Dead by Lead- Jailbreak!

Following on from a very enjoyable game with McZ, a few of the other Regimenters were keen to try out Dead by Lead too.

So, over the weekend we tried out Scenario 2: Trials and Tribulations. There were three of us, so we changed the scenario up to have one crew coming from one side, the other from the other size, and the defenders in the middle!

Conveniently the 4ground Sherriff's Office has two jail cells, perfect for this game!

A view of the table before the crews were placed and the game began!

On to the game....

"Look Sherriff, I already told your deputy all I know. I was just minding my own business yesterday, when this whole thing went down.

Now now, no need to pull your Iron. I'll tell it you, just.... just keep that in that there holster...

Whisper Creek was quiet, nobody was renting a room at Rogan's, even the saloon was empty. There was a train coming tomorrow, but nobody wanted to be out in town after yesterday.

A couple of the locals had come to blows over who's brand was on a particular set of cattle, which resulted in some words being thrown, and then some bottles, and then a couple of bullets. Now, all of that was normal fare in Whisper Creek, 'cept there turned out to be a troop of Cavalry who were in town, and they decided to make a whole thing out of it.

And so it was, that the two leaders ended up in the cells, waiting for the train to come with the new Sherriff, as well as the car to take the cattle away to Bloodstone to sell.

4ground make SUCH GOOD TERRAIN

Now, the Cavalry didn't reckon on the trouble they had gotten themselves into. Their Sergeant was there, taunting the folks in the cell, unawares that around the town, a whole bunch of trouble was getting all set up ready to start.

Trouble.

When one of the Cav, Jebediah his name was came out of the General Store (after taking more than a few things off the store owner's hands), he was quickly met by a hail of bullets from one of the locals, heading to free their boss. He ducked quickly behind a mule, which saved him, but the mule didn't have the same luck....

RIP Francis the mule

Now, that particular local hadn't reckoned on Butch coming out of the Sheriff's office, with both barrels of the shotgun primed and ready to rock. With an almighty bang, that local was a goner.

Shotgun at close range.

Now, this whole thing had kicked off right royally by this point. From the other side of town, the other group of locals (Ma's Boys) were moving up to the Sherriff's office, intent on getting Ma out.

From the top story, Butch emerged, holding his Winchester Repeater. He took aim at a local hidin' in an unfinished building. He stood up there, paused, and a crack rang out, followed by a hard thump as the feller fell from his hiding spot.

Butch coming out of the Sherriff's office

Butch might be regarded as a pretty good shot, but he was never regarded as a smart man. So while he was there, aiming carefully down the road, making that great shot, what he wasn't doing was looking around him, and seeing the person standing right at the bottom of the stairs, pistol raised in his direction.

The six shooter rang out, six bullets fired faster than a fly beats it's wings.

And that was the end of Butch.

Splat.

While all of this was going on, at the same time the locals had gotten their way into the Sherriff's Office, where one hell of a scuffle was occurin'. The Sergeant was hard pressed, trying to fight off one of the locals, the two tuslin' over a Bowie knife.

Brawl!

Jebediah, hearing that his boss was in trouble came runnin', only to end up on the wrong end of a tomahawk...

More Brawl!

Fightin' in the Office was bloody and brutal. More and more of the locals piled in, first fighting the Cavalry, and then fightin' each other. The Sergeant was overwhelmed, and during all of that, both Ma and the Chief were able to get free.

I don't know whether anyone got out of it, because pretty soon all that was left in that office was a whole bunch of dead and wounded folks, and not a whole lot of anything else.

A ridiculous amount of Brawl

And that's all I know Sherriff, honest. Now can I go...?"

Another brilliant game of Dead by Lead, it remains a ridiculously cinematic and enjoyable game. The rules play quickly and simply, with plenty of opportunities for cinematic elements, and great moments where things did, or didn't work out!

We will for sure be playing more....

Pooch

 

Telegraphing my super secret tech again....

So it's that time of year again, when our  club thinks about it's annual Flames of War end-of-year event in which we remember the loss of a close friend and clubmate a few years ago. Every year the organisers come up with something mad and this year blogger Pelarel decided it was going to be: 

• 60-point Infantry companies
• Only 1 top armour 1 unit and no top armour 2
• Only 1 support platoon

I've never really looked at the Italian Motorciclisti Company before. Now I have and I love it so I'll be running it for Remember December. 

The List 

Core 

Motociclisti HQ - 2 Rifle Teams on motorcycles

Motociclisti Platoon - 5x Rifle/MG Teams on motorcycles

Motociclisti Platoon - 5x Rifle/MG Teams on motorcycles

Breda MG Platoon - 3x HMG Teams

Armoured Cars - 4x AB41 Armoured Cars

AT Guns - 4x47mm Elefantini

AA Guns - 2x 20mm Autocannoni

Support

Semovente Platoon - 5x Semovente 75/18

Command Cards

For Italy!; Frontline Fighter; Motorcycles (3); Bombe Passaglia (2)

Getting Ready

I had two jobs to do for this one - rebase a motorcycle transport base and acquire and paint some AB41s.  Blogger Pooch sorted me out with some spare bases and local 3D maestro Che at Potbelly Miniatures printed me the AB41s in a matter of days and I smashed them out in a weekend:

The motorcycles I did a *long* time ago so just had to rebase the HQ from two motorcycles on one base to one on two bases and do a bit of repair work. Here's a fair sample of this absurdity:

Thoughts? 

It's probably terrible. The tiny infantry platoons mean it's brittle AF but it has a lot of MG dice so should be able to deliver those tiny platoons. The Semoventes provide a template if I need one and some mid-range AT as well. But it's going to be SO MUCH fun to play. 

Next Time

I've made a bit of progress on 15mm Spanish. Not enough for this week but enough....

Pooch's October update

October is gone too, this is really, really ridiculous. But still, the painting train continues, and this blog is much more on time. So... I'll take that as a win!

1. Paint a platoon for Flames of War

This month was some odds and sods to finish up my second Afrika Rifle Platoon...

An HMG and a command stand to be exact....

But also painted up some of the 3d Breed DAK that I had Potbelly print for me, to add a couple of extra teams to enable me to use my DAK as an early war army- namely a 50mm mortar and an anti-tank rifle.

Much like everything Potbelly prints for me, they have come out an absolute treat.

More DAK next month I think, as I need to paint up more things for Remember December this year!

2. Add something to armies I have already painted

First up this month is a new model for Marvel Crisis Protocol- or more, three models!

I have actually had these on my painting table for some time, but the models kept breaking on me, and my level of frustration got so high that I very nearly considered never finishing them. The realisation that I didn't have any other Marvel models to replace them meant that I did finish them this month!

So dynamic

So fragile

Rolling with a bit of a Wild West theme this month, I also finished up a couple of Daughters of the West from 3d Breed and printed by Potbelly Miniatures, which I plan on using for Dead by Lead.

Two pistols and a Repeater rifle!

I'm really happy with them

3. Finish up a piece of terrain

Continuing in the Wild West as last month, I built up another one of the brilliant 4Ground kits I had lying around. I've got two more to go before I have them all assembled, so I reckon I might try and do one a month for the next two months to finish them off.

Such a cool looking building

Can't have a jailbreak without a jail cell!

And to further add to the Wild West experience, I also finished up these 3d printed boxes and crates from Battlekiwi.

Simple paintjob, but scatter terrain is so damn useful!

4. Play a game a month, that was different to the last month

As you saw in McZ's review, we played the really fun game, Dead by Lead. 

We deliberately set ourselves a simple "this town ain't big enough for the both of us" type game, wehere all we were doing was trying to kill each other. Read his review if you want the detail, in short, we really enjoyed it.

I do love my Wild West terrain!

3d Breed Cowboy, looking cool

The Cavalry Sgt dealing to on of McZ's Scouts with knife

The result of a VERY silly gunbattle

The dimwit with the Repeater Rifle came up trumps in the end....

It's a great game, I'm already lining up the next game!

5. Paint a Hundred Years War French Army for ADLG

Paint one base for ADLG

And so, the last push on painting up a whole mess of Knights begins- stripy lances for the win!

Paint one Knight for ADLG

I figured I'd better paint up my last commander too, adding further to the push to get more Knights done!

On a prancing pony no less!

Paint up an army of 15mm Celts

You know how I said I wanted to finish my 15mm Celt army in October? 

Well, I did it...

Here is the army in all it's glory!

And some close ups of the things I finished this month....

Two bases of Soldurii, you can tell it's them by the dogs!

Two more generals

Some heavy cavalry

And a base with a certain call back to a certain RPG campaign....

Potbelly Miniatures have done a phenomenal job in printing all of these for me, they have come up an absolute treat. I really should get them out for a game!

Pooch

Dead by Lead! What do we think?

 Yesterday, blogger Pooch and I played a new game! Well, we played cowboys, which we have done many times, but with a new ruleset - Dead by Lead from Electi Studios. 

Why a new game? Well, we broke Legends of the Old West many moons ago and then we got stuck into Dead Mans Hand and I definitely ruined that with a horde of Mexican Peons so since then, the cowboys have been in a box. 

In a nutshell?

Dead by Lead is, thematically, very much of it's type. Lawmen and outlaws robbing banks, jailbreaking and having shootouts at the Okie Dokie Corral. However, it has some clever design features in it's very clean and simple rules that mean playing warbands of Native Americans fit easily alongside Banditos or soldiers or anything else you can imagine. List building comes with character customisation for being both awesome and terrible and crews can be anything from 1 to 12 models. Yep. One. And that one man can still be shot in the head and killed instantly. 

There's a small variety of models like Scouts, Drifters and Leaders. They have Iron and Brawl stats for shooting and fighting respectively, Grit covers off how many wounds they can take and Luck gives them the opportunity to have the bullet whip their hats off and miss! The game tracks ammo and wound locations and both matter but it's light enough that the admin can be done with the included character sheet and a few spare dice.

The game uses D12s for shooting, fighting and lucking and a deck of cards for figuring out how hard you are to hit. It's an interesting addition to the mechanic that provides a level of more controlled randomness and allows for a much simpler combat mechanic. The defender draws a card and the attacker rolls a D12 + stat +/- other variables and if they equal or beat the card, they deal damage. In cover? Draw two, take the best. In serious cover? Draw three. Draw the same cards? Add them together. It's very, very cool. 

The rules include half a dozen scenarios, including Wild West staples like a jailbreak and a train robbery and a campaign system to carry your fighters between games. Dead by Lead is available on Wargames Vault. 

How did the game go?

 Great! Pooch bought four soldiers variously armed and I bought three Banditos and two Peons. All our characters had some flaws (and this is where we learned 'Fast and scrawny' and 'Drunkard' are both quite back breaking flaws!) and we opted to not play a scenario but just turned up in town to have a scrap. We each bought a longarm - Pooch's was a dimwit (so always went last) and mine was big and slow (so had better stats but moved way too slowly to be helpful.)

The game flowed really easily and while we looked up every rule once (mostly from the 'I think I read something that says we should do a thing' in our pre-game reading) the mechanics are so simple that once we'd played through a couple of fights and shoots, it wasn't especially difficult.

 

 We learned quite early that close combat is deadly (and that cavalry sabres don't do anything unless you're on a horse) and that getting into optimal range for fanning means your fan is likely to go badly but it's SO satisfying. In a spectacular example of how the 'fanning' rules work, this tableau played out over the whole game.

 Pooch's soldier and my drunken bandito fanned their sixguns at each other over a three or four turns and managed to do a single wound each. In the end, the soldier ran around the water wagon and battered the Mexican into submission! In the end, the gameboard came out like this:

The bandito leader was gunned down in the street by the army captain, before his big, slow gunner shot the captain in the head and was in turn felled by the dimwit who finally made it to somewhere sensible. 

Things I liked

 Mechanics

The cards for spinning up a defence stat is a really neat mechanic. Interestingly, we observed after the game that the odds of pulling a 10 were pretty good. Something around 40% which means shooting things dead is genuinely quite difficult. Given most of the time the best shooting bonus we ever got was +3 it was tough to reliably hit. Our long-arm fighters spent most of the game taking potshots and doing nothing. Pooch pointed out that in this game a sixgun costs more than most of the men carrying them (which doesn't feel wrong!) and so shooting being hard to hit, but fairly brutal when you did, is very much in keeping with the vibe.

Customisations

After the game, Pooch and I mucked around with the customisations to see if we could make The Man with No Name, Angel Eyes and Tuco (ie. Good, Bad and Ugly) and we definitely could. So I have that list sitting there waiting for our next game. Good is an amazing shot, Bad is all around savage and Ugly is tough as nails. It definitely fits!

Bloggers Tank and Scotty both mused on things they could build including the Cartwrights from Bonanza and we mucked around with creating a truly epic Clint Eastwood as well and a single gunslinger could definitely be made to work. Django (the original, the Takeshi Miike Japanese one and the Tarantino one) would all be great inspirations for crews.

All this also adds a flavour to the game that helps - I used a model carrying a sixgun and a bottle of hooch so he could hardly not be a drunkard!

Things I didn't like

Nothing really.  It's a neat game and we'll definitely be playing some more and exploring what we can make it do. Being able to roll out the Good, the Bad and the Ugly will be genuinely fun.

Overall? 

Really pleased. Dead by Lead looks like it has loads of depth, plenty of customisation options and a ruleset that's super simple. The included campaign system has the most savage post-game injury tables I've ever seen (death is a very very real possibility!) and the kind of fun income earning shenanigans that older gamers might remember from GWs first incarnation of Necromunda. If Cowboys are your thing, I'd definitely recommend it.

Next Time

Back to the brushes.  I'm trying to get back into painting my 15mm Renaissance Spanish.

Squeezed in some painting...

 It's a long weekend of chores and housework at the Casa de McZ this weekend so in between assembling furniture, tip runs and the other mundanities of modern life, I've managed a couple of things off the list. First off, I painted the Dark Troopers:

I know it doesn't look like it. :) There's not a lot to work with TBH and while I've put in a decent swathe of edge highlights and put colour in the two places it can reasonably go, they're mostly just black. But I'll take them out for a run with Moff Gideon some time soon!

They still need the water effects putting on but figured I'd get them done first and then they can be dispatched to the linen cupboard for drying.

A bunch of the locals are playing an ADLG comp this weekend that I couldn't get to but it did inspire me to dig this out of the to-do pile...

 

I got one Minoan chariot from Museum as a test and sweet jeebus it's a great model so this will be going on the 2024 to-do list...

Next Time

More? It's club day so I'll try and get in a game report for a change.  

Pooch's September update

Well.... September disappeared... and so did three weeks of October..... oops!

But at least I did manage to get some painting in!

1. Paint a platoon for Flames of War

The painting progress continues for my Late War US army, this time finishing up...

A Stuart Cavalry Patrol

And.....

LVT-4s to transport some Infantry!

Next up? I probably should finish up the infantry platoon that goes into those LVTs, but I think it'll be back to the desert, as I add some more things to my Early/Mid DAK army.

2. Add something to armies I have already painted

Not one but two big stompy robots in this category today!

Stompy Robot 1 is a Hulkbuster Robot for the Marvel Crisis Protocol game

Metallic Red is a bad colour to photograph....

Still a bad colour, even from the back!

And second is a Dire Wolf Scout titan for Adeptus Titanicus- affectionately known as a "derp chicken"!

So derpy. So cool..

3. Finish up a piece of terrain

The pieces of terrain for this month are to help me get back onto the Wild West bandwagon. The cattle were from 3d Breed, and were printed by the awesome Potbelly miniatures. 

Moo.

4. Play a game a month, that was different to the last month

The reason I painted up those specific Flames of War models was to play a game of Late War Flames of War! I used my wintery US tanks in a couple of really enjoyable games- too enjoyable to remember to take many photos!

So many Sherman hulls!

Not sure what October's game will be!

5. Paint a Hundred Years War French Army for ADLG

Paint one base for ADLG

This month's base is a little bit of a cop out- I'd actually gotten to the last week of September feeling very smug that I had painted everything I needed for September.

Turns out I hadn't, so I quickly worked up this base of Handgunners, who will be used as Elite Crossbow in my Hundred Years War army.

Not much more to say other than that they are done!

Paint one Knight for ADLG

This month's knight is my second General:

And I have so many more knights to go, it's going to be a very cavalry filled finish to the year I think!

Paint up an army of 15mm Celts

A small month this month for the Celts, with three medium sword bases done.

This is the 7th, 8th and 9th Medium Sword base....

Aiming to finish the Celt army off in October!

Pooch

Rinse and repeat

 Haven't felt much like painting this week so dug in a bit and finished up Morgwaeth's Blade Coven:

Or at least as finished as they're going to be for now. I'm pretty happy with how the hair came out given I decided not to buy a $9 pot of contrast paint to do it. I will have to go back and do a bit more work on the Melusa's tail as I tried the studio scheme but it didn't come out well and I didn't love it. So I threw another highlight on and will look at some snake markings and have another go. I've painted a Diamondback before and I liked that.

I did play a GREAT game of Flames of War yesterday but I'm not going to rabbit on about that. At least not here and not now! 

Next Time

I've been tidying my storage boxes and finding more unfinished projects so will be finishing some projects, that's for sure. Might even be more Underworlds...

Not Flames of War for a change...!

Painting time appears to be in short supply at the mo. Some of that has been a lot of 1:1 scale work around the Casa McZ and some of it was my finally giving in and downloading Baldurs Gate 3. Look, mistakes were made. I know that. 

 So I decided to devote some time to painting and with a bunch of new people playing Warhammer Underworlds at the club I thought it was time to have another punt at painting one of the three Underworlds warbands still sitting in the required to do pile.  So here's where I got up to with a solid day's effort on Morgwaeth's Blade Coven: 

 

 There's still a bunch of detail work I haven't done, the hair is a long way from done, I think I need to lighten the skin tone up some more, the bases still need doing and the tail of the Melusa needs the coloured scale pattern (and her arrow quiver is a mess) but otherwise they've come a long way in a day. I'll aim to polish these off over the next week, assuming Baldur's Gate doesn't do exactly what I thought it would and suck up hours of time! 

Next Time

Some games with the nerds. I'll see if I can get the Blade Coven done this week and give them a run! 

Roll 5s. Then it's an easy game for babies.

So due to an administrative error somewhere along the way, the event I was scheduled to attend has had to be postponed. Blogger Scotty offered to host the nerds for a couple of the games we were planning to play. 

In my first, I played Blogger Pel and his Hero T34/85 company in Covering Force.

I leaned heavily on the left hand objective but figured I'd leave my StuGs out wide and if Pel aggressively redeployed they, and the Ostwinds, might have made a cheeky grab for it. As it was, he shifted his infantry towards my shove but left some T34/85s and his ISU122s comfortably holding it!

The middle turns of the game were largely dominated by Pel's redeployment of his infantry and my infantry's steadfast refusal to move at all, especially not to remove the minefield I needed to remove to get the Jagdtigers able to push forward. I got Pel's T34s on my left flank but was struggling to figure out how this was going to work and what I could get onto the objective.

Suddenly, in turn six-ish, the whole game blew wide open. With a shot at taking the far objective in the offing in my StuGs raced forward into the T34/85s flanks:

The Jagdtigers chipped in the first two T34s and the StuGs promptly missed. GAH! Chris' ISU 122s hit back and destroyed a StuG but the realisation that I was going to be unlikely to remove them (and risking breaking if they got killed), I swung my efforts back to the left flank. 

I also sent the Jagdpanthers forward about the same time, inadvertantly preventing an easy ambush in my flanks to try and knock out the T34 CO (unsuccessfully, I might add) but it did let me finish off the SU76s that were also there. Pel finally popped his ambush (you can see it in the cornfield at the top of the picture below) and the CO who wouldn't fricking die knocked two of them out over a couple of turns. I passed one last stand but didn't get the second one I needed!

 In the end, it came down to my trying to work out how to break Pel in the last turn. I had to kill two T3/85s and one stand of infantry to at least make him take a bunch of tests. I got one T34, failed on the infantry alltogether, giving Pel the win in what was a very good and very close game. In the end, for an army that I expected to have very little go-forward, she did okay. If I hadn't spend several turns pinned behind a minefield, I might have been able to push the Jagdtigers up instead of the Jagdpanthers and had a better result. Lessons learned!

I had a second game of Counterattack (not a mission I wanted to play, TBH) against Blogger McBeth and his Soviet Forward Detachment in which I took precisely this photo before the first turn:

This was one of those games where things just landed, especially things that shouldn't. McBeth removed my StuGs with a cunning ambush in his first turn. I got some blitzes and moves off and the Jagdtigers and Jagdpanthers removed the ambushing platoon in response. 7 shots on 5s shouldn't yield that result. It is one of the things I have noticed with the AT 17 amd 18 shots on the Jagds - when you hit, it's just all over. It's weirdly quite satisfying. 

Anyway, McBeth's reserves arrived in turns one and two as well and rolled up to the centre of the table to stop me shoving my Panzersturm through his Strelkovy.  The centre got really congested and then the game got silly. I pushed my Jagdtigers a touch too far ahead and the remant T34s and Strelkovy snuck round their flanks. Things hit and I made SO MANY saves. And then withdrew my Jagds in good order. McBeths IS2s and my Jagdpanthers got in a scrap and it was another one of those, I roll 5s and everything goes bad. 4 shots on 5s shouldn't get 3 hits and destroy 2 IS2s. The conclusion, in the end was that on my turn 4, my 250 Recce arrived from reserve and the 20mms just went to town. Their first round of shooting removed two of McBeth's .50 cal quad halftracks holding the objective and their second and third rounds removed the BA64s contesting the objective, despite the BAs PTRD armament winning me the game. It was patently absurd.

Next Time

Some workbenchery I shouldn't wonder. I've got a lot of primed and partially started things on the desk at the mo...