Blood Red Skies

Now the game has been out a while and we've had chance to get more than a few games in, I wanted to get some thoughts down about the various faction's fleet lists for fellow gamers/non-history-specialist folk out there. I've been playing kriegsmarine and IJN against royal navy , so those three are the ones I'll be focussing on. These are intended purely as a gaming overview for those who aren't history buffs or those intent on recreating specific actions from ww2 with this ruleset. So, the Japanese, in ww2, they started their attack with the element of surprise and rolled through large swathes of poorly defended territory with far superior troops but rapidly overexpanded, got stretched too thin and then pushed back by the allies. This applies to the tabletop too, the IJN fleet box seems to be set late war when the quality of force was poor and all sorts of odd craft got merged in with the remaining bigger ships (hence additions like suicide boats and civilian ...

A brisk north-easterly tugged at the watchman's lapels as he watched the huge ship clear its berth and amble out into the harbour's waters, gliding gracefully into the inky blackness. It'd been a quiet month so far, a few sightings of aircraft, a few false-alarms with "submarine" sightings but nothing concrete. He looked up to the sky and saw the full moon, his gut knotting at the thought that today might be the day that the calm ended and the storm broke. He shoved his hands deeper in his pockets and took up his position. As a change from BRS, my friend and I bought into cruel seas and have been batting our way through the core missions, stepping them up the other week to include some of the bigger craft to get the more complex mechanics down. Tonight's game was a riff on the rulebook mission 6. I played Kriegsmarine, he played Royal Navy. Apparently this is Zerstorer Z-25 but the kit as built doesn't match the specified armaments!  The forces: ...

So after the birth of the little monster, I'm getting back on the gaming wagon slowly. Cruel seas is supposedly inbound (edit:shipping notice received!) but the preorder is still awaiting and my Infinity painting queue is slowly getting smaller. My friend Ian and I decided to crack on with some BRS and get some table-time for our currently unused transports and recon craft and fancied a crack at the newly released "transport hunt" mission penned by Andy chambers and Ken Natt (available in the Ready Room facebook page file section and official Warlord forums). It played out quite quickly due to awful dice so we ended up re-racking after the first attempt and swapping over intercept/escort roles. The 500pt forces were: Allies: x5 P51-D with R4/3/3/3/2 pilots (x2 PBY catalina recon craft) Axis: x6 BF109-G with R4/3/3/3/2/2 pilots (x3 ju52 transports) We used the beta card for this one to do a later war scenario. The mission is written quite loosely with no real speci...

So as we're nearing the end of the inaugural year of the game I thought I'd have a little look back as this time last year I was eagerly awaiting my pre-ordered christmas present! Unfortunately, we were off to a rocky start as the shipping date was pushed back till the spring, but it didn't appear to dent enthusiasm too much as all the initial wave sold out. To start with we had spitfires, 109's, yaks, p51s and a6m5 Zeros and a singular named ace for each faction. With the huge upswell of demand, Warlord partnered with Zvezda for the planes from their "art of tactic" game, bringing 1:200 scale Blenheim bombers for the brits, SB2 and Li2 bombers and transports for the soviets, ju52 and ju88 transports and bombers for the gerries and the c47 skytrain transport for the americans (minor mod to the li2 model required). We settled in and played for a few months before the next set of releases came out, this time in metal much the the shock of some, but they cam...

Evening all! Been a while since I last posted up new content thanks to the arrival of this little blighter, but things are settling and I'm getting the odd opportunity here and there to sit at the hobby desk and crank out a few bits and bobs. At the beginning of november, Warlord games released the first of the new wave of "hard" plastics, the Hurricanes and the Mosquitos for the Allies and I was super keen to see what the new material was like. thankfully I'd won a box of mosquitos in the BRS tourny at the Warlord open day so I only had to splurge on the Hurricanes and I'd seen both already as "test shots" (pre-production testers) so was aware of the pre-production issues with a few panel lines and such here and there. As I'm primarily a gamer, none of these offended me greatly but I know it is a major issue for many other folk out there. Unfortunately, not all the pre-production issues got ironed out with the hurricanes and there is a panel...

Open day tournament and Bombing rules test Today started with a bit of a drama with getting to warlord on time (damn bendy credit cards and their flimsy chips!) but we soon got underway with a small tournament which settled me down a touch. My first round was against a lovely chap called james who had horrible dice right throughout! The board was lovely, looked like a deepcut mat and some home made cliffs. I'd taken my British mustang mkiv's, 5 of them. ratings 4,3,3,3,3 for pilots which worked nicely to 495 points. James had taken mkii spitfires, pilot skills 5,5,2,2,2,2 and immediately I was wary of the outmaneuvres to come from the enemy aces, but looking forward to being able to bully the plentiful rookies for boom chits. I split my wings 3/2 with the R4 pilot taking the right flank and the 3 3's taking the left. Radar support, superior armament and low altitude were the cards I'd chosen. The traits I used were x3 deep pockets and x2 great dive. Pass 1 bega...

Warlord Open day BRS talk with Andy Chambers 22/9/18 The warlord open day was great, Ken Natt (of "Ready Room" fame) was organising the tournament today and we managed to get two rounds in between the BRS talk and the "breaking the box" heavy bomber rules-test. We dashed over to catch the talk and stumbled in after it had started, Andy Chambers and some other bloke from warlord I didn't recognise and wasn't introduced to was there (pleasant chap!). First up was a discussion on a "ground attack" supplement which we would end up testing an iteration of later that afternoon which will be going for public beta via the ready room soon-ish. The idea is that this will come out next year as a PDF. There was a lot of talk about how warlord had originally pitched the game as a fighter game and wanted to keep it "core" to the experience and were resisting temptation to "mission creep" and build into a much more bomber-focussed game. T...