Drumbeat X

On Saturday we held our annual Drumbeat game day at the Lake City Community Center in Seattle. It was a good turnout and we had a good time, but poignant with Dick Larsen being in the hospital due to his recent stroke. Drumbeat is Dick's brainchild. He founded it ten years ago as a game event to get us through the grim Seattle winter and it's been going strong ever since.

Game 1: Quetzalcoatl Rampant

Kevin Smyth and I put on our game of Quetzalcoatl Rampant. We tweaked things just a bit after the last playtest and assumed that we were in good shape.

The Aztecs deploy

In our early playtests, the Spanish consistently wiped the floor with the Aztecs. We tweaked things a bit to make the Spanish less formidable and the Aztecs less horrible. I'm not sure if we went a tweak too far or what, but the last two games have been disasters for the Spanish. 

Aztecs defenders of the village

Part of this problem has been the inexplicable inability of the Spanish commanders to make their activation rolls. In the Drumbeat game, the Spanish never managed to get more than a handful of activations for their troops. The Aztecs did better than average.

Taking corn

Unlike the last play of this scenario, the Spanish/Tlaxcalans managed to capture corn. However, they didn't manage to get it off the board. The Aztec counterattack landed in the Spanish/Tlaxcalan right rear and just started tearing things up. The Spanish troops were on the opposite side and couldn't manage to get an activation anyway. 

The Aztec counterattack: kicking butt and breaking taking hearts

The "Your beating heart" rule proved to be too much for the players. We hadn't used it much in our earlier games because it was moot. The Spanish v. Aztecs melées left the Aztecs too beat up to pass a simple courage test, they didn't bother with trying to take captives. In our last games, the Tlaxcalans—whose regular warriors are no match for Aztec knights—bore the brunt of the fighting and easily lost heart, so to speak. I'll have to tweak things to make it less easy for the Aztecs to convert casualties to captives and lessen the effect. I'm a bit hesitant, though, to make too many tweaks due to what may just be anomalous events. 

Sitting out the battle

The next task is getting our figures ready for the two scenarios we're running at Enfilade! in May.

Game 2: The Pikeman's Lament

After fine dining at Seattle's own Chez Richard, we got ready for the second game of the day.

Doug Hamm was set to come down from Vancouver BC for the day to put on a game of The Pikeman's Lament with Bill Stewart, but he got snowed in instead. Bill had just rebased a whole pile of his 28mm ECW for the rules I had two dragoon units completed, so we managed to pull it off as understudies. There was no particular scenario, we just put terrain out and set up two opposing forces divided between six players. One side was in red, the other in blue—except for my turncoat dragoons, who were in red.

I had my two dragoon units, plus two units of Bill's cavalry taken as trotters.

Part of my forces deployed

Opposite me was Wes Rogers with a similar force, except that his cavalry were taken as gallopers.

Facing off across a wee brook

The object of the game was to take and hold the bridge that sat in the midst of a small village (whose beautiful building were scratch-built by Bill Stewart).

Commanded Shot taking position by the dung pile

The red forces took position early in the game and managed to get a unit of pikemen on the bridge. However, it was not to hold it long. Shot at by blue musketeers in the surrounding houses, it finally wavered (and kept wavering) after a whiff of grapeshot from Russ Bowder's regimental gun.

Enemy pikemen on the bridge, alas

Russ' gun fared poorly after that. He became the target of a lot of fire until the crew was all shot away or had been removed from failed morale tests while already wavering. We had no guns painted for the game, so we pressed into service a couple light guns I'd painted for my dormant 1672 project.

Commanding my forces, was my personal figure, surrounded by his four cats, painted to look like Grendel, Bogart, Rhiannon, and Maebh.

I ride with cats

On my flank, Wes and I sparred a bit. He had the upper hand for a short while, and then I managed to come back briefly. At one point Wes' officer challenged mine. I lost the duel and was severely wounded and left writhing on the field with my cats indifferent to my pain and wanting food. A crueler fate could befall no man.

Dragoons slugging it out

Eventually, Wes took me out. I managed to kill his officer in the course of wiping out his galloper unit. Both of us battered and officerless, Wes had the last man standing—he also managed to get one of those lucky activations where he rolled boxcars, then got reinforcements. He was able to replace his lost galloper unit and soon had command of the flank.

On the rest of the field, things slowly went for red. Russ was unable to hold the buildings he'd occupied, Tyler (on Russ' right) got most of his troops shot away from Gary Greiss' musketeers. In the end blue ceded the field to red, the day was theirs.

Postscript

Drumbeat X went very well. There were several other games being played, including a morning game Wes ran of Loose Files and American Scramble, a venerable set of American War of Independence rules by Andy Callan.  Kevin ran a Lion Rampant game in the afternoon with his Hundred Years War English against Darren Howard's French.

Drumbeat 2014

Last Saturday was our annual NHMGS Drumbeat mid-winter game day at the community center in Lake City, WA. Attendance was very good and we had several games running in two gaming periods. We even enticed Doug Hamm to come down from a place he calls "Canada." Doug ran a game using the figures and rules he's been working on and writing about on his blog.

Phil Bardsley, Bill Stewart, and I planned on running a Bolt Action game set in North Africa. I managed to borrow from John Kennedy the desert mat and some buildings that we use when we game at The Panzer Depot. We didn't have any of the sculpted pink board we use for hills under the mat. I solved that by getting up early on Saturday and using my hot knife to carve some hills out of a few slabs of pink board I had in my garage left over from building land bits for my Row Well and Live game. The fumes didn't kill me, but after a short while, I was seeing colors not normally found in the electromagnetic spectrum and experiencing something not quite the same as "reality." After that wore off, and the hill bits were done, I packed up and headed down to Lake City.

Along with several others, I showed up bright and early and went through the obligatory waiting period in the cold, cold weather until the guy with the key shows up. Fortunately I'd already had my coffee and breakfast courtesy of Starbucks—and I didn't need to pee—so the wait wasn't too bad. I spent some time chatting with Phil in his warm car and later with Bill in his warm car. Phil had to bail out before the key arrived, but he left his figures with us, so we had a lot to put on the table. After about 30 minutes, the key arrived and we got into the community center and started getting table, chairs, and out games set up.

I carefully planned dashed out an impromptu scenario that had a squad of French Foreign Legion, with a few 8th Army assets in support, holding a small village while Rommel and a small contingent of Italian allies tried to take it. More 8th Army was on hand to counterattack. We wound up with six players.

Italian troops and German tanks move up on the Axis left

We had a few new players, but they quickly caught on and play proceeded well. We played six turns in  less than three hours.

British troops and tanks move in to support the village

I ran the bulk of the British armor—to little effect. I spent most of the game trading shots with the Axis tanks opposite me. When I managed to actually hit, I flubbed my penetration rolls. Fortunately for me, the Axis were just as feeble. The Pz IVD, with its cute little howitzer, kept hitting my Grant, but had no chance to penetrate the +9 armor with its +2 PEN. However, I wound up getting several pins and had to spend a turn rallying at one point.

Mon Dieu, les Allemands sont à venir!

The FFL squad holding the outpost got shot up pretty early in the game. Mitch Berdinka ran his panzers and a few squads of Afrika Korps in close and started a big fusillade, which quickly reduced the troops until they failed a morale check and fled.

Holding the west wall

We got troops into the center of the village to hold it against the Germans working around the building held by the FFL. I also ran one of my tanks into the center in the hope of holding off any Axis tanks who had the same idea.

Lulubelle goes up in flames

German tanks from the Axis center moved against Bill Stewart's position on the British right. Bill's 2-pounder and M3 Lee "Lulubelle" had limited luck stopping them. One german tank was immobilized, but "Lulubelle" was hit and caught on fire forcing Sgt. Gunn, Waco, and Jimmy to bail out.

Bruce Meyer, commanding the Axis right, put more pressure on Bill's lone infantry squad holding the reverse slope of a sand dune. After a quick rush from the panzergrenadiers and a fusillade of submachine gun bullets, Bill's flank collapsed.

Reinforcements pour in

The British squad holding the west wall was quickly shot to bits by Mitch's Afrika Korps troopers. We got another squad to come in and shore it up before everything went downhill.

Kampfgruppe Berdinka

Mitch's troops shot up the British defenders and got into the center of the town. One of his tanks overran Bill's 2-pounder; another took out my Crusader tank with a side shot. My only success of the game came when I finally took out the Pz IV I'd been targeting with my Grant all game long.

Even though the Germans and Italians failed to take every building in the town by game's end, they had shot us out of all of them. They even re-killed Lt. Kevlar, who had recovered from earning his posthumous VC in a previous North Africa game. The only british forces in town were my burning Crusader and my small four-man command team. Apart from that we had my Grant, a Valentine, and a Honey facing off the almost untouched Axis armor.

After lunch with Bill at the Elliot Bay Brewery, now occupying the old site of the American Eagles hobby shop, I brought Phil's troops to him, went home, and then got fairly ill for the next three days. I'm not sure if it was Drumbeat, the wait in the cold, the burning pink board fumes, or what. I was experiencing the return of an intermittent cough/sore throat, but it turned into a full-blown cold on Saturday afternoon as I sat at home and shivered with chills. Better now after a sick day at home.