A Fistful Of Kung Fu – Page 2 – An Archive For The Steinberg Shed Space Blog

A Family Dispute In Miniature, Soon Settled By The Local Police!

Family. Often the most difficult group of people you will ever meet. Often your interests will clash. When two mob bosses marry their interests and aspirations can lead to competition and conflict.

Picture Mr and Mrs M.

Mr M runs things north of the shed. A traditionalist and always supported by his goon squad (all with no fashion sense or understanding of camouflage).

Mrs M runs the south side with her band of bikini clad females. Far from traditional and all armed with automatic weapons and huge …smiles. Very distracting and great for getting the other mob guys to forget what they were doing just long enough to put two between their eyes.

Both think the other needs to be shown how to do things better. So they agree on a wager. Whoever takes the prize first, wins.

The prize in this case is the local security truck. Its route easy to follow, and its cargo profitable and easy to fence.

The only risk comes from the local police who have a station right in the middle of the drivers route.

Mrs M made her move first as the van left its first pickup. No finesse and no caution. Shoot first work out how to get the doors open later…

The van runs for cover and to the safety of the police station.

All that gunfire attracts the interest of the local bobbies pretty quickly…

Out they pour, truncheons at the ready. (This is the UK you know… Don’t worry though, the armed responders will be here in about an hour.)

As Mr M speeds in to try to steal back the initiative the first of the armed police finally turn up and start to fire their rubber bullets taking a few mobsters down.

As the standoff continues Mrs M runs out with a fierce look and a handbag to show those boys in blue what for.

When they show no signs of backing down in the face of her threatening eyebrows, she decides to run for cover. Finding the injured Mr M hiding behind a wall she has two choices. She chooses to let love rule and stops to protect him. Just as the bobbies with handcuffs rush in and manhandle her to the floor.

Its ‘Game Over’ for both Mr and Mrs M… Attempted robbery and possession of an unlicensed firearm… Gonna be hard time for the M’s it would seem.

Sometimes no one wins!

Until next time…

A Fistful Of Godzilla

This game was played about a month ago but as the post is only just getting put up it must be obvious to all that I am a little behind at the moment. We wanted an easy but fun game of Fistful of Kung Fu and wanted to add in the rules for complications and VIPs again. The last time we loaded the game this way I was swamped by a hoard of zombies… not this time.

The table was setup to represent a warehouse district and had all manner of open spaces and blind corners. Plenty of tall terrain was new for this game too. I expected to see lots of sniping from afar in this one.

I had the Arab influenced terrorist while my opponent went for plenty of goons with guns and a couple of connected mob bosses.

My secret weapon was a MG armed truck (played as a bruiser with the long move, protected and big traits). The extra mobility and strength didn’t help it to last as it became a bullet magnet early on. Maybe I should have gone for something not so yellow to help it hide better.

We also had a large visitor for this game, in the form of GODZILLA…

The game was played with the mission objective of ‘find someone’. In this case it was all about finding the mob boss’s best gal. She was hiding in some piece of undisclosed scenery. All I had to do was stop them finding her, and if they did find her, I was to stop them from rescuing her.

Very soon I had lots of targets in my sights, where ever they chose to hide.

Godzilla had other ideas though. She was just out to find lunch, and was roaming the battlefield munching down on anyone foolish enough not to run for cover.

Sadly that was all to often my own men…

Nowhere was safe to hide and soon she had the scent of perfume and was off to find the boss’s best gal herself.

Surprisingly the dame survived the chewing of some huge teeth before being run out of town by the mob boys. Sadly that only left my own men to provide pudding in this game.

The game played out nicely with all the random movement ending up where it made sense for Godzilla to go. I would have liked slightly less attention from such a large opponent. I guess I have something about me that attracts these things.

Warbases Workshop Finally Gets A Touch Of Love

This little Warbases building has been on the shelf for a good couple of months. It was the trial roof for my bigger warehouse but after that was completed the momentum stopped and no further updates have occurred. This is a lovely little building with lots of nice touches like sliding doors.

That has however changed. I had a quiet half term when my daughter was home and I couldn’t get any games in. I did get lots of time to break out the paint brushes and finish a few projects.

The basic paintjob was a whitewash to 3 walls and red brick to the remaining side. The whitewash was applied using a small piece of foam and some watered down white paint. A stippled coat of white was applied with the aim of getting an aged and heavily repainted look. This came out as a bit too clean. So, the foam was dipped into my paint brush water (a lovely dirty, green tinged pot of filth) stippling that over the wet white did the job well.

Add in some of the 1/43 scale signs, a couple of bins and a petrol pump or too…

Just a dirty up of the roof was needed to finish the overall look (again a healthy wash of dirty water with a drop or two of army painter ink to darken it slightly).

Job done…

All garages need some thing to work on so a small collection of cars has been collected recently.

The Audi came with bullet holes painted on it already…

And with a 70s Ford Granada police car they are perfect for our Kung Fu games of late.

Our future games look like they will have lots of tough coppers driving about on the table trying to stop all the mayhem from happening.

VERY happy with how this has come out…

A Fistful Of Kung Fu, Without All The Kung Fu.

We managed to fit in a quick game or two of Fistful of Kung Fu recently. We seem to be playing the game more as a 70-80s gangster/police TV show, instead of in the planned Hong Kong movie style. I have to say though, that it seems to lend itself well to any over acted, movie based, period.

Using a 3×3 foot table and keeping the gang points to about 300 made it fast and bloody.

I got a chance to try out some of the smaller bits of new scenery I have picked up recently, as well as getting the warehouse out again. The roof is as unfinished as expected but is likely to get some love soon so watch this space…

I must paint those die cast trucks I bought or the table will look like a black and white movie soon.

Picked up a cheap 4×4 and caravan in the local pound store. Not quite to scale (modern 1/43 cars are a bit BIG).

Dug out my old, and long out of print, Battlefield Evolution figures from Mongoose Publishing for this game, as I still can’t find a suitable 70-80s style gang that makes me happy as yet.

Plenty of cover and props to activate (translate that to trash cans to dump on peoples heads and shelves to topple on the bad guys)

We played the complications and VIP rules for these games too. These can range from good old fashioned zombie invasions to spreading fires on the table.

The more observant of you may have spotted some new large and small wheelie bins (trash cans to my American audience) and a large skip. These are the Lasercut Card, Urban Scatter items. Currently undercoated in silver (the only full spray can I had at the time…) More on these later.

We are still enjoying this fine little game, and with the painting and construction in the shed again focused on scenery, I suspect this will continue for some time.

Shipping News: The Bigger, The Better.

Lately we have been talking boats in the shed. By we I mean me and anyone that will listen. It started with Coronasan’s epic ship build on the Loft Full Of Lead. I will never be as skilled, or take the time it needs, to create something like that but I have been bitten by the possibility that a boat (of some sort, any sort really) would add some missing aspect to the collection of scenery in the shed.

Pirate era ships are the main focus of this interest but the cost of these (if you purchase them in resin or ready made) appears prohibitively high. The Playmobile option is an obvious choice to base a scratch building project on, but would require more work than I have time for at the moment. Also, if I’m honest, I haven’t played a pirate game for quite some time.

A friend then started talking about his desire to play more pulp style games and how great it would be to find, or make, a tramp steamer. Picture some intrepid traders chugging down a jungle lined river whilst being attacked by native tribesmen who want to stop them from stealing the resources of the area… I digress… Anyway, as I was looking into finding said steamboat, I came across the Playmobile range again. It turns out they have done a couple of rather large cargo ships over the years.

My further research led me, as always, to the vast hoard of info to be found on the lead adventures forum. It was here that I found a really impressive modern ship convertion. Far beyond my abilities to complete but an inspiration for my own, somewhat simpler, planned build.

Then, what should pop up on ebay, but a cheap auction for one of these huge plastic monsters. This beast turned out to measure almost 2 feet in length.

Without any pause it was on a table and played a part in our most recent game of Fistful of Kung Fu.

The overall scale of the ship is great. A 28mm AT-43 scientist is standing on the container deck plates. It is big enough to look right but not so huge as to be unusable or laughable. The cargo hold opens to allow the transportation of tanks, shipping containers and varied cargo. In fact it is just big enough to be filled with a zombie horde or two…

The cabin will need some work as the ships wheel is designed to be in scale with Playmobile figures but this should be a simple change. The addition of a couple of cranes to load and unload the cargo hold would be a simple change, as the model has some deep screw holes in just the right places for this.

Even the colour looks good with the red deck, black hull and white cabin looking pretty good from the start. With only a few changes to be made, I can see us starting to think up games where it will either be an objective to capture, or a deployment area for one force to enter from. It should fit into any modern setting, from Later Pulp Adventures to World War Two (Dust or Bolt Action), all the way through to the modern era. Maybe Somali pirates will attack it, or terrorists will use it to smuggle weapons and men into the country. Who knows where this may lead… Either way I think it will be one of my better buys for this year, and its only February…

A Little Bit Of The Movies

We have, amidst the rest of the things going on in the shed, been playing a lot of the new Osprey rule sets lately. These are all good rule sets. Usually simple and quick and easy to learn. Their other selling point is their somewhat individual nature. A couple of the books stand out as appearing very unique. Their Gods and Mortals rules (I have posted about my force before, one day I aim to finish this to a point that I can show it…) are unlike any that I have seen and are written by a talented chap named Andrea Sfiligoi.

His second rule set for Osprey uses the same activation rules and a lot of similar concepts but is set in a wildly different world. A Fistful Of Kung Fu is designed to allow us to play out any movie style game even down to those cinematic effects like swinging round lampposts or being hit in the face by a frying pan.

I know, we can all use our imagination to picture how our little heroes are beating up our enemies. These rules however, actually allow you to play a game and, as a result of combat, activate any item on the battlefield as a weapon or effect. No surprise here but I actually own 2 deep fat fryers in 28mm. In our first game I actually got to push one of my opponents henchmen into one of them, causing it to become a weapon in the fight and also leaving a slippery oil patch on the floor for later in the game.

The game calls for lots of small bits of scenery to be scattered over the table for just this purpose. When we played I got to use the modular warehouse I bought a while back, something that I have never found a place for in any other game.

It will be no surprise to some that I like scenery. With lots to pick from I can put an effective table out with ease. Lots of lampposts and table scatter. Trash cans to kick over, gas trucks to jump into and drive though shop windows, crates to climb and lengths of 2×4 timber to swing, poke or throw at anyone in range…

Fighting on container tops.

Running over the tops of buildings.

Jumping from place to place (and sometimes falling off stuff).

It’s all possible in this game.

If you want a game that is new and refreshingly different, but easy to read and play, this is likely to be one for you…

Andrea also appears to have his own rules system using the same (or very similar) basic rules. It’s called Song of Blades and Heroes and includes a fair few expansions already. Maybe this will be on the next wish list I set up on Amazon.