High Seas Drifter is a set of free wargames rules for playing battleship combats in the World War II era.
WWII
Carentan Modeling Guide and Historical Resource
From Matakishi’s Tea House comes a guide to modeling the French village of Carentan. From the author:
Carentan details the building of the Second World War French town featured in Band of Brothers for wargaming in 28mm. It contains detailed build notes and many full colour photographs of the process. There is also a section explaining the quest to match the known historical facts with the reality of Carentan today including both period and modern photographs and an analysis of the fighting at the time.
Carentan is a riveting tale of historical research and a valuable modelling resource offered free by Matakishi’s Tea House.
Bolt Action Burma Game
This Saturday afternoon, our group played a game of Bolt Action set in late war Burma. Allied Forces — British, Sikh, Gurka and Indian — were tasked with forcing their way across three bridges defended by the Japanese. The victory conditions for both sides was to control two of the three bridges.
The game ended in a tie, with one bridge each controlled by the Allies and Japanese, and one bridge contested.
We played with the standard Bolt Action 3rd rules with a couple of exceptions. One is that we allow weapons to fire at up to twice their standard ranges at a -1 as a house rule. The modification works well; the main effect is to speed up the game, which we appreciate.
The other change is a group play modification: when a die is pulled from the bag, we dig through the bag and give each player on that side a die for activation. So, if a Japanese die was pulled, each of the Japanese players gets one die from the bag. Otherwise, a game with six or eight players would take forever.
Although as veteran gamers — we’ve been gaming as a group for more than thirty years — we have tried dozens of WWII rules, we have settled on Bolt Action.
German NK-101 Minenraumer rolling mine exploder
The Hemmings Auto Blogs have a post on a wonderful Wierd World War II vehicle: the Minenraumer, which apparently is kept in a Russian museum.
Road To Hell WWII Skirmish Rules
Road to Hell is a set of free wargames rules for WWII skirmishes. The author writes:
1.0 SCALE
This is a skirmish game so one miniature represents one man and one model vehicle is one vehicle. One centimetre corresponds to around 2 metres and a turn represents 10-20 seconds of real time.
2.0 YOU WILL NEED…
You’ll need a couple of units or squads (one per player) of around 8-15 miniatures each to play Road to Hell (for more details see the Army lists), a few six-sided dice (hereafter referred to as d6) a ruler or tape-measure (all measurements are in cm) and a minimum recommended playing area that measure 80x80cm (30×30 inches) for 28mm figures and 60x60cm (2×2 feet) for 20mm figures. Considering that these are small skirmishes, scenery is very important. Avoid battles in open ground as they will be very lethal and not particularly satisfying