Faustus Furius: MMLIII

A couple months back I picked up a copy of Faustus Furius and instantly fell in love with it. It looked like a RIOT! The game  is written by Nic Wright and uses some of the same mechanics as Galleys and Galleons (which uses some of the same mechanics as other Ganesha Games Song of… game systems). It looked like it would be a really fun game to do as a demonstration game at a convention – fast, fun, simple, opportunity to have cool looking toys and terrain. It seriously just about derailed the whole Vimy thing as I started taking stock of all the chariots I have (and I DO have quite a few chariots – a Pictish chariot, an early British one with Boudica, an Amazon chariot, at least 3 Egyptians ones… none of them assembled or painted).

Then Viscount Eric over at Gaming with the Gnomies went and posted a link to the Jet Bike Construction Kit Kickstarter and I realized: This would work even better for JET BIKES!!! I kickstarted the thing to the tune of 20 BIKES (they’re not ALL for me!) and decided I would run an event at the next ToonCon (September 2017 – watch for it!). I think I will call it “Faustus Furius 3000” (or should that be Faustus Furius MMM…?).

Of course while I’m waiting on the Jet Bikes to arrive (and to finish up the whole Vimy thing) I was trying to think of  a way I could actually try it out… without having to paint anything. So I went digging and found a few not-quite-jet bikes that were already painted that I could re-base onto the size of bases I’ll be using for the jet bikes so have a go at the rules. Not being Jet Bikes, I decided it needn’t be so far in the future, hence “Faustus Furius: MMLIII”.

THE GAME

(Remember: click on the pictures for a bigger version)

As the War Room table is currently occupied by terrain and toys for the Vimy project, we set up a small circuit on the dining room table (where the lighting is awful – I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the photos…)

On the left we have The Thundergutt brothers (a pair of ancient Citadel/GW Squats - that paintjob is over 25 years old);  Darwin on the left, and his younger brother Freddy on the trike next to him. On the right are the Latrodectus sisters; Coral is next to Freddy, and Mira is on the extreme right (They’re a bit newer and from West Wind Productions).

Finnegan played the Thundergutt brothers and I played the Latrodectus sisters.

Things looked like they were getting off to a great start when I drew Mira’s card, but then I had to roll dice. One success, two failures – so Freddy got a reaction and shot out ahead of Mira. Mira got her compulsory move, but then had to use her single action to turn a bit so she didn’t go crashing into the building straight ahead of her on her next move.

Darwin’s card came up next and I don’t remember how many actions he had, but it was at least one and her zoomed out into the lead!

Freddy’s card came up next – he rolled three successes and used that little lead he got from the reaction to Mira’s failures to shoot way out using one action to do a “propero” (I’m going to have to come up with some new names for these maneuvers…) in addition to his compulsory move. Then, having two action left and not having anything better to do with them (not needing to turn or anything, and not having a competitor close enough to attack) he decided to Incite the Mob!

Finally Coral got to go and she did a bit better than her sister, but had to use actions to veer out and around Freddy to avoid a collision.

There was a lot of sound effects involved in this game – high pitched whining of engines and screeching brakes… Oh, yeah, it got loud.

The Thundergut Brothers both rocketed ahead the next turn while Mira and Coral had to waste actions maneuvering to get back on track.

Two turns in and the Thundergutt brothers had a commanding lead.

Coral pinned it and briefly moved up with the Thundergutt brothers.

It got a bit tight in that first corner! I was a little worried someone might bump!

But everyone seemed to hold it together and get through that congested corner okay!

Swinging into that second half of that first lap, Mira is desperately trying to keep up with Freddy Thundergutt, Darwin is swinging wide around that corner and Mira is floundering way behind.

I should have taken notes… I can’t remember exactly what happened here… I think Mira rolled two failures and Freddy got a reaction move ahead, then Freddy rolled a bunch of successes on his activation dice and rocketed ahead of everyone!?

VrrrrroooooooOOOOOWWWWwwwwwrrrrrrr!

Cant’ believe how far that guy got ahead of us… It’s like we forgot to do our turns or something… but that wasn’t it, he was just crazy lucky with the dice rolls and positioning and the Latrodectus sisters not being able to roll more than one success per turn!?

And Freddy finishes his first lap while the rest are lagging nearly half a lap behind. I have to say, Darwin did a pretty good job of blocking for his brother. The LAtrodectus sisters had to do a lot of brake maneuvers to slow themselves down or swing out wide to avoid collisions.

Freddy roaring around the next bend nearly half a lap ahead of everyone else.

Freddy gives a wave as he roars past some of his more exuberant fans

Damn. Look at that guy go… must have been that extra wheel he had…

Darwin swings a little too wide and Coral nips past!

Darwin manages to incite a few more of the Thundergutt fans to pour into the streets, blocking Mira’s way!

Freedy roars around the far end of the circuit. He’s gone… just gone…

Darwin roars up between the Hooligan Mob and Coral and then uses a spare action to ATTACK (gave her a kick as he roared past.

Darwin’s attack was successful and Coral rolled on the Out of Control table which made her veer off the right, nearly taking her off the table… (I’m going to need more buildings to make the circuit completely closed. We said the table had a hard edge and Coral had collided with it.

I rolled a “skid” which allowed her to make an immediate 90° turn and come to an hat! Could have been worse. Mira is having to maneuver around the crowd of hooligans.

Coral pinned it once again and shot back into the race, passing Darwin. Mira just past the finish line to start her second lap as Freddy was roaring up to finish!

The scene from the other end of the circuit.

Not about to give up Coral and Darwin play a bit of a game of cat and mouse.

Darwin was ruthless and not about to give these girls a chanced at catching up to his brother, so when Coral nipped ahead at the turn, Darwin attacked AGAIN!

His blow sent Coral careening off into the corner of the circuit, giving her no hope of getting around that corner and catching up to Freddy.

Mira for once rolled more than one success and was going to get that Darwin back from messing with her sister. She used her compulsory move to catch up to Darwin and then used her first action to attack! Unfortunately DARWIN BEAT HER! So SHE had to roll on the out of control table. Luckily(?) the result was “stunned driver” which would have affected her dice on the following turn. She then used her second action to propel herself right into Darwin’s Bike! Rolling for Darwin first on the collision table he CRASHED! Mira rolled next and got another SKID result which just brought her to an immediate halt after turning 90°. Not that it mattered at this point… 

Freddy zoomed past the finish line to the roaring adulation of his fans! Huzzah!

Great Game! Can’t wait to play it again! Can’t wait to be done the Vimy  project and for those jet bikes to arrive!

I will have to make a few more buildings/walls to have a hard edge all the way around the circuit. The table is, I think 5’x3’ and it was a little tight even with just 4 bikes. I think for bigger games – especially for the demonstration game at ToonCon in the fall I’ll need a bigger circuit (MORE buildings!).

I’ve already been dreaming about possibilities with this game… campaign rules and advances… a simple method of tracking damage to bike/rider from crashes… It would be fun to do a weekend campaign stage race. Or possibly combine this with a Mutants and Death Ray Guns campaign weekend (MDRG campaign Friday and Saturday, mega FF3K race on the Sunday…?).

I’d also still like to play this with chariots (when I get to building my chariots). Which brings me to another game weekend idea: a Song of Shadows and Dust campaign on the Friday/Saturday and street chariot racing on the Sunday!). I will do one of these for the Winter Wargaming Weekend in 2018! 

Coming soon on Tim’s Miniature Wargaming Blog:

Great War Germans! (I hope!) 

Countdown to Vimy – 9 weeks to go!

Seems I’m posting these things on Mondays…

The Plan for last week was to:

#1 Cast, base, prime and goop remaining Germans.

CHECK!

Monday I cast just over 100 Great War Germans to make up the rest of the Germans I’ll need for the project – plus a few extra, in case I hadn’t counted right or I noticed any terribly miscast figures after the fact.

I thought I’d taken pictures of the workbench during the priming/gooping process… but apparently I didn’t. Anyway, I DID get them all primed and enough of the ones I actually need to do gooped.

#2 Cast, base, prime and goop British 5th Brigade

CHECK! Well... sort of...

I made a couple of realizations this week regarding the 5th. First, I don’t need the ENTIRE 5th Brigade, probably only two battalions. Second, I already HAVE enough of my own British/Canadian figures cast to make 3 Battalions. Unfortunately I realized AFTER I’d don’t the casting of the Germans that those three battalions worth of figures lack Lewis Gunners and Officers!? So I will need to do some casting agains at some point in the next week or so. I didn’t get these based, but I’ll have one more batch of basing to do when the rest of the 6th Brigade arrives anyway, so…

#3 Base, prime and goop remaining 6th Canadian Brigade (miniatures should be arriving on Tuesday)

CHECK! Well... sort of...

They didn’t arrive on Tuesday – some mix up with import papers, sender not assigning broker  or UPS being confused about something... Held up in Winnipeg.

Or Wednesday… Still in Winnipeg.

Finally arrived Thursday morning. (These are from Irregular Miniatures)

Unfortunately it was missing a bag of 16 Advancing British, so I am unable to complete the four units of the 6^th Brigade right now as I have to wait for replacements to arrive…

I also ordered a bunch of Machine guns and mortars and artillery from Irregular Miniatures because… well.. they are cheap – like less than half the cost of the any other mortar or MG teams from any other manufacturer – and I’ve gone WAY over budget for games and toys this past year. You get what you pay for though – the German and British MG teams are basically identical – they just have different helmets (and some minor modifications to the guns, I noticed when I actually assembled them).

The Mortar teams were the same – these they didn’t even cast separate crew with different helmets – they just have a generic crew with separate heads! That doesn’t matter so much – they’re in shirtsleeves and puttees and minimal equipment – the crew will probably look alright when they’re done – what was really disappointing (which any of you that know anything about Great War Equipment will have no doubt already noticed…) was these mortars they have come equipped with. The German trench mortars of the Great War ( the Minenwerfer did not look anything like Stokes mortar or any of the tripod mortars used by most nations by the Second World War…. I know, both sides made use of captured equipment, but I don’t think it was done on a large enough scale that it would be reasonable to produce this as the only option for the Germans… I’m not sure if I’m even going to use these. I do have four Mortar teams… I’m not really sure how many I was thinking I needed? One per regiment, is that what I was going for?! They’re not going to be a priority - I have four other much nicer ones, three of which are complete.

Even crazier is the Artillery crews – I ordered a British 18 poinder, a French 75 and two German Krupp 7.7 field guns. The guns are okay-ish, if on the small side. But the “crews” are two sets of machine-gun crews (two kneeling with hand out to fire gun and two prone looking like they want to feed belts of bullets into a machine-gun) and an infantry officer with his pistol out!? I would have much rather had more of the generic MORTAR crews – thwy would have worked much better!? Ah well… I’m probably not going to get to the guns for this project…

And then there’s the Turkish Cavalry I ordered… oh, don’t get me started about them.

I did get them based and primed – but ran out of goop before getting to them the evening I was doing all the base gooping… Though I did manage to get all the Boxers gooped (which I also ordered from Irregular) I think the justification was that I knew I’d have to do some more basing priming and gooping to finish this brigade of Canadians, so I could do these ones at that time – the Boxers ended upbeign higher priority as now that they are gooped I can squirrel them away in their storage box and not have them haunting the painting table… tempting me…

(pay no attention to the jet bikes in the back ground I TOTALLY wasn’t working on those… okay maybe I was… just a bit… I ordered them from North Star Figures as they were blowing out some Warzone stuff and these were 50% off and I’m planning on doing a jet bike racing game for ToonCon  and… well.. it’s a long story… never mind…)

I did get the Machine-gun teams assembled and based yesterday. Hopefully I’ll get to the Mortar teams today.

#4 Finalize Terrain Plans

I did a bit of work here – thinking about things and trying to redraw old sketch plans, but I can’t say they are “finalized” just yet…

#5 Reorganize Germans – repaint collars on old 261 Reserve Infantry Regiment to match collars on 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment reorganize those two regiments to form 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 1, and Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 3.

I did start reorganizing them. This is the first part of that.

On the left we have three regiments of Bavarians – they are not all part of the same Division. In the front is the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment (part of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Division), which held the north end of the Ridge and “The Pimple” just to the north. The other two Bavarian regiments (Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiments No. 1 and No. 3) were part of the 1st Bavarian Reserve Infantry Division which held the area at the south of the ridge.

In the center are Reserve Infantry Regiments No. 261, No. 262, and No. 263, which were all part of the 79th Reserve infantry Division which held the center of the ridge.

On the right are a bunch of extra regiments I cast, primed and (mostly) gooped to field as a few of the reinforcement battalions that appeared on the day – I actually only need four of them.

In front are a few casualty/morale failure markers, in the back are an assortment of achine-gun and mortar teams, field guns and higher command figures all in varying states of completion.

I do have a few more Germans for the Great War – early war cavalry and a Jäger battalion

Distractions!

There were a few…

One thing I’ve been meaning to do for a LONG time once I got the table cleared off was to make a star field battle board for various spaceship battle games. This didn’t take a LOT of time 15 minutes per coat of black (x2) and about 20 minutes to do all the stars. Then board itself was one of the DBA Game Boards I made five years ago. I think I made four of them for use during campaigns, but in all the HOTT and DBA campaigns I ran I don’t think we EVER used all the boards in one campaign turn, so one is beign repurposed for battles among the stars!

Did I overdo it on the stars…? I’m not sure.

My local game store (Dragon’s Den Games) is having a 50% off sale on Reaper Miniatures metal miniatures. So I went and picked up a few weird things – mostly anthropomorphic animals and plants to use as mutant plants and animals in Mutants and Death Ray Guns  (which I have become a bit obsessed with lately…) plus a pack of familiars and halflings and such.

I even started basing and assembling/converting some of them last night (as a “treat” for getting all the German infantry based and primed and machine-guns based…) - there is also a pair of old RAFM REptiliads and an old Citadel Firmir I assembled along with them. 

This Week:

#1 Paint ~45 Great War Germans to add to those painted last week and reorganize into 10 figure battalions to form the 3 regiments of the 79th Infantry Division.

#2 Repaint collars on old 261 Reserve Infantry Regiment to match collars on 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment reorganize those two regiments to form 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 1, and Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 3.

#3 Work on (and maybe try to Finalize!?) Terrain Plans

#4 Begin refurbishing rest of 4th Division’s Terrain…?

Rest of February

Finish Germans – 4 more (10-man) battalions of units in reserve plus machine Guns and mortars

Build Terrain for 3rd Division.

March

Finish British and Canadians 2 battalions

Build Terrain for 1st and 2^nd Divison

April (one last week!) 

Make more wire and barrage markers

Coming soon on Tim’s Miniature Wargaming Blog:

Hopefully some painted Great War Germans!!

January Boardgame Round Up

Back at the beginning of January when I posted my Game Plan 2017 I mentioned I had come up with a list of 50 games I wanted to make sure I was going to play SOMETIME this year. The kids have followed suit and made up lists of their own – though their lists are shorter – Finnegan had 25 on his list and, I think, The Girl has 37… which is okay, they can add to it later – or just play some of those game MULTIPLE times – I suspect it will be the latter – in fact I HOPE it is the latter! Luckily some of the games I want to play most are games that are on all three lists – which means we’ll get to play those at least 3 times this year. Amanda even said she’d pick one game a month – thought couldn’t be bothered to make a list in advance.

We didn’t “officially” get started on the lists until the second week of January. The first week was still part of our winter holidaze 12 Days of Gaming.

As the end of the second week I did a brief update - I had thought I’d do a little weekly update on the games we’d played each week.. but since I’m already doing a weekly Vimy I thought I’d forego a second weekly update (which I’d probably end up wanting to do on Sunday as well) – at least for now. Maybe I’ll do this at the end of the month for the next few months… or have fortnightly updates… just because I like the word fortnightly and I don’t get to use it nearly often enough!

So here is what we got up to since that last update…

The evening of Sunday, 15 january, we played Amanda’s pick for the month: Olympus

It had been a while since we played this (over a year!) I’m not sure what sparked Amanda’s memory but it was fun to dig it out and play it again.

I recalled the getting the Temple of Athena early in the game was a huge benefit and managed to grab it – not only does it give you extra levels of other stuff when your priest worships at the temple of Athena, at higher levels it causes your opponents to LOSE levels in something of their choice – which is nasty. It is one of the few things that mess with your opponents in the game – that and building up your army and raiding them or bringing down plagues by worshipping at the Temple of Apollo.

When we last played the kids were a bit younger and didn’t take offensive interactive play very well and everyone pretty much left every one alone and concentrated on building up their stuff. I didn’t do that so much this game. I raised my army up and attacked their cities a few times. I worshipped at the temple of Apollo when I had the last priest and no one else could join in and save themselves from the plague I brought down. But I was only able to do each ONCE. After I did it once, everyone else followed suit and built up their army or would worship at Apollo (taking the victory points instead of the plague) early in the round to prevent me from using such things against them.

On Monday we played Five Tribes. This wasn’t anyone’s “pick” for the week… we just decided on Monday afternoon that we should play it, and we did.

Wednesday we played Race for the Galaxy. This was one of Finnegan’s picks for the month. I didn’t even bother putting games like RFTG or other games that we play in less than an hour (like 7 Wonders or Dominion) on my list as I knew that we’d get in games of them anyway – whenever we had an hour to spare… but Finnegan had it on his list so  we picked this for our Wednesday game.

The last few games of RFTG were pretty… I don’t know… unsatisfying…? I couldn’t get a theme going or get anything working together and felt like I didn’t even get started before it was over. This game went a bit better, I got some cards that worked together and had a bit of a theme going. I can’t read those six-cost developments, but I’m sure I had 50-60 points. I’m not sure I even won with that, because the kids also had great games it was all very close and entirely different strategies were taken – The Girl always like setting up production and consumption worlds and just producing and consuming for 2x victory points and usually does pretty good with that – racking up VPs with just a few worlds while were all scrambling to fill out our tableaus before she eats all the VPs.

Friday we had another crack at The Big Book of Madness. This is a co-operative, deck-building game where all players are students at a school of magic where one of the students went looking through the restricted section of the library and accidentally unleashed a bunch of horrors into the school and the players are busy trying to banish them all before they take over and everyone goes mad. WE tried to play this as a five player game over the holidaze and lost – big time! It was SUPER hard and was almost unimaginable how the game could ever be defeated.

Well… playing with fewer players is one key to the game. You face 6 monsters in the game and have rounds to deal with them – so 30 rounds. In a five player game that means everyone gets on round of play per monster and a total of 6 rounds of play in the entire game (if it lasts that long) which is precious little time to advance your character – build up your deck and get better spells.

We STILL didn’t beat the game this time around, but we got a lot further, and got a better sense of the strategy of how to play. I think this would probably play even better with just two players… which isn’t as awesome as we usually like to all play games together (which means minimum 3-4 players, depending on whether Amanada is available to play with us). Two player games hardly ever get played around here…

Saturday I spent the day at FreezerBurn VII (an annual invitationa game day hosted by my firend John) and played Small World, Roll for the Galaxy, Age of Industry, Viticulture, and Power Grid Deluxe. As Power Grid Deluxe was on my list, I counted it as one of my picks for the week.

During the last week of January, on the Wednesday, we played Olympus again – it was one of Finnegan’s picks and he wanted to play it again while it was all still fresh in his head. They let me get the Temple of Athena again – though The Girl did try to scoop it, I was quicker… I think she went for the 2 VP from Apollo EVERY TURN through the whole game – which put her in a pretty commanding lead and had me wondering if that was maybe a pretty good strategy to do that through the game… until we did the final points tally and Finnegan and I raced WAY ahead of her.

This past Saturday Brent came by and played Power Grid Deluxe again with me and Finnegan – this tiem we tried the Europe board (which I hadn’t played on before) . With three players there were only three areas available – we had ended up picking the France/Spain, Germany, and Russia/Poland areas which left a bit of a bottleneck which caused to trouble early in the game. It ended up being the closest game of Power Grid I’ve played – in the final turn we ALL powered 17 cities and it came down to counting coins to see who won (I think I won by a few “Elektros”!)

Monday and Tuesday we had a bit of catching up to do as we’d missed a few of The Girls picks for the month...

Monday, 30 January, we played Bottlecap Vikings. The Girl won this game at a local event at Dragon’s Den Games for International Tabletop Day last year (which I thought I had done a post about… but can’t seem to find it..? Maybe I just posted pictures on facebook…) – and she has been HOUNDING us to play it ever since… I have to admit I’ve been reluctant to try it out – mostly due to the name. “Bottlecap Vikings”? Seriously? WTF is a Bottlecap Viking!? That and that fact that it’s supposed to take 15 minutes to play didn’t strike me as a game that would be very interesting.

I was wrong.

For a small game there’s quite a bit going on – lots of decisions to be made strategies that could be taken and lots of replayability in that the board is modular and only half the board elements are used in any game (as they are double sided and you randomly select one or the other). It did take us a bit more than the 15 minutes the game claims it takes to play, but with a few more plays, we could get it close to that…

I guess I should have been so prejudiced (and then surprised!) – Love Letter is a very quick-playing game that is a lot of fun.

Finally… at the very last moment we got in The Girl’s last pick for January: Submarine. This is another game we haven’t played for over a year and a half.

The kids weren’t pleased with me (as may be evident in the picture). Rereading the rules I quickly ascertained that this game really isn’t about picking up the treasures as it is about card management and always trying to make sure when someone else picks up a treasure they have to give you a card as well and positioning yourself to give up a minimum number of cards when picking up treasure yourself – you start the game with a finite number of cards. In a three player game everyone starts with a deck of 15 – from which they draw a hand of three. Every time you pick up a treasure you have to play a card of the matching colour. If there are submarines of another player in the same space of above you in the same column, you have to give a card off the top of your deck to the other players for each of their submarines so positioned – which they then place on the top of their decks.

Halfway through the game the kids were down to only a few cards and I had a HUGE pile… yeah… so… this may sit on the shelf for another year and a half before we play it again (or however long it takes them to forget how badly I crushed them…). I had hoped they’d get wise to my shenanigans earlier on and try to block ME from picking up stuff without having to pay for it, but by the time they sort of figured it out they’d pretty much given up…

Next Month...

Earlier this week we sat down and tried to plan out what games we’re going to play for the next month – trying to fit in all the games we want to play around all the stuff I need to do for the Vimy Project, and all the kids activities and… y’know… actual schooly-stuff… Luckily there is a stat holiday in February followed by a week-long school break – one might think the school break wouldn’t matter to us (being homeshoolificators) but when there is a school break, it usually means all the kids other activities (dance, violin, karate, swimming, theatre school, etc) are all cancelled which frees up a LOT of time. (I’M hoping to get a lot of terrain building done over the school break!).

The Girl picked Space Junk, Linkage, Agricola, and Smash Up. Finnegan wants to play Small World, A Study in Emerald (Second Edition), Arkham Horror, and Firefly. My games for the month will be A Game of Thrones, Railways of Mexico, Pax Porfiniana, and Illuminati (which I haven’t played in YEARS – probably even a decade!). Amanda decided her game for the month would be Nations.

So today we are playing Smash Up and A Study in Emerald (Second Edition) on Saturday. Next week is probably Railways of Mexico on Wednesday and Firefly on Saturday. The following week is Small World on Wednesday and A Game of Thrones on Saturday, Agricola, and Nations on Monday (that’s the long weekend). I think we were going to play Space Junk one of those evenings. Sometime during the break the following week we’re going to play Arkham Horror, and finally – on my birthday (Saturday, 25 February 2017) we’re going to play Pax Porfiniana in the afternoon and Illuminati in the evening!

Well… that’s the PLAN… but our plans tend to be like the Pirates Code (“they’re more like…’guidelines’”)

We didn't get to playing any skirmish miniature games last month, but I'm hoping we might get to that on Sunday evenings this month... or maybe every other Sunday evening...?