Ponape: A Pacific Island for Colonial Gaming

Like the Gunboats in my previous post, my island setting of Ponape is a caricature of features ranging from Australia to China through Melanesia to Micronesia.  Some of it is pure fiction, some things out of place, but all things in the spirit of the game.

The island started as a list; a port, a coast, a fortress, a town, some rough terrain, a native village.  Quickly it evolved into a map designed to fit on a large game table.  At a minimum, the table would need to be 10'x5', preferably 12'x6'.  The features of the terrain dictated a modular design, though less flexible than my typical game terrain.  In its initial form, Ponape featured a Spanish fortress at the "west" end of the island, overlooking a bay with a dock and small town.  As you moved "east" from the town, you would encounter the jungle.   The island was cut in half by rocky jungle covered hills and a river.  Beyond the river were the natives, sometimes friendly, sometimes head-hunters, sometimes in need of a sacrifice for a festival.  To the north was the coastline, and to south, room for new adventure.

Here is the early version of Ponape:

The Spanish governor usually tried to impose his will (whether it be the Spanish will or not) from the fortress in the distance.  The native village can be seen in the foreground.

A view of the town and bay, better showing the fortress.  The town featured Madam Ophelia's, a trading company, and a black-birder auction.  Local business was overseen by "The Boss" with help from his henchmen and working girls.  Foreign navies would sometimes visit.  Sometimes they could be burdensome, as above, where he bay is blocked by the French ship, the Dunois.

The natives above are preparing for one of their many celebrations.  A festive people, in this case it appears that the antiquarian explorer may have lost his daughter, as she is being assisted in preparation for the native celebration.  Converting the Foundry Africans into Micronesians was only partially successful, as the natives all looked like they had a steady diet of steroids.

Strange alliances often formed.  Here German troops are assisted in leaving the jungle by the natives with Austrians in hot pursuit.

Above, natives invite an English explorer to dinner.  The natives were very friendly that way.

 After the first couple of games, the island suffered some geological activity, which made transit on the island  a little tougher. 

Phase two of Ponape featured more dramatic rocky cliffs cutting the island in half, and the addition of a swamp (not depicted above)  in the jungle.  The natives got a more secluded, less accessible village, and proper place for the their rituals.

A view looking from the fortress toward the new cliffs separating the island natives from the Spanish side of the island.

A view of the dock.

A couple of views showing the northern coast and the river.

Spanish troops looking for ...trouble.  The dramatic height of the new cliffs is demonstrated

Views of the "native" side of the island

 

Eventually the fortress got a minor face lift.  A lot of additional plans were made for the island including detailing existing structure, adding a docking station for the airship, and a small railroad between the mine (yes, there would be a mine) and the dock area.  Only the face lift and some of the minor detail items got completed before Ponape's last game.

The fortress received some battle damage, weathering, and various other details, most of which are not visible in any of the photos that I have. This is how the game looked at its last convention presentation.

 

Ponape proved to be a success, with players contacting me prior to conventions and arranging to bring their own colonial factions that would be worked into the storyline.  The games flowed more like a "B" movie than the typical wargame with homebrew rules that catered to the light-hearted flow of the games.

Ponape also proved to be a bear to transport, requiring about 90 cubic feet of cargo room with very careful planning and packing.   The cargo room problem was the primary reason for developing the next stage of Ponape, Mission to Pingalap, which used many of the components of  the original island, but reduced cargo volume.

Mission to pingalap is up next.

Mission to Pingelap: 28mm Colonial Adventure in the Pacific

The last variation of "Ponape" came in the form of "Mission to Pingelap".  The only negative thing about Ponape was the cargo room needed to transport the game to gaming sites, as my own table was no longer big enough to field the entire terrain set.  This resulted in my adapting some of the Ponape terrain to another island, i.e., a more flexible gameboard requiring less cargo room.  After searching around on the maps of Micronesia, I settled on naming my new island after Pingelap.  In reality, Pingelap is a very small island, an atoll with a central lagoon, and population a little above 200.

For my game, Pingelap was the site of a Christian mission, a native population, and a small trading post/village.  The island map featured coast on opposing ends with the mission on one side, the village on the other, and the natives in the middle.  The interior of the island was quite bumpy (unlike the real island) filled with rocky formations providing plenty of hiding places for pirates, castaways, giant mythical birds, and whatever else might be needed for adventure.


Here is a  photo of part of the island under construction:

The finished sections are from Ponape, losing the fortress and ramp up to it  resulted in a huge space savings during transport. Here is the the above terrain completed:

I believe the complete footprint was 11'x6', about seven feet of the eleven is pictured above.

The new native village...

...the castaway's shack....

...and the Christian mission.

The original Mission to Pingelap scenario centered partially around around a newspaper article by a creative reporter, proclaiming "Vegetarians Eaten by Cannibals", "All lives lost at Pingelap Mission".  This resulted in British and Spanish naval forces responding, who would run into the quite healthy missionaries, an explorer looking for the source of the native giant bird myth, pirates looking to kidnap some natives and to extinguish the mission, etc.

The game looked like this:

The trading post/village side of the island above.

The mission side of the island.

The island interior with many channels created by the rocky formations.  the native village is to the right, and was located near the mission.

Various parties in search of adventure in the distance.

The native tribe investigating all of the recent activity on the island.

Most of the parties found themselves at this site by the end of the game, several meeting their end here.  The mythical bird wasn't a myth, and was discovered by the explorer's party.  The explorer was then discovered by the pirates.  That ended badly for the explorer.   In turn, many pirates died at the sharp end of a beak, but in the end, the bird was no match for so many rifles.  The remaining pirates were no match for the natives, who were no match for the British Navy.  The Spanish must have gotten lost in the jungle, but lived to tell about it.

Though it started with the movie Nate and Hayes, when I realized that the figs were available to create the game, I had no idea how much research I would do for such a whimsical game.  Starting with an investigation of just who this Bully Hayes was, lead to a general history of exploration (and exploitation) of the Pacific peoples and islands,  further leading to study of 19th century China, East Asia, and Australia.  When done I had collected maybe three dozen volumes ranging back to the 1870s, many maps, post cards, and other bits (even an old cigarette card depicting Bully Hayes) offering windows into a fascinating history, otherwise hidden from from me for so many years.  This part of the colonial Victorian era offers a rich, endless source of adventure for the miniatures or role-playing gamer, and from what I can tell is almost completely untapped by the gaming community.

The Ponape games that I ran in the early 2000s remain some of the best gaming experiences that I have shared in.  The best thing about Ponape were the players, and I must thank them all, particularly the guys from Wayne's Legion Historical gamers, and the Colby Street Irregulars.  Truly the best.

A number of factors resulted in temporarily shelving Ponape. Unfortunately, the temporary shelving has stretched into around seven years now.  At one point I considered selling off the figs and getting rid of the terrain, and I did sell some of the extra figs that were never used.  I also considered making some modules that would interface with the colonial terrain, and allow me to use some of it in a post apocalypse setting, or a sci-fi version of Ponape, but don't know  if either will ever materialize.  I am sure that Ponape will rise from the sea once again, as there are simply too many adventures left undone.

Thanks for looking.

The Ships of Ponape: 28mm Colonial Gunboats

Some years ago, probably sometime in 1999, I began working on a 28mm colonial adventure game set in the South Pacific.  The idea was born roughly 17 years earlier, while watching the the movie Nate and Hayes.  The game was conceived as a Victorian adventure with miniatures, incorporating roleplaying, set generally in Micronesia.   The game, a sort of Darkest Pacifica,  included military contingents from various navies, shippers, traders, natives (both cannibals and not), antiquarian explorers, black-birders, gun-runners, pirates, jungle critters, mad scientists, dinosaurs, and anything else I could think to through in.

Players would run a faction (could be pirates, military contingents or various civilian groups) with around 12-25 figures, with a unique objective, and cooperate/trade/cheat/kill each other as required in an effort to achieve their objective.   Games would be loosely set in the 1880-1900 time frame, and most took place on a Spanish controlled island in the South Pacific.  I called the game "Ponape" after the island identified in the movie by the character, Ben Pease.

Anyway, while trying to reduce the number of old CDs and DVDs stacked around my computer, I recently came across a bunch of photos of the Ponape games and of the ships that I built for the various factions in the game.  Since I'm not really working on anything blog-worthy at the moment, I've broken the photos up by subject, and will post them in three or four blog entries over the next few days.  Here is the first, my 28mm colonial gunboats, ships,  and floaty things for getting around the Pacific.

The ship models are all caricatures of real ships.  Most are scratch-built from styrene sheet and/or bass wood.  I tried to make most spaces above the main deck, the bridge, and fighting areas of the ships accessible to players and figs.  The first ship was the Spanish gunboat, the General Concha.

The main gun was scratch-built from styrene sheet, strips, and tubing from Evergreen Plastic.

My version of the General Concha had a single 4,7 inch gun forward,  quick firing 3 pounders each broadside, and machinegun aft.  This is a picture of her in the first convention run of Ponape at Drums Along the Maumee 2000 in Toledo, Ohio.  I had forgotten my "water" drop cloth, so the bay featured a lovely wood grain  pattern. 

Possibly my favorite ship was the Euterpe, an Italian  torpedo boat, that I built for one of the guys.

The Euterpe is shown next the the General Concha.  She was so small that she  is actually just about a full size model in 28mm.  Besides the two torpedoes (made by Jack Shaw), she had a twin barrelled 25mm Nordenfelt, which I added after the initial delivery of the model. 

Shortly after building the Spanish boat, I added an American gunboat, and a French torpedo boat destroyer.  Unfortunately, I don't have too many photos of them.

This is the French torpedo boat destroyer, the Dunois, under construction.  My version would feature four 9-pounders.  She was heavily damaged while in my trunk, when my car was rear ended several years ago.  She has silently set on my workbench awaiting repair for at least six years.

Here are a couple more pics of the Dunois and the American gunboat, whose namesake I cannot remember at the moment.

Though they don't show up in the photos, the American ship (black hull with white superstructure in the foreground) has two guns forward in sponsons in the hull.  The entire main deck lifts off to expose the compartments below. 

The sailing ship was a quickie model slapped together from bass wood, and loosely based on a ship from Nate and Hayes.

Last is the German airship.  She never received proper detailing and was the first step into VSF for the Ponape game.

That is my daughter proudly presenting the airship many years ago.  The ship could be armed with two guns, either machineguns or 1 pounders.  The gondola was designed to be detached and could be affixed to a winged flying affair that converted it into the world's first seaplane.  The winged structure sets in a box, somewhere in my basement, never completed.

That's it for the ships.  Next up will be the island of Ponape.

The Burden of Abandoned Projects

Over the last few months, I made some effort to reduce the clutter in my gaming spaces (I'm really jammed for storage space), with some success.  I threw out a bunch of stuff (clearing out maybe 10-12 cubic feet of stuff), condensed some more, but still ponder what to do with the endless goodies associated with abandoned and on-hold projects.

As I filtered through boxes of stuff, I experienced a bit of a nostalgia trip.  Seeing Dwarves, Teddy's Rough Riders, old D&D figures, rocky ruins, and endless unfinished or unused items that brought back memories of hopes, dreams, and projects unrealized.  Unfortunately, they mostly seem to be things that I can't possibly live without.

So now that I've completed a sort of first run at reducing my heap, I must try to figure out which items will never reach or return to the table, and talk myself into discarding them, such that my gaming space will better serve those that will.


28mm Fantasy
Fantasy gaming is the only "core" period (period or genre that I wanted to game in, at the time that I discovered gaming),  that I have not continuously pursued.  It saw life during my D&D years, re-manifested during a flirtation with Warhammer, which left me with a Dwarf army that never saw the battlefield (nobody else painted their figs).  And surfaced again, when my daughter took an interest in orcs, which faded after a few of games.

One of the trays of mostly GW dwarves, 

70 percent of them have never seen the table top.

I've sort of inherited my daughter's orcs, maybe 80 of them painted, which are also of the GW version.  I actually preferred the old 25mm Ral Partha orcs and goblins, and still imagine what an army of them might look like, but not sure that I could make them work on the same table top as my big GW dwarves, which I quite like.

There is a space-taking dwarf ruin and a couple of craggy outcroppings for the orcs taking up a good part of a shelf, and then a dozen pages of plans for the a grand dwarf stronghold, largely based on my original impressions from reading The Hobbit.

An unfinished ruin, roughly a cubic foot of shelf 

space occupied for 20 years.

Elsewhere in the basement, lurk more than a hundred Tom Meyer Elves; one is painted, a few others have some paint.  They are beautiful figs, that sadly, I could not find on his site the last time I looked. In my heap gaming plans and notes, I also have design sketches for a viney, lusciously green, fairy-tale forest and village in which they would live, if I ever got around to finishing them.

A small batch of elves, these still on a painting tray 

from ... good lord, 15 years ago?

There are other bits as well; trolls, ogres, unicorns, and hippogriffs, a couple of dragons, including my old Grenadier beast hovering above his hoard of gold from those long lost D&D days.  I don't know that any of them will ever see the table again, but I can't yet part with them, as I still feel the adventure of the fantasy world in which they might battle.  In my mind, or maybe more in my heart, the dwarven forges glow, a slight breeze ruffles the leaves in the elven forest, and orcs and goblins cast a ominous shadow from the nearby hills.


28mm Celts
Maybe 150 of them sit peacefully in boxes, as their Roman enemies moved far out of state several years ago with one of my old gaming buddies.  I probably should sell them, but they were a lot of work (even if not that well done), and it feels like selling a piece of my soul, not to mention that they would be a real pain to wrap and package for shipment.  I guess that I could use some in my fantasy world, if that ever comes to anything (though I always kind of imagined more of a Romano-British thing for my fantasy humans.  Oh, I really need to buy some figs, they would be so cool when done...).


28mm Colonial Adventure
Some years ago, I created what I referred to as "Ponape" a game of Victorian piracy and adventure set in the Pacific and East Asia.  It featured light role playing of factions of colonial troops or figures set in the late Victorian era, chasing various tasks such as gun running, slave trading, piracy,  politicking and militarizing in various settings.  Most of the military figs are Boxer Rebellionish, with much of the civilian portion having an old west flavor.

We played a number of great games at conventions and at home, when my old gaming group was still together.  There were even gamers creating factions to bring to the convention games that I ran.  It was all very positive, until I got some negative feedback about the games being too show-boaty and/or not historical enough for the mostly historical oriented conventions in which I ran them.  Foolishly, I allowed myself to be put-off by a few protesters, and with the melting away of my game group, I stopped running the games.  It is probably the most dynamic thing that I ever did with respect to gaming, and now sets in boxes in the basement, and on shelves in the garage, taking up at least 150 cubic feet of space. 

I simply can't get rid of it.  I tried to a few years ago, but couldn't do it.  Another piece of my soul is invested in that game.  Besides, many of the figs have another use (see below).


28mm Boxer Rebellion
The Boxer Rebellion is my favorite colonial era historical subject; I once had over 1600 painted figs in 15mm, all originally inspired by a game run at Fal-Con at Bowling Green State university back around 1983 by Black Forest hobbies from Dayton, Ohio.

The game was my introduction to the conflict, and I was completely taken with it, slowly building up forces over the next 8 years before I could run a game of my own.  Once I could field the game, I struggled to get anyone from my gaming group to play.   One memorable game was eventually played, but my frustration about the games diminished my enthusiasm to run them, and most of the figs ended up being sold off.

With the advent of Ponape, I realized that much of my interest in the Boxer uprising really centered around the potential historical adventure, rather than the more traditional wargames wargames.   For the last 15 years, I've envisioned eventually playing a series of historical adventure scenarios set in China, during the boxer uprising, elaborately modeled in 28mm.

So now, along with the Ponape figures (painted and otherwise), there set many Boxer figures, untouched, waiting to rise up in adventure on the tabletop.  But I don't have the gaming group that these games scream for, and won't any time soon.  So they all conspire to take up more shelf space.


28mm Near Future/ Alien Invasion/Sci-Fi/Cops-n-Robbers/Post-Apoc

While these may look like separate things on the table (the post-apocalypse part has already manifested), they are all inter-related, with significant overlaps in terrain, buildings, figures, and rules.  Think Hollywood "B" movie.  Aliens land/crash near a route 66 town, maybe other aliens land to combat them, local law enforcement and the National Guard try to maintain order, locals get involved, time travelers happen upon the scene, the local scientist tries to work a deal with them, then MiB, KGB sleeper cells, drug cartels, a scout troop, some good old boys out for a hunt, hip-hop bands, and you name it get involved and chaos insues.  Or, it can take place on an alien planet with human colonists facing the local fauna, alien army, or whatever my madness can throw at them.  Or maybe it simply is the alien invasion of an advanced planet with two sci-fi armies battling it out.  Or,...you get the idea.

The problem is that "the game" is tremendously broad in scope, and despite having some terrain and over 400 figs painted and at least 400 more waiting, I am nowhere near fielding most of the game.  It is actually one of my primary interests, but I know that I  need to shrink the scope considerably, if I am ever going to get it on the table.

A couple buildings for the alien invasion nearly semi-done (for 12 years or more), 

and the blown up police station for an eastern US post-apoc town,

 setting since 2012?   There are a dozen more matching 

buildings for each game, sitting in boxes in various states of completion. 

Other Stuff
Scratch-building supplies take up a tremendous footprint.  Foam, plastic sheet and stock, boxes of parts and doo-dads, paint (I think I'm under 400 bottle and tubes now), putties, flock, boxes (like 12 cubic feet) of 8-14 inch tall Virginia pines that I happened into, boxes of artificial plants, 200 model kits, etc. all taking up space.

There are others periods and genres of figs as well; pre-dreadnoughts, WWII and Cold War naval, 1/300 air etc. but they don't take up so much space, so aren't so much of a concern right now.  Some of the unfinished projects, such as Swedish micro-armor, 15mm WWII Poles, and prehistoric peoples, got started as interest flowed, and then ebbed, within my old gaming group.  Others projects were purely me jumping in, then jumping elsewhere.  Each of the projects mentioned up above will tie up a tremendous storage footprint, and in some cases years of work.  My house isn't growing in size, and I may not live forever.  So something has to go (before I do).

Previously, I let go of periods and projects that I wasn't as passionately invested in, but now, I need to give up some things that are much closer to my gaming soul. 

I'm so conflicted.