A Billion Suns

A few months back Osprey released another set of wargame rules called A Billion Suns. It was by the same guy who did Gaslands (Mike Hutchinson) and promised to be a spaceship fleet battle game. I eagerly pre-ordered it and was quite excited when it arrived. The excitement dropped a bit as I started reading the rules and realized it wasn't "really" a fleet combat game. The game is model agnostic which is nice, but the object of the game isn't necessarily about combating the fleets of other players. In the game each player represents a corporation (it's like our species has an instinctual fear of future corporate power). Each corporation competes to complete various contracts using the fewest ship resources as possible. The contracts are actually more like bounties, which is a bit strange for some of the missions. There's no tender process in the game univers, a job is simply paid to anyone who completes the terms. This makes sense for contracts involving destroying rival corporate assets, but why would you pay a bounty for an escort or evacuation missions? Wouldn't you want everyone to cooperate to get the job done? If you want a rival corporation’s communication satellites hacked to steal their data, why would you want multiple factions competing to complete the job? Wouldn't you want as few people involved as possible? Anyway the game needs to happen, so don't think about it too much. In terms of game play, the contract system encourages players to use the least number of the smallest ships available. Ships like battleships are prohibitively expensive and likely won't see much game play in small games. This is a disappointment for fans of Full Thrust or Battle fleet Gothic who want to see big ships duke it out. This isn't to say that the rules are bad or the game isn’t fun, it's just different from my initial assumptions. Folks on YouTube speak highly of the game, so I persevered and tried to learn how to play. One thing that struck me is that the contracts require players to have a fair amount of "stuff" to represent freighters, satellites, space stations and other things for your ships to interact with. The game can scale to any size, but small games will only see players deploy fighters or frigates. If you want to use large capital ships, you need to play a bigger game to justify the expense. This then requires you to buy more "stuff" to represent the extra contracts. This is something I could see GW designing! I have lots of warships in my collection, but none of the non-combat assets needed for a game. Luckily, there are several companies on Etsy that make resin and 3d printed components for the game. I ended up getting some space stations and tokens from Etsy as well as some utility ships and satellites from Brigade Models. The paint jobs aren't fancy because these are really just glorified objective markers. Hopefully I can put on a game, though the list of games we would like to play is quite long already.

Thanks for visiting!

Side tracked, yet again... Small Ronin or Daisho skirmish force

So, with all the Warhammer 30k going on, you would think that I should be working on my Fire Raptor and Sicaran Venator, but no I got sidetracked, once again, with another side project.

Mike, Kevin, Dave, and I have started looking at some small skirmish games set in ancient Japan.  Is it ancient if referring to the 16th century? If we can call a 386 ancient technology, then I am going to stick with the 1500's being ancient too.  The two games we have looked at are Ronin (by Osprey) and Daisho (by the Ministry of Gentlemanly Warfare).  Ronin is historically based and sticks pretty close to real history, while Daisho is more mythical factoring in powers and demons (if you so choose).  The great thing is that both can be played with the same figures, which we all collected over the last few months and have been sitting cleaned and primed on my painting desk.

I was sick the last few days from work and couldn't focus on some of the technical work I had to do on my 30k stuff, so I pulled out a few figures to get ready for Ronin.

Keep in mind I set out to paint these quickly and to a table top level, they are not meant to be show entry pieces.  I used quick base colour (mid-tone), wash (shadow), highlight method, with very little additional cleanup of fine detail.

I think the longest part on each was painting to insignia's on the back banners.

All of the figures, other than the large banner bearer, are from the Northstar Bushi Buntai box set for Ronin.  The large banner bearer is from Perry Miniatures.  The figures are all excellent quality and the various other Northstar and Perry figures I picked up will all mix with each other perfectly.

However for only about 6 hours of total paint time, I am pretty happy with them.  I may go back and clean up some of the fine details at a later date, but for now I have a force to play either game with.

Hint Hint Kevin, Mike, and Dave....