Cast From Hitpoints

 So realizing I can post here from my phone, I guess that's what I'm doing now ! Since (a little before) christmas, I've been interested in the wild world of solo rpgs. The first I saw was the excellent review of Thousand Year Old Vampire by Shut Up And Sit Down, and it somewhat sent me down the rabbit hole of looking at similar games. Using some of the christmas money I picked up some pdfs and even two physical copies, and have since settled on three games. The first is The Machine from Itch.io, that has you as someone haunted by dreams and visions of a strange machine which you are compelled to build. Play is in the form of journal entries, the theme of which being based on what card you draw from a standard deck of cards. I've already started this one as a round robin game with some friends, and have been having a blast writing creatively again.  The second is the above mentioned Thousand Year Old Vampire, which has you playing as a vampire, obviously.  It is again j...

 Having the time (or rather energy) to squeeze a solo game in, I set up the grid board to play Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame.  I picked the book up originally around the time I got Neil Thomas's One Hour Wargames, and in fact the two seem to get recommended together a lot by those seeking space saving or solo Historical play. I also recently acquired Bob Cordery's Portable Napoleonic Rules, and till I expand the number of bases of units I have will be using a sort of slapped together mix of his two rulebooks as seems appropriate.  So, setting up a scenario from OHW and using the random force chart from it led us to the the Botched Relief of Glannes 1812.  The French Brigade under General Allard consisted of : 1st Infantry Battalion (Average) 2nd Infantry Battalion (Average) 3rd Infantry Battalion (Average) 1st Light Field Battery (Average) The British Brigade force under General Badger consisted of 1st Foot Infantry (Average) 2nd Foot Infantry (Average) 3rd Foot Inf...

 One of the things I've been trying to solve about making a small portable miniature-less version of OHW is the issue of terrain. Having flocked hills with simple wooden unit indicators seems a bit weird to me and defeats the purpose of trying to keep the whole thing simple, cheap and low effort.  So, what to do? One thought is to pre-print workable birds eye views of maps like these images pulled from google. While these would probably look nice on the 12 inch MDF board, and as decoration, it wouldn't solve issues where one game I would like a hill in the north, but for another scenario require an open field there.  One solution that originally occurred to me was using cute up bases, like the ones that you may have seen in the first post being used as hills. Renedra (or similar brand) square cavalry bases, the kind you typically end up placing two horses side by side on (that I had spare from an old and unfinished Saga project I may one day return to). However this requi...

 While I doubt many knew of my old tumblr wargame blogging of the same name, it has been long enough since I posted there (and long enough since I've done anything to blog about) that I finally took the plunge into making an account on blogspot (like the REAL wargame bloggers hur hur). Honestly, I had been gravitating towards this idea even back when I had been posting on tumblr still. Between several personal issues in my life as well as the These Trying Times of Covid, my content output has been nearly zero the last year or three. However, because of those things I have also been playing a lot more boardgames, including some solo games! So I figured why not make somewhere to return to throwing my opinions on them out into the void to.  I'm not sure yet if I am going to have any sort of theme to my posting content or frequency, but I suppose we will see how it goes. If nothing else, it'll allow me to collect some of my homebrewing thoughts on games after I've played th...