Introduction to Afrika

Fantasy Afrika for Skirmish Sangin

In 2015 Dishdash Publishing (DD) was approached by the Miniature Building Authority (MBA) with a request to sell our game Skirmish Sangin in their forthcoming Kickstarter. The Kickstarter was to create a series of 28mm non-denominal forces for a fantasy modern Africa.

At the time we where creating our own Somali miniatures for our project Maalintii Rangers (Day of the Rangers) that went on to be a very successful Kickstarter for us and you will see many of those miniatures in the forthcoming book, as they make great Afrika OPFOR Forces

After a brief discussion between the two companies, I got over excited about things as is usual and decided I would create a special book called Skirmish Afrika especially for that MBA Kickstarter. 

As MBA wanted to make sure this was all fantasy we looked at the country of Africa and first off  completely redrew the country boundaries and renamed the countries. Being long time Deutsches Afrikakorps (DAK) fans we changed the spelling to Afrika to emphasis the difference.

Thus the book concept was born. As with all births, its had its good bits, its hard bits and it downright painful bits and I am still not quite finished... its currently weighing in at 25k words wise and has breakdowns on 15 countries with ORBATS for all the main protagonists in each one. It also has (currently) 6 scenarios and an article about making Afrika terrain (sneak peek below). ORBATS on PMCs and Guerrillas and few other things to add that Afrikaan flavour.

In our renaming we took all the existing countries chopped up their names and mixed them up, combining country names and keeping the feel of the original african nations. Sometimes we reverted back to ancient country names, sometimes we just went wild with the names. Until we settled on the map of Afrika.

Below you can see one of the proposed double page spreads of the book.

Once the map was redrawn we had to provide sensible backgrounds for each of the countries, we looked at the land masses and worked up using bits of real history but changing the names to protect the innocent and also looked at a sort of modern colonialism. Thus you will be see everyone from China, India, USA and Europe having some influence on our new Afrikaan countries.

We then choose one major conflict for a small campaign of linked scenarios to show how you as players can take these country background and create your own campaigns.

Now obviously this is still a work in progress. The first draft has been completed and gone off to the trusted readers in the Sangin Community for feedback. Once thats collected and analysed, the book edited and laid out, it will just be the photoshoot that will be needed before we can release this bad boy, first to those wonderful people who supported MBA Kickstarter and then to you the waiting public.

Play testing a scenario

Rescue the Journalists

BELOW:

This the board set up for a scenario Ray wrote, about a group of journalists behind enemy lines being harassed by the Taliban and in need of rescue. Their rescuers are a squad of French legionnaires in a VAB armed with a 50 cal.

BELOW: The journalists have abandoned their TV van and sort shelter in a nearby compound. You can see the Taliban sneaking up on the far side.





BELOW: and much later in the game - (I forgot to take photographs oops) the French arrive in their VAB. The french avoid the road in case of IED and crest the hill and move down into the village to take cover behind a Compound this is where they debused. At this point the Taliban have actually began to storm the compound that the journalists and their PMC bodyguards are in.




BELOW: The French take their time climbing out the VAB.



BELOW: The Taliban sniper managed to hit one of the French, his body armour saves him but he sis stilled knocked to the ground.



BELOW: Now the French find out the compound they took cover behind is not empty, the Taliban on the roof lets go with AK47 but misses everyone.




BELOW: The now debused French try and sneak round the back to get at the roof top gunman.




NOT SHOWN:
The French came under fire from Taliban across the street but they fired their AT4 and removed the threat. Eventually the French brought their .50 cal to bare and under such fire the Taliban slipped away but not before first the female journalist managing to kill 2 Taliban with a pistol.

Was a fun game it will be one of the scenarios in the new Afrika book being released soon.

Roamin' on the Gloamin' AAR

This was the last of the play test for the Roamin' on the Gloamin' free scenario and the battle was fought between father and son.

Ray took the Taliban, you can see his Taliban Scowl in the pic and and Michael the Black Watch Scots who apparently play by Marquis of Queensberry rules.

The game board looked like this:

The game began with the Taliban but as the Scots weren't on the board they passed on several combat phases until the 'dour' Scots turned up.

First Scots man up came on the board and secured his position in cover:

Meanwhile on the bridge the Taliban are trying to spot in the dark. This proved very difficult.

It didn't matter how hard they tried only having one man with NVG  made the Taliban spotting needing 01's to find the enemy.

Several more turn elapse and now a few more Scots had turned up.

Activate on the bridge now grew frantic but the Al Qaeda operative somehow couldn't get his NVG goggles to work. Finally more by luck than judgement one of the Scots was spotted and shot at. 

A hit, first blood to the Taliban but still the calm Scots, held their fire and found their targets in the dark. 

The Scots bring up their GPMG to cover the bridge and still they refuse to shoot. 

The view from the GPMG position

By now the sniper in the main Taliban building is doing everything he can to find and shoot at the Scots, but a series of unfortunate rolls leaves the Scots well protected.

The Scots now fire there 40mm grenade at the group on the bridge and hit spot, its kills 2 outright and the other two now have to have morale rolls at -30%.

Taliban on the left hand building move up in position to try and spot the Scots in the dark but again to no avale, the night time rules make spotting incredibly difficult without NVG, just as they should.

Finally the British Leader steps up and calls in the off table Warrior. He rolls the perfect score and the Warriors Chaingun wipes clear the roof.

It probably looked something like this.....

However the Scots weren't having it all their own way, one brave young man runs forward to help his injured friend and perform first aid in attempt to evacuate the casualty, the Taliban sniper see him and shoots, scratch our Hero.

Shortly after this, incensed by the deaths of his comrades the Scots Marksmen finds the Taliban sniper and after a few attempts 'slots' him.

Now the Scots rushed the bridge. One Taliban behind the end of the wall found a Scot armed with a combat shotgun, it didn't end well. The Scots now occupied the southern end of the bridge.

This was quickly followed up by more Scots

Unfortunately that's where we had to call the game but the Scots now occupied the southern end of the bridge, the Taliban had taken lots of casualties and were trying to get their novices to move up without two much luck. A series of Taliban took to their heels in this the last combat phase of the game.

So a good victory for the Scots. Its an interesting game playing a nighttime advance and means you have to change tactics. Have a go and let us know how you got on?

Roamin' in the Gloamin' - The Black Watch in Afghanistan

Roamin' in the Gloamin'

So its been a while since our last free scenario. Many things have happened in that time not the least being a very successful Kickstarter campaign, new writers onboard, other taking a rest as they wrestle with careers and small children, but never fear we are back with this great new scenario from Michael Charge. Michael is very active on the blog and was brave enough to send me this scenario that I loved. Some play testing and a few tweaks later we have a new a scenario for you.

You can download it here or from the website, look under free scenarios.

Platoon+ - Some of the thinking behind the game

Platoon +

 So a few people have asked questions on the new Platoon + game, so I thought I would share some of my thinking so far. I must of course emphasis that all of this is a work in progress.

The first thing is that Platoon+ is a working title and the final game may not be released under that name, but it gives us a point of reference moving forward.

Looking at the aims of the game it probably worth listing the core building blocks of the new game.

1. The game needs to allow Skirmish Sangin players to take their characters into playing a larger game, with some conversion.
   
2. The rule system will NOT just be Skirmish Sangin with a few new rules.
   
3. This is a modern rule set for modern warfare both symmetrical and asymmetrical; it is NOT based in Afghanistan and can be used to model any current or future conflict.
   
4. The game smallest unit can change depending on the size of the game player want to play. What do we mean by this, well if players want to play a platoon sized game the smallest unit will be a fire team, if they want to play multiple Platoons the smallest unit type would be a squad. It may be possible to play this game with the smallest unit being an individual.
   
5. Miniatures will be based singularly but the larger the game becomes the more abstract the game system will be come, as it needs to handle bigger numbers.
   
6. The game must be easy to play and learn and players with 2 platoons per side should be able to play a game in about 2.5 hours.

So those are some big building blocks on which everything will hinge. Below are some images of working platoon sheets. They are a work in progress but the idea is a single page should represent a platoon and everything the players need to will be on that page.

Above is a basic US army Platoon

Above a Taliban unit - note the difference in command dice

Above French Foreign legion Platoon, avery different make up.

Below is the first look at armoured platoons

 

All images are subject to Copyright to Radio Dishdash Publishing 

Currently we are experimenting with using 1d20 instead of 1d100. While I love 1d100 for granulation in Skirmish Sangin, as the number of troops gets bigger, it becomes increasingly necessary to loose that granulation without loosing the spirit of the game.

We are also looking at command dice, command dice gives the unit their Action Points (AP). The larger game is predominantly about command and control.

So thats just a few little things to show you some of our thinking.

Cheers

Colin

Platoon+ test games

Platoon+

So we continue with our Platoon+ testing. This time we added off table resources. The Taliban had a mortar and a sniper and the ISAF had a heavy weapons team which included 2 Javelins and a sniper.

The ISAF platoons consisted on 1 Platoon of US Army and 1 Platoon of French. This was mainly to help us test the differences in national Platoon types and the Taliban had 25 minis.

The board looked like this.



The Taliban held everything south of the river with ISAF coming from the north of the river. The Taliban were embedded in the village of Ghorak having in the scenario taken possession of the town the day before.

The battle unfolded with the ISAF advance. Its was a two prong approach designed to split the Taliban fire, this worked very well. The Taliban, dug in the building were initially a tough nut to crack with the French being pinned down on the left flank (bottom right of the pic below).



The Taliban used the banks of the stream as cover as they tried to bring fire on to the face arriving Americans.

The French hunkered down over the continual fire from the Taliban. The advanced initially brought to a stop. Here the first casualties went to the Taliban withering fire.

 The Taliban occupy the mosque and gain the high ground advantage (Sorry about the pic quality).

US army below make it to the first compound to find it empty.

The Americans charged the dug in Taliban along the river line and a fearful hand-to-hand battle begins. This would go on for most of the game with the Taliban taking casualties but refusing to yield. Ray (pictured) wanted to test the hand-to-hand rules and his Taliban held up well.

The French move up through the poppy field and come under off table mortar fire, twice they were hit and twice the dice (6d20) yield no casualties, but it did shake them up. The US employed both javelins but were such bad shots they missed their targets and inflicted only minor damage.

 Eventually the Taliban Morale breaks and the survivors bolt.

So just like before we have learned a few things and we have added more elements to the game I can honestly say I like where this is going. Both of my play testers liked it too. Once more of the rules are written up in a more cognitive form I will be looking for more play testers, so let us know if your interested.

The game took 2 hours and 15 minutes with high Taliban casualties but ISAF were pinned for a number of rounds, which stopped there advance dead for a while.

The larger playing area really worked too.

Code name Platoon +

Code name Platoon +

This is the working title for taking Skirmish Sangin into larger battles. It will allow players to play any conflict so you’re not restricted to Afghanistan, even though most of our testing has been asymmetrical so far.

We have been working on this now for 6 months and last night played our first Alpha  version of the game. This involved putting two full ISAF platoons, 1 French and 1 US Army against 28 Taliban who where occupying the town of Ashram Akar. So thats  80+ miniatures on the board. The entire game including learning the rule splay in 2.5 hours

The aim of our rules is for a quick game that allows players to command multiple units. As an Alpha test release this played better than I ever hoped. The battle was intense, with each unit type having a flavour all of their own and with an easy mechanic that took my two play tester (I was just observing and explaining rules) 30 minutes to play without my help.

Now obviously we found faults and flaws and the project needs much more further development but we hope to this product out in the third quarter this year.

We still have all vehicles to develop but we can already call in off table assets, think aircraft, snipers and heavy weapons support teams and the like.

The idea of the rules is you can play it at different levels with the smallest unit type being a fire team if you are playing a single Platoon, or a squad if you are playing with more than 1 platoon and having the same mechanics regardless of scale.

Let us know your thoughts on this.