Social Distancing Saturday

Or... e-Ogre and the paintbrushing

For a Saturday in which I had no real gaming activity planned, things worked out for me. I finished up 12 Wargames Atlantic 28mm scale skeletons. WA is a fairly new plastic model company. Thei make multi-piece kits and the quality is excellent. I wanted to sample their wares and figured some vanilla skeletons would always be welcome.

One of the skeletons may have been attached upside-down. Silly necromancer! The weapons and shields are very much "classical antiquity." I suppose the bucklers should have gone to the swordsmen, but I put the spears together first and just really like the small shields.

My wife and I watched 1917 in the afternoon. It's really good. Watch it if you haven't.

In the evening, David S texted me and Mike about playing a game on Vassal - an online boardgame tool that allows gamers separated by distance to play a game together. It is important to know that Vassal does not know the rules, it only provides the components. There's a bit of a functionality learning curve so if you give it a try, bear that in mind.

We chose Ogre since it's easy enough and we both had rules handy. We chose the most basic of all Ogre scenarios - Mark III Attack - and proceeded to blow things up! I took a few screenshots.

Early going. Spending a few minutes to get familiar with the controls and making the layout usable is time well-spent. I was the Combine Player controlling the Mk. III Ogre.

The wolfpack pounces but the dice are miserable. Although David manages to destroy my two missiles before I can fire them, his other shooting is ineffective. This pattern continues for most of the game. Pro tip - then a unit is destroyed, drag it off beside the map! There is no "destroy unit" function.

It's shaping up to be a successful raid. Killdozer has suffered very little damage (much of it self-inflicted tread-damage from ramming tanks) and is spitting distance from the CP.

Killdozer want love! Why you break Killdozer gun?

Turn 9 - my Ogre overruns the CP. Mission successful! More importantly, the Vassal test was successful and by turn 3 or 4 we were experts, the game flowing very smoothly.

David's dice were absolute trash. It wasn't unit it was waaaay too late that he starting scoring meaningful hits. Mine were generally better than average and the Ogre was able to smoothly rampage its way up the map and to what it does.

A very fun evening of gaming and looking forward to more! If you're cooped up these days like may are, Vassal is well worth the effort. Combined with a Zoom video-call running on a iPad / smart phone, you can have a nearly real tabletop gaming experience without having to risk the National Guard beating down your door!