After Curly Billy shot down Crazy Sam McGee Part 1

We kicked off our What a Cowboy campaign yesterday with the Rescue scenario from the rulebook.

The story so far:

A wealthy rancher, Frederick Broadstone (originally from Germany and known there as Friedrich von Breitstein) has settled in a Rocky Mountain valley. He owns most of the nearby town of Broadstone, including the saloon and the nearby silvermine. Broadstone didn't appreciate that Curly Billy also started a competing saloon in the town and began an intimidation campaign against Billy. The local sherrif "Crazy" Sam McGee turned a blind eye. After another incident, Billy's son tried to confront Broadstone, but was killed by one of his henchmen.

Curly Billy vowed to avenge his son and gunned down both the killer of his son and Crazy Sam McGee.

On the run from the Law and Broadstone, Billy has formed a gang and tries to hurt Broadstone wherever he can. Broadstone has contracted several Pinkertons to take out Billy and his gang.

Campaign map

Part 1; Bad man's cabin.

Curly Billy has kidnapped Broadstone's bookkeeper and has hidden him high in the mountains in Bad man's cabin. Broadstone's men have tracked Billy's gang to the cabin and are intent on bringing back the bookkeeper.

Paddy deploys inside the house with the bookkeeper and Mad Jack outside at the back of the house.

The Law and Curly Billy and Hans deploy at opposite table edges.

Billy moves to the top of a nearby ridge from which he has an excellent view of the cabin area.

 

The Pinkerton leader, Davey Kroket, approaches the front of the house while Mad Jack moves to the corner of the cabin.

Soon the Pinkertons are closing in on the cabin, exchanging fire with Paddy and Mad Jack.

The Duke even manages to come within point blank range of Mad Jack, but both manage to dodge the gunfire.

Mad Jack pursues the Duke, but finds himself surrounded by Pinkertons.

Dodging the crossfire, Mad Jack has to withdraw to the cabin and is joined by Hans Huffheins who certainly took his time to walk from the table edge to the cabin!

The Pinkertons close in on Mad Jack.

Meanwhile at the front of the cabin, Davey Kroket has taken several bullets from both Paddy in the cabin and Curly Billy on the ridge.

He loses all his action dice and is put out of action. With some shock on the other Pinkertons, they fail their Ride or Die test and withdraw from the table.

Paddy escorts the bookkeeper to safety, gaining enough reputation to be promoted from Greenhorn to Shootist!

All characters recover from their wounds and will face each other again in part 2!

This being our first What a Cowboy game, we forgot a number of things (taking Ride or Die tests and using the Desperado cards for instance) and had to look up stuff in the rulebook, but it was a fun game.

Project Star Wars part 16: More ships!

You can never have enough spaceships (until you run out of storage space that is). So when I saw this thread on the Leadadventure forum, I bought the Zurg mothership.

The shape and size of the ship make it suitable for a lot of roles. It could be an Imperial ship (Moff Zurg's ship), a Zurgian Rebel Alliance ship, a Privateer ship or a ship from any faction outside of the Star Wars universe. I decided to keep the paint scheme simple so it could be used for all those purposes.

First I removed the top (it's easy to unscrew) and spraypainted it grey. The purple spines on the lower half were spraypainted black. The red tips are separate pieces which I kept in the original colour (the separate parts of the ship are pictured in the Leadadventure forum thread).

Then I drybrushed highlights on the entire ship, picked out some panels and painted them red and used a dark metal wash to fill in the panel lines. As a final step I added some black smudges and weathered the edges with dark grey paint.

Lando is from Imperial Assault (28mm).

The same Leadadventure thread has a reference to a converted Paw Patrol ship. I had come across this blog entry from Chicago Skirmish Wargames before and managed to get a cheap second hand one (figure is a 28mm Crooked Dice ghostbuster on a 25mm slottabase).

Although I admired what the Chicago Skirmish Wargamers had done to convert this ship and I did copy part of their paint scheme, I didn't trust my scratchbuilding skills enough to change the cockpit in the same way they had done.

But first I tried to remove as many paw symbols as possible. This was quite difficult because the plastic is very hard and parts of the interior are not easy to reach.

The removal of the paw patrol symbols left the floor uneven so these parts were covered with plastic material used for insect screens.

Ladders (made from bits of sprue) and other items from the bits box were added. I covered the back of the cockpit with a piece of plastic card, embellished with suitable bits.

Tie-wraps, dwarf shields, Renedra round and square bases, a WH40K hatch, mdf bits from some kit,  plastic card (especially to hide the large paw patrol symbol on the rear hatch) and several other bits were added to the outside of the ship. The cockpit got an elevated floor with two seats and some additional bits (sorry, forgot to take in progress pictures of these steps).

As with the Zurg ship I wanted to be able use this ship for any sci-fi faction in my miniature collection. So I went for a neutral grey paint scheme without any too specific markings and weathering similar to the Zurg ship. The figure in the pictures is a 28mm Imperial Assault Luke.

I cut out printed screen images I collected long ago from some long gone internet source and used these to cover the interior screens where the paw patrol symbols were scraped off.

And some more pictures:

I found painting the interior not easy since a lot of areas are difficult to reach, but I'm satisfied with the overall result. 

The ship will certainly feature in the next installment of our Escape from Aniron Star Wars campaign!

Dead man's corner

Since the last bits for our upcoming What a Cowboy campaign are still on my painting desk, and we're taking a break from the Winter Storm campaign, we enjoyed a one-off scenario by William Thorpe for Chain of Command: Shootout at Dead man's corner.

Patrol phase was a bit strange (everything was locked down quickly) because the scenario put the patrol markers quite close together in their starting positions. Nevertheless, they were favourable for my Fallschirmjäger because they could deploy in the buildings.

With two LMG's per squad on overwatch, the Fallschirmjäger covered most of the approaches to the house.

My opponent's Screaming Eagles approached the house from the front and the side through the orchard.

Upon reaching the edge of the orchard, the German LMG opened fire from the attic window, causing casualties. The US medic ran forward to the sound of the guns.

Return fire from the paratroopers managed to wound my junior leader after a few phases however, despite the heavy cover provided by the building.

A double phase allowed me to deploy the two remaining Fallschirmjäger squads on the other side of the table. My plan was to flank the Americans. Counting on the team covering the dirt road on overwatch to keep the Americans away long enough for my Fallschirmjäger to cross the open ground.

My opponent cleverly countered this plan by bringing forward his squad of Americans in the orchard, triggering the overwatch and keeping the Fallschirmjäger in the house engaged while subsequently deploying another squad to fire at the Fallschirmjäger crossing the field.

Also the US mortar started firing at the Fallschirmjäger. This was bad news for the Germans. Their junior leader was hit and knocked out. Caught in the open without a leader to rally them, the Germans were being cut to pieces.

The other Fallschirmjäger squad moved sideways so they could fire past their own troops at the Americans. With a full Chain of Command dice I decided to end the turn to get both knocked out junior leaders back in the game. The downside of this was that my opponent could now deply his Stuart tank.

Although the American squad stopped firing at the exposed German squad and retreated into cover, the Stuart started pounding the survivers with HE.

Fortunately the Fallschirmjäger squad broke and retreated behind the wall before it was destroyed completely.

German attempts to knock out the tank with panzerfausts and a panzershreck all failed. German morale was going down faster than the American morale. After silencing the German LMG, the paratroopers advanced to close down first one and then two of the German jump-off points.

While the surviving Fallschirmjäger team was kept busy at the front of the house, the paratroopers entered via the back and defeated the German occupants in close combat.

Game over for the Germans.

Dispite losing, I really liked the scenario. The terrain invites lots of manoeuvring.