Combat Patrol on New Years Eve

Buck

Since 2009, we have been hosting a war-game on New Years Eve.  I don’t find New Years Eve a compelling holiday, and I don’t feel like sharing the road with a bunch of drunk people, so we start gaming around 1500 and end a little after midnight, which gives everyone time to get home before the craziness beings — or join a wild and crazy party in progress.  We usually make the games light, often Christmas themed.  The first game last night was a GASLIGHT game centered around the movie A Christmas Story in which two groups of characters from the movie competed to round up items from the movie, such as the Red Ryder BB gun and blue bowling ball, while the town was being invaded by zombies.  For this game, I set up my Granville, Illinois, town that I use for my pulp and gangster games.

The second game used the same terrain, since it takes a couple of hours to set up.  American troops were defending the town against an attack by space aliens.  In the picture above, you see a crashed space ship in the foreground.  The aliens landed and advanced toward the ship.  The device in the foreground is the macguffin.  The aliens have to get to it and destroy it.  Why not nuke it from space?  The aliens had to make sure that the Americans hadn’t already found and exploited the device.

These pictures don’t really follow any narrative, but it is meant to provide a bunch of eye candy.  When I loaded the pictures into the WordPress from my computer, they finished loading out of order.  The order the Internet picked is the order you get.  🙂

The aliens did a nice job maneuvering their tanks and infantry together up the roads against the American opposition.  They even used smoke to screen their advance.

The game went well.  The Americans had lots of opportunities to knock out the alien tanks, but they had bad luck, missing almost every shot.  While the Americans tore up the alien infantry on the American left flank and delayed the alien infantry on the American right, the aliens knocked out all but one American tank and drove relentlessly to the objective.  Combat Patrol(TM) worked fine for a science fiction game.  It was a nice way to spend New Years Eve.

from Buck’s Blog http://bucksurdu.com/blog/?p=8356

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from Tumblr http://tumblr.hawks-club.org/post/181631789313

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Author: hawksgameclub

0 thoughts on “Combat Patrol on New Years Eve

  1. Thanks. It was fun. I wish I had had time to put the pictures in order and weave a more cohesive narrative, but I was pressed for time and wanted to get the pictures posted. It has taken many years, but it has been fun to assemble the town, bit by bit.

    Buck

    1. Thanks, Mark. I actually have two file boxes of additional buildings I couldn’t get on the table, including a beautiful theater from an outfit, called Multiverse gaming. The buildings were a combination of Plasticville, Litko, Multiverse gaming, and scratch-built. Some pieces are somewhat unique. I had a heck of a time finding a green dinosaur for the Sinclair gas station. The phone booths, mail boxes, and light poles are sometimes hard to find. I have been collecting Marx and Plasticville parking meters to use as the speakers in the drive in. One of the things that is fun is that the screen on the drive-in movie works. I have loaded about two hours of trailers from old science fictions movies that plan on the screen during the game.

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