General Purpose Deck of Cards and C20th Mk 2

My latest distractions from proper miniature gaming.

The General Purpose Deck of Cards

This was inspired by games played by Bob Cordery using card based unit activation such as this one and by the Command & Colors and Manoeuvre games.

The idea is that you can list a set of cards in a text file, paste them into the box on the page, then generate a deck of cards. The cards can be dragged around the screen. You can double-click on a card to raise it put it on top of others. Please see the instructions on the web page for further details. I've tested the page in Firefox and Internet Explorer. 

You can just have a line of plain text for each card, or you can have HTML, with bold and underlined bits, paragraphs and links to images. There are some simple example cards in the instructions on the card page.

I found some nice free playing card images, so added buttons to fill the deck of cards box with a standard deck or a Bezique deck. You can alter the page title and change the border colour of the cards.

I plan to use the page with the Portable Wargame Electronic Version in one of two ways. The first way would be for a 'Bolt Action' style turn sequence, where the cards just indicate which side moves, rather than which individual unit. The second way would be be to use cards to indicate which specific unit is activated. To use either of these methods I needed to add to my existing game page design. This leads to my second distraction:

The Twentieth Century Portable Wargame Electronic Version Mk 2

I call it C20th, this is really the 'army men' page, with two sides of generic units moulded in green and blue plastic. Double clicking on a unit makes a control image appear that can be used to change its facing or edit its label. Units have a coloured border that can be used with the card deck page for card activated turn sequences for specific units e.g. there will be a card for 'Green Tank Red'. There is a stack of orange markers to indicate which units have had their move, for a card activation sequence that indicates only which side moves, rather than which individual unit.

If I'm using the 'which side' only activation method then my card deck would be consist of lines just reading 'GREEN' or 'GREY', one per unit on each side.

If I'm using the specific unit activation method then the deck would consist of lines looking like these, with one line per unit:

Green Comand, Red
Green Tank, Red
Green Tank, Orange
Green Artillery, Red
Green Infantry, Red
Green infantry, Orange
Green infantry, Yellow
Green Mortar, Red

 There are some fiddly little muzzle flash markers to indicate which artillery units have fired. The black smoke markers can be used to indicate hits in the simultaneous artillery exchange phase.
 

Squares and Blocks

By quick recycling of existing bits I've done up some C20th boards with block style units. There's a choice of background colour, green or light brown . The big 12 by 16 board is to allow for playing games using the Table Top Battles rules. I think horse & musket and ancient style blocks might be next. The boards use a control thingy image to change facing, double click to make it appear.

Horse and Musket

Still no tangible progress, but another online board: Top down horse and musket. This uses a square control thingy to change facing and label units. There's a choice of infantry and grenadier units; a single stand or two half stands so you can represent line, column and square:

Portable Blasthof Heath

Hexagons and Blocks

Inspired by David Crook's blog and his many excellent Portable Wargame battle reports my latest web page is for a hex based game using block style units.

The controls work in the same way as the pre-dreadnought game; double click on a unit to summon the control-thingy that allows you to change facing or edit the unit's label. You can keep track of a unit's strength either by using the markers, which count down on a double-click, as in the screen shot,or by label editing.

ECW Upgrade & Odds

I've modified some of the units in the ECW version of the Portable Wargame Electronic Version. The cavalry units can now be used to represent 'trotters and 'gallopers' in Stephen Page's ECW rules. I've added a few extra comedy units and terrain pieces for 'hoisted by your own petard' siege assault type actions.

I've carried out a 'Winston Smith' style edit on the 'Electronic Portable Wargame at Sea' post so that the link now points to Bob Cordery's renamed rules.

I found out that the  'load game' button on all the pages didn't work in Internet Explorer, so I've fixed that.

The Electronic Portable Wargame: At sea!

Inspired by Bob Cordery's 'Portable Naval Wargame' rules and Steven Page's 'Old Admirals' blog my latest diversion from getting started with tangible wargaming is a hexagon based web page game for pre-dreadnought battles, which can be found here. Here are some screenshots:

 

 

This game page uses a different method of controlling units than the previous ones. When you double-click on a unit a Control-Thingy (profpatpendingallrightspreserved) appears in its vicinity. Click on one of the arrows at the edge to change the facing of the unit:

Click on the circle at the centre of the Control-Thingy to edit the label of the unit:

You can enter the name of the ship, or add game information: HMS Beano has 6 gun dice, 9 flotation points and has not yet launched her port or starboard torpedoes. The label becomes visible when you place the mouse pointer over a unit.

The page has been sized to squeeze onto a 1260 by 1024 monitor using full screen browsing (F11), but can be made to fit on smaller screens by using the zoom out feature built into most browsers, <CTRL>-. I think you can go down two stops to 80% and the ships are still more or less visible.

The ship design is very cartoonish, reflecting my deep ignorance of the period, including Laputa style land gun batteries and bonus Martian fighting machines.

The page makes use of a JavaScript rotate image function, so there is only one image file for each unit that is rotated. Previous pages had four image files for each unit which were swapped between on a double-click. The new method makes hexagon based games practical as well as square based games where units have 45 degree facings.

I hope the page will allow people to enjoy and experiment with the Memoir of Battle at Sea rules. As with the previous pages I shall be using it to fight solo battles during brief pauses between my otherwise unstinting efforts at work. 

English Civil War 8 by 12

I've added an English Civil War 8 by 12 page to the Portable Wargame Electronic Version site. I hope this will allow people to experiment with the ECW rules written by Steven Page and available at his Folorn Hope blog.

Prefab Hills

Added some prefab hills to the C20th versions of the Portable Wargame Electronic Version. Hopefully this will make using them a bit more practical to use.

Still sidetracked

More cutting and pasting and find and replacing. I've added 12x12 and 12x16 boards for the C20th portable wargame electronic version. To play these versions you'll need a big monitor or you'll need to make use of the zoom-out facility in your web browser. If you zoom out to 80% then they'll fit on a 1280x1024 monitor in full-screen browser mode.

Sidetracked

Instead of painting figures and making scenery I've been working on a web browser based version of The Portable Wargame. Results of my efforts can be found here.