Past midnight... to 02 Hundred Hours!

My apologies for the long silence this month. I’ve actually been busy painting and playing some games. One project was the board game by Privateer Press called The Undercity based of their Warmachines/Hordes games that were so popular a decade ago but has since died and relapsed into obscurity.

I decided to paint the smaller expansion for a follow-up to The Undercity called Widower’s Wood. This was Widower’s Wood: Dead Men Walking which gives you a small 3 mission campaign to play for The Undercity and another small 3-mission campaign for Widower’s Wood. 

I completed painting the minis (all 34 of them!) in 3 days!* (See photo above). Yes. Bragging rights. Also don’t look too closely at them but from 1 meter away they look absolutely fine. (And you can see the 2 minis I needed at the back: the 2 Pistol Wraiths. The other two at the back are Bonewraiths that don't feature in this mini campaign but they do in the next. They were so easy to paint I figured... what the heck. Just prime a basic colour, use Agrax Earthshade then pick out some highlights and voilá!) 

I completed the 3 mission campaign last week and am now going to paint the minis from the main Widower’s Wood game so I can play the mini mission for that game. Below is what I need for the FIRST (of three) mission.

Now, the advantage of all this is of course I plan to use the minis either for the now-defunct Iron Kingdoms RPG or a minis agnostic RPG or skirmish game. Not playing Warmahordes again, that's for sure.

But that’s enough of excuses! What you want to hear about is th latest solo tabletop skirmish game called 02 Hundred hours by Grey For Now Games… right? 

…

Right?

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I was inspired by a game report I saw about 02 Hundred Hours on BGG a few months ago, and wanted to try this game out, solo. I borrowed the core set from the owner of my FLGS. It was already assembled and all I needed to do was at least prime the Brit models to quickly distinguish them from the Germans.

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Mission 1 was a very basic game to get you used to the rules so about half of the chrome got left off. Things like event cards, equipment and a few other more in-depth rules. 

The objective is to get 3 SAS troopers off the map to the other side of the table (the right side).

Now, cover and the Undetected status is really important in this game. If you’re hidden, it’s much harder to detect your model and shoot at it. Unlike most stealth games, in 02 Hundred Hours BOTH sides start Undetected. So the Brits don’t know where the Germans are and vice versa. This gives rise to some instances where your models might not quite go the way you want them to… because you don’t know where the enemy truly is.

Then all of this is tied to an Alert level where the more noise (from alarms) you raise, the higher the Alert level goes until the Germans are fully alerted in which case some actions you make are rolled at with a disadvantage or you’re limited in what you can do.

Sadly, despite my best efforts to remain stealthy, one SAS trooper was detected and quickly went down. This is because combat here is deadly. You basically get one chance (if at all) to dodge or otherwise not take the effects of a successful shot. Or attack. Fail… and it’s bye bye trooper.

Then his partner went down also because he couldn’t shake the detected status. Once the Germans are aware there’s an enemy model (SAS) near them, they’ll make a beeline for them and shoot. If your model is caught out in the open with no cover, you’re basically screwed.

There was a moment when I thought I would succeed because I managed to get two SAS troopers off the map, but it was not to be. The 5th and final guy got detected and the guards just swarmed to his location. There's no way he can tank all the hits, so...

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The game has some unique mechanics and definitely if you want to play a stealth game, this is one of them. 

You get to roll some bespoke dice instead of normal d6’s. And the dice also come in 2 colours. White dice give you more successes but also cause more noise. Grey dice give you less successes… but don’t cause any noise AND can potentially remove your detected status and you go back into hiding again.

Everyone starts off undetected. But once you get detected, it's pretty hard to lose the detected status, the guards will swarm over to you, and... bye bye. As noticed above.

Of course, I got some rules wrong, as expected.

One thing I noticed was I made the German deployment too far up front, close to where the SAS enter the map and the other was the terrain was oriented wrongly so there were huge stretches where there was absolutely zero cover for the SAS to skulk in.

Also another note: this game out of the box is a 2 player game. The publisher, Grey For Now, has made the solo rules and solo Event Cards available as a free PnP.

Of course, I haven't played with the solo AI rules or Solo deck yet. Let's see how that goes, but not so soon as I need to print the PnP cards first.

What I did was I just did my own home-brew solo version that worked pretty well, without changing any of the rules.

Coming up next: My second attempt at this mission with proper rules in place (basically which actions to make if you’re undetected and detected.) 

* There were 2 more minis I needed but overlooked in the photo.