Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

In Ogre, you put your Heavy Tanks out front and your Missile Tanks and Infantry form the second line of defense.  But if you’re playing the 1983 Challenger: Ultra Modern miniatures rules double blind, this is not a good idea.  In this game you should have a line of infanty on the first line in order to alert you to the enemy’s approach.  You should concentrate your mobile units in a second line– preferably somewhere that your opponent is unlikely to shoot with artillery fire.  Finally, you should have a reserve just in case your opponent if feinting.

Here’s my infantry and APC’s whooping it up after taking out some Ruskie scout cars:

My boys quit laughing right about the time the rest of the party showed up.  The APC’s were quickly destroyed and the infantry remained dug into their fox holes.  I annoyed the Ruskies with artillery fire and accidently hit some of my men once, too:

I had to do something about my men!  I sent my tanks to respond and split them up a bit in order to avoid having them disabled all together by enemy artillery.  I moved at full speed to get there ASAP, but couldn’t fire as a result of that.  (I was still learning the rules!)  Then… because of the lack of a full first-line infantry screen… we unexpectedly ran into the main Russian element!  The smoking hulks in the picture below are all that remained of my platoon of tanks:

Now the Ruskies were free to roll on through and cover Bergkohn with as much fire as they liked.  The rest of my forced were ill-placed to respond… and heavily outnumbered. 

A fog of war can have a huge impact on tactics….  Panic is bad news– and playing a game with another game’s tactics is, obviously, not a winning strategy.

Yeah, a lonely Battletech miniature or two is all well and good… but there’s nothing like a fill spread of miniture armies clashing on a tabletop.  (Wow!)  I’ve come close to playing with minis and terrain that cool, but my own scraggly collection of half painted Ogre units still need a lot of help.  And on the roleplaying side, I’ve never done much more than punch out my Cardboard Heroes for GURPS, but they never got much father than the Bar of the Perpetual Brawl.

No.  Every game blogger worth his salt has pictures of his kewl minis for everyone to ‘Oh’ and ‘Ah’ over; it’s time for Jeffro to get on board!  But we’re way too much of a nonconformist to field an army identical to everyone else’s.  (Actually, our painting skills suck so bad we’d be lucky to have an army that looks like everybody else’s.)  No… if Jeffro’s going to make minis he has to be the only guy in the country with something like it… and he has to simultaneously mock what passes for mainstream gaming in our belegared industry!

So put on your beret and light your scented candles.  We’ve got work to do!

First off, you need to get some plastic army men.  Occasionally you can find packs of 5 or 6 giant sized soldiers.  The guy to the right is so awful looking he could make the cover of a 4th edition GURPS book.  His base is warped so he won’t stand up properly and his flame thrower looks attrocious.  We don’t have to feel too bad about what comes next!!  If you can find army men like these smaller ones below, you have the gold standard for these sorts of projects.  That brand of army men is made from a very light and pliable form of plastic… and they have nice big flat feet instead of an annoying base:

Get out your razor blade and maybe even a knife with a serated edge.  Pick out 3 regular sized army men and remove their legs.  Cut of the head on the 8 inch tall soldier, but leave a clump of plastic on the bottom so you have something to work with.

Now you are ready to go!  Put the base of the giant disembodied head into the flame of the candle.  Cook it real good… you want the plastic to get good and molten.  Inhale the fumes deeply.  Next take one of your six legs and hold the top of its thigh in the candle flame.  Once that melts, smoosh it into the side of the giant head.  You’ll have to work quickly!  You don’t want the giant Head’s base to cool too much, but fortunately the heat of the legs will cause some additional meltage as you attach them.

Experienced plastic modelers will have tweezers or other tools at hand to to shape and sculpt the plastic while it’s still maleable.  Hard Core Gamers will of course just smoosh things into place with their fingers.  (The burns will hurt intensely, but the pain usually goes away in the next day or so.)

Voila!  If you need to touch up your model, take an arm or bayonet of one of your mutalated army men and set it on fire.  Attempt to drip or smear molten plastic in places where you want it to hold together better.  Let the model cool, then prime it and paint it.  For bonus points, choose a color scheme that clashes insanely.  Do this 30 times and take your custom army to the local Warhammer group and freak out the other gamers!

Had a blast a couple of weekends ago playing Ogre Miniatures. Here’s a photo:

It was the closest I’ve come to playing a Convention-quality type game.

The geomorphic hex map pieces were really cool. They’d be perfect for Battletech. That was my biggest irritation with that game back in the day– the maps for it were lousy! Especially after you played a lot of Car Wars….