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.

Battles & Beer!

This  weekend we enjoyed our bi-monthly Battles&Beer Saturday at the Karwansaray premises.

The day definitely an American flavour since we played Muskets & Tomahawks and Blackpowder AWI. Jasper showed his concept for big games with few figures by using single stands for entire battallions. It worked very well and gave us a lot of units on a relatively huge table.

It was gorgeous weather, so a perfect day to shut ourselves indoors with out tin soldiers!

The American Rebels scored a smashing victory on the unlucky British.

We concluded the day with bock beer and delicious food.

Witchfinder General next time!

The making of The Raid: how a scenario is born.. Part 3: The Building

On with the show. Now the scenario and rules have taken shape, further building can continue! 

Roofs will be detachable. Doors and gates must be able to open and close. The buildings must allow for a lot of cover, given the lethality of missiles in the Ronin rules. And where would a ninja sneak if there is nothing to hide behind? 

As usual I made some sketches for the design. No blueprints, just an impression to guide me during the building process.

The building should look distinctly Japanese. This calls for a maximum of clichés and the watching of some samurai movies while making a list: shoji doors, tatami floor coverings, cherry blossom trees in a Zen garden, a little arched bridge, curved roof ornaments and Buddha statues in some of the rooms. A Chinese food-and-novelty shop proved a treasure trove!

The building was undertaken in my proven fashion. Sturdy foamboard outer walls with small windows detailed with balsa and basewood timber would hold the roof made of cardboard. 

I decided on rooftiles instead of thatch: the owner of the manor is supposed to be rich and powerful enough to warrant assassination after all! There are lots of expensive and laborious ways to make rooftiles but being a stingy and lazy peasant I chose corrugated cardboard, cut in strips and glued in layers overlapping each other. Once painted this is remarkably effective. The top of the outer wall would be likewise tiled.

Interior walls will have to be double-walled to enable the sliding shoji doors to move into the walls. All interior doors and doors opening into the courtyard and garden have to follow this pattern. As shoji doors are relatively easy to break through, opening them would signify a broken or opened door, needed to either look or walk into a room. The doors are made from plasticard, as they would have to be moved around a lot and need to be resistant to friction and sliding. 

I make extensive use of printed paper to decorate the rooms and walls. Wall panneling, floor planks and stuff like paintings and screens are all googled, printed and glued. Be aware that the usual printer paper is too thin to take glue well (see the regrettable result on the floor in the picture below) so take thick paper to print on when you have to glue large surfaces like floors.

Rooms get foamboard lids resting on the interior walls to prevent the attacker (and up to a point the defender) from finding out what is in them too soon.

Wooden gates and exterior doors, reinforced to enhance the fortified nature of the manor, are made of glued basewood (praise the Heavens for coffee stirrers!) and move on dollhouse hinges.The same technique is applied to the double front gate and the rear garden door.

The garden presented me with a challenge in that it would need a pond. So different ground levels were built using thick cardboard and construction paste. The garden would then lay higher than the courtyard, but as these two spaces are separated by one wing of the manor this is not disturbing. Grass would be flocked around the pond, cherry trees fit into the garden (and can be replaced with bare winter trees) and fine gravel is glued onto the paths in (hopefully very Zen-like) patterns. The roof gets some simple ornaments. The building is then painted. I try to use as much cheap acryls as possible. 

The lanterns are beads from a huge box with all kind of beads I bought years ago.

All that remains is the interior detailing. I always add a lot of prints for interior and exterior decoration. All are found on the Internet. Used are several different wood patterns, Japanese art and such. Japanese rooms were sparsely furnished in any case and as this is essentially a wargaming table enough room should be available for moving figures around. So tatami floor coverings and some ornaments (Buddhas, a wire Bonsai on a plasticard table or a vase made of a large bead) made up the furniture.  Added to these was a scratchbuilt rack of bows and arrows and some wooden boxes, some of which could contain an arquebus, powder and shot.

I also made modern furniture so I can use the manor for modern games as well. Below is the Oyabun's office. Mind the aquarium! All items are largely made from plasticard (old gift cards and credit cards) and plastic sprue or tubing. 

The local Chinese store also produced a lot of useful stuff. The screens are again prints. 

A rack of bows from the bit box and some balsa wood. 

The garden. Mind the loose cherry trees. They can be replaced by bare winter trees for winter games. 

And the courtyard. Park your horse or BMW here (depending on the game played). 

 I need to add a sword rack because it looks so darn Japanese and for any players that like a less bloody scenario in which the ninja steal something instead of kill someone. Whether they do so with or without violence, I am not able to predict. But I have my suspicions….

Let the Raid begin!

PS

Thanks to Peter's generous donation I was able to add this Ancestral Sword Rack and Offspringly Firearms Locker!