameplay for Flames of war.

• Missions that are interesting, very well balanced and make any battle interesting

every game of WFB that I have played, for as long as I can remember have been straight across the table meetings. I know pretty much what my tactics will be (dependent upon opponent only).

•  Variable starting lineups.

depending upon the mission, FOW requires you to start many times with only half of your troops on the table. This can make unit choice very interesting.

• scenery rules that actually make the arrangement of scenery important

FOW requires half of the table to be covered in scenery, and the scale of the game makes this very important. With WFB the scenery only appears to have a minor effect.

• Realistic models

Not a lot to say here, they are two games trying to achieve different things. I have no problems whatsoever with GWs figure range. Lets face it the only reason I started playing was because I love painting the figures so.

I'm not trying to say that WFB is a bad game. Its not, in fact its a great game that has kept my interest for many years. The core rules don't need much tinkering to make them perfect. I just wish that there was a little more variety between games.

 If you want to know what happened in the game. I didn't protect my guns enough and was overrun by the masses of Russian infantry. My anti-infantry tanks were taken out far too easily by a late arriving platoon of Russian tanks.

Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition

It appears that everyone has a view on what they would like to see in the new rules, so I thought I would record my wish-list. I love the game and I don't want dramatic changes, they are just not needed. I do, however have concerns about the odd little thing

1. Fear

It is not that I dislike the current fear rule, I just think that it is a little too powerful at times. An autobreak when outnumbered is just too strong. Maybe keep the auto break - unless you roll double 1 - for the first turn of combat (the shock of combat against a unit that scares you), thereafter just modify your leadership by the amount you are outnumbered. Some armies need fear, quite rightly, so it should not be dumbed down too far. It just needs a little softening.

2. Missions

I have played a lot of Flames of war in the past couple of years, one of the best features of this game is that it has some great missions that reward thinking on the hoof and, not to put too fine a point on it, good general ship. These missions would also make scenery significant. At the moment it becomes a bit of an irrelevance at times.

3. Cannons

As it stands, the best use of my cannons is as a sniper weapon to kill off enemy characters in units. In one game I shot three cannons at a Vampire count general and killed him in the first round. Admittedly he had to fail a look-out roll, but it was a little too easy.

4. Autokilling Chariots.

There are just too many units that can deliver strength 7 hits now. It makes chariots a poor choice.

Just my thoughts. probably best that I'm not involved in the re-write.