Well as far as weekends go, this one has to go down as a good one. I got a Trifecta and was able to get some gaming in, get some painting/modeling done, and get some new toys all in one weekend... nothin' wrong with that!

Friday:

Friday night started by getting together with Bill and Nino to run them through a few of the games in the "Song of Blades & Heroes" family. Of course we hadn't seen each other in a while so spent most of the time drinking and chatting but we actually did manage to get 2 games in.

We used the same setup for both:

The first game was Song of Drums & Tomahawks. I had come up with a scenario for the night but since they had never played before, we kept it simple and just had a few French Regulars go head to head with a few Indians in a pitched battle.

Nino took the French and was able to win soundly - mostly because Bill charged in his Legendary Warrior all by himself to a hail of musket fire.

Bill and I are roughly on par when it comes to tactical acumen. That is to say, we have none. Bill is however, the best painter in our gaming group so there you have it! Bill is also quite the armor modeler (hence his nickname - Panzer Bill). Check out his blog here:

http://panzersminiaturewars.blogspot.com/

Can't be good at everything though...

After this we switched it up to Fantasy and did the original Song of Blades & Heroes. We pitted a brave band of Heroes against a Marauding Chaos Warband who were intent on killing and sacrificing innocent children! The horror!

Bill actually won this one, although it was close. The Chaos band he was playing managed to capture a child, tie him up, and remove him from the table to take him and sacrifice him to their gods, while the rest of the party was fighting off the Heroes. This was worth 2 Victory Points. He also spent a turn burning down the farm, which earned him an extra VP. Nice job Bill!

The night was a solid victory for me, because I achieved by objective of getting the guys interested in this game... this was worth 100 Victory Points. Hehe. At this point Nino, Scott, Bill, and Greg are all interested in this game, which means we might have a good thing going here! I will try to suck the rest of you in at some point.

I like the "Song" games because they are pretty easy to learn and fast to play, and there are supplements for all different genres. I plan on using Flashing Steel to try out my English Civil War troops once I get some painted, and I've got a small collection of Pensinsular War troops to be used with Song of Drums & Shakos someday too... Bill just got Mutants with Death Ray Guns to paint up some small warbands of his old 40K models. Hmm.... now I have an excuse to paint up the troops from my Dark Vengeance boxed set that I got on clearance from Miniature Market, even though I had no interest in the game!!

One problem with using a mostly similar, but slightly different, ruleset for various genres became apparent during our games though. There are minor nuances between the games and it can be hard to keep them straight when you switch them up. For example, the "Forester" trait works slightly differently in SOBH than the "Woodsman" trait in SODT. Oh well, we just need to double check before we play and probably stick to one genre each game night.

On to Saturday...