Playing the ninja raid

Today I hosted the Ninja Raid game as a participation demo at Ducosim in Amersfoort. It was a bit of an experiment as I usually host multiplayer games and this was a 1-on-1 game. The convention, held three or four times a year, is a combination of mainly board- and card gamers, some wargamers and that elusive category in between, the participation game. It was the first time my Japanese manor featured on a con and also the most compact demo I ever hosted: I carried all the stuff from my car to the table in two boxes!

 Here the terrain is shown. While the entire game is basically confined to the manor, I thought it good to dress up the table with some more fluff.

The brave (but somewhat sleepy) inhabitants of the manor. The dice are thrown into the building to represent  where the inhabitants are and whether they are awake or not.

Background fluff: temple, gate and Buddha. Yes, here be cherry blossom trees....

The sneaking route for the Ninja up to the back door.

The front gate. As you can see the time to paint the dragons flanking the gate somehow eluded me.

Two cute girls played the first game and as usual in reality turned out to be bloodthirsty hack-and-slash players intent on slaughtering their way to victory...

Here Ninja and samurai battle in the garden. Note the Koi fish. I am very proud of the Koi fish....

Audience gives some constructive criticism while the ninja player ponders his plan of attack.

 Note the blinds that cover up the rooms. This way the ninja player has no idea where his target (or the guards) are and the samurai player knows where they are, but not whether they will be awake...

Ninja sneaking over the garden wall, taking aim with the blowpipe with the poisoned darts...

Here a poisoned dart target, pardon a samurai guardsman reclines on the bridge in the garden.

After the bit with the poisoned darts, ninja sneak up to the back door. Unfortunately several AWAKE samurai were waiting inside!

A smoke bomb took care of the first round of combat and prevented the samurai from using their superior numbers.

One ninja even confronted the Daimyo directly in his sleeping chambers! Alas, in the end the target  ran too fast to be caught...

For Ninja caught inside a building filled with awake guards and staff, times have become interesting indeed! 

Here my neighbours played the venerable game Battletech Classic, which is a silly tag, since, well, what other kind of Battletech is there, really?

Some impressions of the convention: lots of card- and boardgames, some wargames and a huge FoW game. Not my thing, but impressively huge.

I spent a very enjoyable day, hosted 4 or 5 games and chatted with a lot of people, known and unknown and even got a bag of Thirty Years War Cuirassiers for my birthday. Thank you Sander! They will grace some Witchfinder General Table in the future.

Building simple wargaming houses NB More pics added!

There are some lovely wargaming buildings around. One of my favorites are the Conflix houses. Pretty, compact and not unreasonably  priced they are very attractive. However, a village will still set you back a few hundred Euros and they are a bit hard to come by. So I decided to try and build something similar myself. 

The inspiration for the project was a building by Conflix, called the Merchant's House if I am not mistaken. Below a picture of the original. 

I decided on the cheapest of materials available to me. Foamboard (left to me in huge quantities by the marketing department of a past employer), coffee stirrers, packing netting and cornflakes packaging. 

The parts were drawn and cut. Sizes were somewhat estimated using the figures next to the building. Use really sharp knives and a metal ruler to cut foamboard and discard the knife as soon as the tearing begins. 

The parts were glued together with a hot glue gun. I drew the timber scheme on the house with a permanent marker and then glued the timbering in place with PVA glue. Timbers were made from coffee stirrers and cut with a pair of pliers for speed. Sawing and sanding would of course produce a better result, but I was aiming for simple and fast. 

The windows were made from pieces of netting, glued underneath the window sills. Rooftiles were cut from an old cornflakes pack and glued separately on the roof. Not very fast I hear you think, but it is the only way to produce  the battered look of the original. 

The chimney is simply cut from a piece of styrofoam. Be sure to coat it with PVA Glue before spray-coating it or it will melt completely. 

The entire house was then primed black and painted with acrylics. I avoided details that would give away the scale, like a door post sign or a rain barrel, so the house would work equally well in 20mm and 28mm scale. This was the result: 

EDIT: After steadily building most of my "Tim Burton village" as my son's girlfriend calls it, is finished. I took advantage of some nice weather to take some pictures. 

Dad's Army

Just a quickie: the 1st section of the Walmington on Sea Homeguard Platoon. 

Painted for Chain of Command. As opponents for my VERY serious Fallschirmjaeger I looked for something a bit more light-hearted and these venerable guys looked the perfect part!

They are the Home Guard figures by Foundry, should you wonder.