/awg/ Alternative Wargames General

Snek - Edition

Preview for Ghost Archipelago Figures
wargamesillustrated.net/ghost-archipelago-figures/

>What is /awg/?
A thread to talk about minis and games which fall between the cracks, or people's homebrew wargames. /hwg/ doesn't entertain fantasy (for good reason) and the other threads are locked to very specific games, so this thread isn't tied to a game, or a genre, lets talk about fun wargames.

Any scale, any genre, any company, any minis. Skirmishers welcome. Rules designers welcome.

>Examples of games that qualify
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miniature_wargames
Grimdark Future, Age of Fantasy, Mighty Armies, Dragon Rampant, Of Gods and Mortals, Frostgrave, Hordes of the Things, Songs of Blades and Heroes, Freebooter's Fate, Dark Age, LotR and anything that doesn't necessarily have a dedicated thread (gorkamundheim).

>Places to get minis
docs.google.com/document/d/1D2DbNJ2mYAUxh5P9Pq9NZqS5tXHGn0i2JhZchEwbA2I/edit?usp=sharing

>The Novice Trove
pastebin.com/viWJ1Yvk

Last thread

Other urls found in this thread:

reapermini.com/Games/CAV
plus.google.com/communities/116965157741523529510
reapermini.com/OnlineStore/skeleton/sku-down/77116
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Any good summer sales on?

Anyone interested in a Gundam-esque wargame? I'm in the process of writing one now. It's made to be simple and fast to play. If you have any ideas please share them and I might add them in.

Watcha building, watcha playing?

I'd be interested in helping as a huge Gundam fan. Got a way to contact you outside of Veeky Forums?

...

It's in its very early stages at the moment (just wrote the first page actually) but when I'm further through the process I'll take up a tripcode and maybe get an email going as well and post regular updates. Mostly just looking for ideas right now

Ambush Alley has used up my remaining patience, I think. Any other good games about insurgency/irregular warfare?

Good time to set up a Discord for it then. Figure out which universe you want to base the physics on.

Yeah I'll look into setting one up when I get home from vacation. Currently stuck on mobile up north.

Alright.

Are you thinking of doing original mechs or using 1/144 Gunpla as the basic unit?

1/300 Gashapon Gundams

They're 1/400 and hard to get hold of outside of Ebay bulk buying junk.

Has anyone ever played kings of war?
I've been seeing a lot of ads for it and I'm interested in playing a warhammer FB esc game that is has a more midevil combat flavor

They come in 1/300 as well. Ive had a fairly easy time tracking them down

Built some mounted Samurai for Test of Honour.

I'm very annoyed that I have to buy the 2 player box to get the full card rules, but the game is pretty fun.

Is it ground or space based?

If you're making a game to play by yourself or with friends then cool but what about with other people wanting to play? They have to source these things as well

They very well might, but my plan is to have an entire unit(probably the most basic guys) armed with swords to help make them more visually distinct from the elite guys with a hand weapon and shield. Also I know the idea of a unit of Dwarfs armed with swords will make some neckbeard somewhere absurdly angry.

That's the major thing keeping me from investing. I HATE the Wargames factory Samurai models, so the fact I'd have to buy boxes of models I'll never use just to get unit cards is a big turn-off.

Shame too because, as you said, the rules are fun.

Both
Would be a lot cheaper to get 1/300 stuff than 1/144, wouldn't it?

It's not the models, I just don't need 2 player's worth of sets to play the game.

That's a fair point, as well.

>building/painting
Terminator Genisys Resistance fighters, commissioned RT-style orks, and anxiously contemplating whether my impulse purchase of Dredd minis was actualy a good idea yes it was
>playing
Nothing atm, will have a go at Terminator some weeks down the road.

I kind of think that short people with short weapons is a dumb idea. Why would they play to their weakness even more?

>building/painting
Building some reinforcements for my Empire of the Dead gang, but painting up a bunch of Afrika Korps for an upcoming local Bolt Action Tournament.

>playing
Just got in a game of Empire a week or so ago, and tried out Halo Fleet Battles for the first time.

Not the same user, but I can't fucking stand the WGF plastic samurai and the outrageous markup warlord has put on them. I could stand them back when they were 25 guys for 20 or so USD.

>They're 1/400 and hard to get hold of outside of Ebay bulk buying junk.
...hirojapanbrand sells singles and I've never had any complaints. Also, they made 1/300s for the Strategy of Gundam line, they're about the size of a GI Joe. Got a full Black Tri Stars Zaku I team, Char Custom, Dom, Gouf, and a couple -IIFs. And unlike the 1/400s, you can get a Guntank for under twenty bucks. Super easy to source.

>Would be a lot cheaper to get 1/300 stuff than 1/144, wouldn't it?
Yeah. 1/144 runs from 15 to 30 a model, albeit a little cheaper from resellers. Average grunt suits run about $2-5/pop in both 1/400 and 1/300.

>I kind of think that short people with short weapons is a dumb idea. Why would they play to their weakness even more?
Ask the Romans. In fact, Legionary gear is pretty much ideal for the shit Dwarves would be doing in their home areas.

Whoops, meant this one. Oh well. Shows all the "action figure" and gashapon scales pretty effectively. G-Sight is the only one that's hard to find. The 1/300s are usually slightly cheaper for the basic suits, and still in active production, but the 1/400s have a MUCH broader pool of available units.

Skirmish Sangin and/or Skirmish Afrika

No End in Sight

Jihad v1.5 from Stan Johansen Miniatures

>Jihad v1.5 from Stan Johansen Miniatures
First I've heard of this.

I've been into Gundam for almost 20 years now and I've never heard of this scale from any one or that store. A HGUC GM is like $9 on amazon.com right now. Everyone has access to them and they're easy to build but have a huge model range.

Unless you're wanting to do a full skirmish game with like 10+ suits I simply can't think why you wouldn't pick something people will already own as the unit size. Having 3-5 MS and high damage on weapons would make for an ideal game. Build it so the key strategy is piece trading. Weaker units become more valuable than Gundam spam because if I can trade 1 of my 2 2 point Zakus for your 4 point GM then I'm trading up. Cheap suits become not only viable options but also vital in that you can use them to flank and force your enemy's valuable MS out of cover.

Make it so that having cover is really important due to high damage weapons (say a single hit from a bazooka or beam rifle will kill 30% of the time) but ranges are short and cover just blocks LoS and nothing more.

You also have the advantage of using Gunpla's natural functionality to the game. If you take a shot then you might end up losing an arm, so just pop the arm off and set it aside.

Doing final prep for a big cheesy space opera Full Thrust mega battle, an alliance of Soviets and space pirate rock-men against evil blue space elves near the event horizon of a black hole.

It should be immense, the mission is to buy time for a boarding party of Spetsnaz Space Marines to assassinate the elf emperor on the bridge of his flagship.

I foresee it ending like The Emperor vs Horus, only with Horus replaced by a squad of drunk angry Russian special forces.

Sounds awesome, Silicate comrades united to bring down the Elf menace sound fun as fuck.

It's the culmination of a truly great RPG campaign with the PCs as members of a BPRD style organisation working out of 1980s Osaka. It started with a cyborg monster hijacking a truck and ended with them commanding the Soviet Spacefleet against an alien emperor they pissed off in a bar fight (he was on a "diplomatic mission" that mostly involved him spending his fortune betting on an illegal human vs alien bloodsport arena run by the mafia)

>drunk angry Russian special forces.

Is there any other kind?

Russians can be suicidal too, but suicidal Russians usually become novelists rather than soldiers.

Or opposition politicians

Maybe this is the wrong thread in which to ask, but can anybody point me to the pdfs for the Not-BattleTech game, CAV?

They're free on Reaper's site

reapermini.com/Games/CAV

Not sure how much you care about official-ness of your gundam suits, but you might also consider using some stuff from Heavy Gear as proxies. IIRC they're technically 1/144 or 1/160, but are smaller in-universe. They look to be right around the same height as your 1/350 model there.

Thanks, user. I'm now looking for the Journal of Recognition 1 and 2.

Oh yeah, and the CAV models from reaper are a little bigger (10mm scale but closer to gundams in-universe), but you can get them dirt cheap now in the bones plastic.

I'm one of those gamers that's perfectly happy to source big stompy robots from 30 different manufacturers in one army, though... if you're pickier about accuracy, these may not work.

While we're on the topic of giant robots, any suggestions for what games I can run using mechwarrior minis?

Gruntz?

>Ask the Romans.
Fair enough, tho they had the pila, which is a really fucking awesome thing. Dorfs usually get throwin axes that while nice, are not the same.

Maybe mech attack? It's like $6 on wargame vault.

Horizon Wars is "ultralight battletech".

Dirtside 2 has mechs in.

Speaking of, the rules for Stargrunt 2 are impressively woolly on force creation and game size (full on "we didn't bother with points" stuff), if anyone has played it is this a reasonable army (using 15mm Humvees and Bradleys, and modern US infantry plus probably Heavy Gear mecha)?

Infantry Platoon
HQ - 4 men, 1 SAW, in "Mule" IFV (Class 2 Wheeled vehicle, Extra MG, 2x GMS/L)

3x Infantry Squad - 8 men, 2 SAWs, in "Husky" APC (Class 3 Tracked vehicle, Turreted GAC/1, 2x GMS/L)

ATGM Section - 4 men, 2x GMS/L, in Mule

2x Osiris Assault Gear (Class 2 Walker, HEL/3, GMS/H)

2 small mecha and 32 infantry in 5 vehicles seems a decent size army and can be built cheapish from Skytrex or something.

Also have a photo of my FT ships for

Any thoughts on designing a single player focused game? How would you go about making a horde mode type game?

Strong AI with lots of possible options and a bit of randomness, pre-determined goals for them.

Gnome Romans would be an amusing joke. Take their goofiness away, keep their stereotypical love of engineering, and go wild with the idea of Ancient Gnomans with spring-loaded Pila and mag-repulsive scuta.

Any one make a highly detailed skeleton figure big enough to eat a 28mm model but at a reasonable cost?

I think Osprey recently published a game like that.
If you read a few reviews you may get a few ideas. There were some people that had an issue with the implementation of cutomization.
I think he used a hardpoint system, but people felt the game was imbalanced.

Anyway, as long it is a bit less crunchy than BattleTech you are good.

Heavy Gear has some interesting ideas about the genre as well. They have a neat activation system and interesting rules for indirect fire or using the mechs sensory arrays to improve your fire. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, I only saw a battlereport, but it looked like the game had some good ideas.
And it doesn't place the focus solely on the Mechs either.

I personally haven't played it, but from what I hear the rules are good.
Alessio Cavatore, who also worked on WHFB wrote them.
They are however quite a bit more streamlined from what I gather. The stuff that Rick Priestley would refer to as 'grit', all the small checks and special exceptions that make your life difficult are missing.

I know some people are turned off by that, but I think GW usually goes a bit overboard with that.

Anyway, maybe you'll get a few more answers if you ask in /wfb/, pretty sure there are a bunch of guys over there that gave it a try after WHFB passed.

Chainsaw Warrior was a pretty cool take on singleplayer boardgames. Basically a First Person Shooter with dice.
Their approach was that you pick weapons and items at the beginning of the game and then draw cards from a deck that randomly determine where you are going and what your encounters are.

It was basically a zombie shooter, so kind of a hordes kind of thing, you just weren't fighting them all at once.

>a highly detailed skeleton figure big enough to eat a 28mm model but at a reasonable cost?
The Reaper Bones 4 Kickstarter has a skeletal Owlbear, Manticore and a few other fantastical beasts.
If you were going for a humanoid skeleton you can still give Reaper a look cause I think they may have a skeletal giant too somewhere in their catalog. They also recently came out with a skeletal minotaur. Minotaurs eating people is kind of a staple, right?

WHFB also had skeletal giants for the Tomb Kings range. You'd have to hunt one down on ebay, so I can't guarantee it's gonna be reasonably priced.

If none of that works you could look around for 1:32/35 miniatures that would reasonable with a skull headswap. I've seen quite a few people sell 54mm skulls in basing or bits kits.

>I think they may have a skeletal giant too somewhere in their catalog.

They have two - 77116 Colossal Skeleton and 02742 Skeletal Giant (pictured).

Thanks for the info. Yeah 1/400 would probably work just fine with the system as well. Just finished page 8. Long way to go.

Oh forgot to mention, I'm also working on rules for an Angel-esque army like from Evangelion. If you guys know any other archetypes you want me to throw in, let me know. Kaiju are next.

Veritechs, as well as any other "Fighter-to-Mecha" types as well. Hell, a Herzog Zwei mode would be amazing.

>Horizon Wars is "ultralight battletech".
Literally started out that way. Author offered free PDFs of the Horizon Wars rules to people who'd bought the previous version, which was really basic but still fun.

I like Horizon Wars, it's almost as good a light microarmour/picoarmour wargame as Ogre.

Things to check out: Two Hour Wargames, Gears of War, Featherstone's Solo Wargaming, Featherstone's Skirmish Wargaming, the Lone Warrior magazine, the Lone Wolf Roleplaying google+ group0 ( plus.google.com/communities/116965157741523529510 ), um, oh!, Space Infantry, the boardgame from LnL games, that is pretty fun and solo.

Chainsaw Warrior is kinda fun but also badly-designed.

>Gnome Romans
So, Imperial Gnoman Legions?

I'll second reaper, check this out:
reapermini.com/OnlineStore/skeleton/sku-down/77116

Don't want to crud up this thread too much with Kings Of War (since we were talking about it a lot already in the last one), but I've played it quite a lot and I think it's great. Basically Warhammer Fantasy, with all the useless crap pruned out. It feels like what I nostalgically remember being fun about WHFB.

There are freebie rules and lists available on Mantic's site, so give it a spin and see for yourself.

It's good. It is a lot less about list building and very much about decisions on the table, plus you can get a game in in less than an hour while still being satisfied. Can't reccomend it enough.

What AWG has the most active UK tournament scene?

Does somebody have a good source for battle reports, especially of the /awg/ kind?

Ill see what I can do

I think youtube is gonna be your best bet.
I've seen a few by Guerillia Wargaming. They were fairly well made by youtube standards.

I would think either malifaux or guild ball, from what I heard. Assuming you also don't count blood bowl. SAGA is probably up there as well.

Gundam Wargame user here again. What scale should I build the game around? Its not too late to change it. I was thinking 1/300 since they're easy to find on eBay and since 1/300 is the same as 6mm, it gives you a lot of options since plenty of companies make tanks and such in that scale. If I go 1/500 however, you would be able to use the nice Jovian Chronicles minis and you could use 2mm tanks since they would probably look fine together.

Another option I forgot would be to go middle of the road so it would work with anything from 1/500-1/400-1/300. That way you could get away with pretty much whatever

Can't stand Malifaux DESU. It's far too complex for it's own good. Any of the single mechanics are fine but when you stack multiple objectives, hand management and special snowflake model rules it becomes over whelming IMO

>Gnome Romans
No, no, the Romans are Orcs, the Halflings are Barbarians.

but wait, the Romans are Halflings...

...and also Goblins?

It's confusing enough to drive you to drink and/or flintloque.

...especially once you realise the Orcs aren't quite Romans, they're Nomans. Gnomes. My god.

Have some penguin pike & shot.

Well, icicle and snowball.

Not like these ladies, who look like they've seen some serious shit on patrol in 'nam.

They don't have Puff running air support, but they do have their own variation on CAS helos.

The oven gloves are because the rainbow laser gun gets hot.

Now THIS is /awg/

Oh dear! A late-running entrant to the "what the fuck are Romans, really?" argument: some of them are Werewolves, while others simply ride giant wolves!

Maybe we should move to a later period. Things might be clearer with, say, Landsknechts.

Good Lord is that from Wargames Foundry?

This has all gone horribly wrong so I'm just going to start posting dicks.

That can't possibly get confusing.

Yeah, well, Casting Room Miniatures now, they've spun some of their stuff out under a different name for reasons that I cannot begin to remember.

(the hammer is his penis, i mean spanner, i mean the spanner is his hammer, wait, no)

I SAY DID YOU SAY SPANNER ARE YOU AN ENGINEER DO YOU LIKE COGS LET'S ALL GO STEAMPUNK TALLY HO!

vsf is actually better than and not steampunk

oh god who let kids into the Zone the Zone is not a place for kids they will be dead before you can say cheeki breeki

blowout soon, children! this way!

Faster, cyka, the steampunks are gaining on us!

I'm bored now, so I'll stop with some orc pirates. They may be romans, or gnomes, I don't know.

>tfw want to buy single metals but can't be arsed paying £2+ £3p&p

I need to go to wargaming shows, I'm in Yorkshire I think there's one in Leeds next

What's your favorite fantasy skirmish ruleset?

What's your favorite skirmish ruleset in general?

1) pulp alley
2) fivecore

Song of Blades and Heroes because I'm a brainlet when it comes to rulesets these days.

Open Combat is cool too, slightly less lightweight than SoBaH. Generic enough for either medieval combat or light fantasy, but if you want to have your big Reaper Bones monsters the special rules of SoBaH work better.

that's a lie my favourite fantasy skirmish ruleset is literally dungeons & dragons (1974, no supplements, alternate combat system)

but that's my inner grog talking and for fantasy that isn't literally d&d, it's pulp alley

This was great
We should have these more often

probably Lord of the Rings actually.

REEE GET OUT BIGGERS! THIS IS OUR EMPIRE!!!

So is there a standard way to base 6mm miniatures? Most of what I've seen is 16 figs to a 20x40mm base.

I'm looking to get either Baccus or Irregular 6mm and wanted to do my modeling homework before I take the plunge.

If/when I get back to my fighting anime kids wargame these girls are getting painted up as a gang of delinquent Pretty Cures

>Can't stand Malifaux DESU. It's far too complex for it's own good.
Takes all kinds. If you ask most of the malifaux die hards, that's exactly what they like about it. Look on the upside, though, at least it's nowhere near as complicated now as it was in 1st edition.

My Horizon Wars stuff is based 3-5 men or 2 tanks in loose formation on a 20x40 base or 25mm round base, but then again I wanted small squads or irregular units.

I also had some units of 2-3 infantry escorting a light vehicle or standing around a truck to represent mechanised squads.