Junta - Family game night

 Hi All,

I'm still plugging away at the Formigny figs, but we had an opportunity to have a family game night with my daughter home for Thanksgiving.

The ladies of the house chose Junta from the selections on offer. It is definitely a product of its time, 1985 and is in the genre of games that encourage you to lie, cheat and steal your way to victory.

The ultimate goal is simple, have the most money in your swiss bank account at the end of the game. I've only ever played this game with 4 players, but it can support up to 7 and there are rules for less than 4 but with a separate mechanism to accommodate not having enough players.

The roles available for the game are: President, draws the foreign aid and proposes the budget; Generals of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Brigades each have their own troops and barracks in the city; Air Force Commander, controls the paratroops and has access to three airstrikes; Admiral, commands the marines and can call in gunboat bombardments; and the Minister of the Interior, controls the police, has a free assassination attempt per turn and can seize the chamber of deputies to force through the budget,

8 bills are drawn from the foreign aid deck each turn. Only the President knows the denominations they drew. The president then proposes how much they will distribute to the players and the budget is voted on. If it passes you get the money, if it fails the President keeps everything. 

Players can start a coup if there is a coup excuse, like the Minister of the Interior seizing the chamber and ramming through the budget.

I believe the above picture is just after I had assassinated my daughter and taken all her money. In Junta you play a family, so you're never out of the game, you just lose cards and money in hand. My son (with the fancy beard control markers) has amassed a strange political between the Church and the Radicals. He has Christian Militia, Rioters and Student Protestors in the streets.

I'm not totally sure what all is going on here, but we had used up all the money. Bribes are placed face up on the bottom of the money stack. We called the game here.

Here is my winning account with about 43 million Pesos in it. I was lucky in my assassination attempts and caught both my daughter and son with piles of cash in their hands. Each turn you pick one of five locations for your faction leader to be. Assassins have to guess correctly where the player is in order to have a chance at success. The Secret Police always succeed, but they can only show up at the bank on alternate turns.

Anyway it was a little diversion over the holidays. A silly game that plays a little dated, but if you like backstabbing games it's got a lot of that.

Prepare to be underwhelmed - Formigny project

 Hi All,

I've been dragging me feet on many things, but I do have progress of a sort.

The gaps are all  green stuffed and I just have to put extra swords and visors on the knights.

I've also primed the first twelve archers.

I know, grey primer on grey plastic. Woo hoo! Of course I noticed one right arm I forgot to putty.

I also realized after priming these that none of these guys got swords. Perry shows a sword in the instructions, but I don't think there are enough swords for everybody. I feel like these guys would not be universally armed with swords so I'll scatter a few throughout the units as I build more. I have another 16 archer torsos cleaned.

Fantastic Legions will probably not be impressed with my progress, but it is what it is. (P.S. I'm going to try putting hyperlinks in bold since this template only shows them when they are moused over.

Anyway. Have a great Thanksgiving if you celebrate and happy hobbying.

Return of Mojo - Formigny project

 Hi All,

Well, suffice it to say I had a rough Summer and my mojo for life in general was just not there for many months.

I had been planning to do a late Hundred Years War project with Fantastic Legions and playtest some rules, but after buying a bunch a figures all this real life stuff happened and I just pretty much went into "I can accomplish one thing per day" mode. Unfortunately that one thing wasn't hobby for quite awhile.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. Fantastic Legions sent me a link to putting on a game at Desert Wars in March 2022. He suggested Formigny in which two French Armies linked up to defeat an English expeditionary force and hastened the fall of English Normandy.

It has a little bit of everything. English longbows ravaging the French. French canons wreaking havoc and a final French cavalry charge. As well as the linking of two forces to combat the defending English.

So if you want to read about it there is a decent article here.

There are also a couple of interesting youtube videos about the battle. This one by Kings and Generals (23minutes) and this other one by Schwerpunkt (2.5 hours). 

So it looks like I'll be making up about 8 units, 4-5 of them bowmen.

The English leaders were:

Thomas Kyriell

By Rs-nourse - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29263362

Matthew Gough

There is no opensource heraldry for him but a common theme is three boars or boars heads on blue or white field. 

Robert (De) Vere

By Newm30 - The Notebook of Tristram Risdon 1608-1628, James Dallas, Henry G. Porter, London 1897. p. 106., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76419312

Henry Norbury 

By Lobsterthermidor (talk) 14:14, 28 February 2020 (UTC) - Own work, using bull element modified from commons File:Urdorf-blazon.svg by User:Gerhard Bräunlich, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87533580

I'm thinking of adding the coats of arms of Bayeux, Caen and Vire as well, since the garrisons were pulled from those towns to battle Jean de Bourbon the Comte de Clermont at the time.

Anyway, lots of work to do. I've been dragging my feet while Fantastic legions has been putting out some lovely units.

Hope your hobby is going well.

Paint em if you got em.