Blam! Blam! Aargh!

 

Last night we played a game using these free skirmish rules which came with a recent issue of Wargames Illustrated.  I missed this completely... to be honest I rarely buy any magazines these days after years of faithfully being them.  I'm rarely in a High Street to pick up a copy on spec and when I have bought magazines I've really only flicked through them.  Luckily my friend Anthony is a bit more alert and had spotted these rules.

BBA (I can't say I'm a  fan of the name) are written by Dan Mersey  so sounded promising and have a good pedigree. They seem to be designed for a broad range of periods...certainly from the 18th Century onwards and are covered much aimed at small skirmishes with a handful of figures.  Each turn has 4 action phases and players bid for initiative from a pool of Initiave Points.  As you lose figures this pool decreases.  The winner of the bid chooses one of 4 actions: move, shoot, fight or recover from stun.  

An interesting mechanism is that the opposing player then has to do the same action (but with half the number of figures that the active player used) so if the active player chooses to move, the other player then can only opt to move figures and not, for example, shoot.  At first I thought this was a very odd approach but it actually works well in practice and means choosing when to try and win initiative (or not) becomes really critical.

We played a WW2 scenario with some very nice 42mm figures from Irregular Miniatures (... must resist looking at their website...!!)

We had 2 evenly matched forces with mainly rifles, a squad MG and a leader with a SMG.  My riflemen and leader quickly headed into the cover of the woods and waited for the enemy to act.  There are definitely times where you don't want to win initiative, letting your opponent use up his points and then controlling the later phases and this tactic proved pretty deadly.  I managed to sucker Anthony into overspending his Initiative Points which left his troops stranded in the open and under a deadly hail of fire.

They tried their best to get into the cover of the farmhouse but were now coming fire from all sides and, of course, as figures began to be killed the IP pool was also dwindling, making to harder to win initiative.  From then on it was clear that the British weren't going to last long.

They're an interesting set of rules... obviously they're pretty simplified and short but that's no bad thing.  It'd be interesting to see what they're like with other periods and more complex scenarios.