1 Hour Skirmish Wargames

 

I've played a couple of games of James Lambshead's skirmish rules recently... one set in the Russian Civil War, and the other using the Ancients/Medieval version.  They're a card based system with no dice at all.  Each player has a deck including a Joker. Cards are drawn to determine initiative, to activate figures with a number of points (from 1 for an Ace to 13 for a King) and to resolve shooting, melee and morale.  Drawing a Joker ends the turn and players go through their card decks pretty quickly.  But this does mean turn length is unpredictable and figures may activate multiple times or not at all in each turn

 I failed to take any photos of the RCW game (always a sign of a good game!) but remembered when we played a 2nd game last night.  The original book goes from the 17thC onwards, including rules for Pulp and SciFi games.  The 2nd book takes it back to Ancients through to Medieval times.

In the 1st game my Bolsheviks attempted to overrun some dug-in British Interventionist troops.  The turn limit meant I really needed to press home the attack.  Hand to Hand combat gives an advantage to the attacker, but instead I got drawn into a long range firefight which got me nowhere and gave the British the victory.

The Ancients/Medieval version is very similar but with enough differences to cause us some initial confusion.  In this version there's an extra step where your opponents  armour makes it easier to hit them but they're more likely to shrug off the attack.  Cavalry also have some advantages in combat and can also break off freely from a melee with infantry, ready to charge again.

As you'd expect from Skirmish rules the scenarios are quite themed and detailed... no simple encounters here.  They range from battles among rocks to a Robin Hood tax collector raid.

In the original Napoleonic scenario the French and British are squabbling over an abandoned cannon.  We shifted the action slightly... a Saxon raiding party have stolen Arthur's  cows and Aelswine the prize pig.  These have stubbornly ground to a halt  in the middle of the table, allowing Arthur and his troops to catch up.  We stuck with the victory conditions from the original scenario in which the Saxons have to end the game with at least 1 figure within 6" of the animals, while the Britons have to drive them off.  In hindsight this was never going to work... it really needed the firepower the Napoleonic setting would have brought, or for us to start much closer (games are usually 3'x3' or 4'x4').  My fault for not thinking the scenario through.

The Saxons sensibly drew back, maximising the distance and, although Arthur and his knights charged home they weren't able to make much headway.  The scenarios have a tight turn limit (5 turns in this case) and it didn't help that my 1st card was a Joker, meaning turn #1 was over before we'd moved!  Despite this I enjoyed the game.  

The rules work well.  The armour rules mean that light troops are still effective... often in games like this they are spear-fodder but their nimbleness means they are actually very effective, although if they fail to dodge then it's game over.  Cavalry feel right... charging, pulling back and charging home again.  So with a better chosen scenario these are definitely on the regular gaming list.  Next might be something a bit more modern....

Dominion of the Spear

 

I seem try out a lot of rules that I only play very occasionally thanks to my rules-magpie friends (yes Anthony... I'm looking at you!!)  At Eric the Shed's the rules tend to be more consistent and we mostly use the Black Powder/Pike and Shotte/Hail Caesar trilogy as a regular set of rules which has the huge advantage of being able to get the game underway with a varying group of players straight away as we're all familiar with them (although there are enough minor variations between each of these to cause regular confusion)  But it's nice to try out rules I might not otherwise have come across

This week Anthony and I played Dominon of the Spear (technically we played Dominion of the  Claymore, Tomahawk and Talwar which is one of the variants as we were fighting out a series of Jacobite battles).  I'd seen these being mentioned quite a bit recently online but knew nothing about them. Dominion of the Spear ranges from Ancients to Medieval and there are numerous supplements all the way up to 1900 CE

They're an interesting concept with units based in a grid facing each other.  There's no movement and no terrain.  And games last about 15 minutes.  My immediate thought was "oh... this will be... erm... interesting" and I was initially a little underwhelmed but actually the concept is much more nuanced and thoughtful.

Combat is a straight d6 roll-off with the loser being removed.  Different troops need different scores, so for example my Elite Highlanders succeeded on a 3+, while the Govt Line Infantry needed a 5+.  But the Line troops have the advantage of fighting first... in other cases the combat may be simultaneous and there's a very real possibility of both units wiping each other out!  Reserve troops have to be moved in immediately so there is a bit of thinking about which troops you use to plug a gap, and there are some simple rules for flanking.  The terrain rules are abstracted and factored into the rating of the troops: so, for example, a unit may be given a defensive bonus to reflect woods or hedges, or an Elite rating to represent a tactical advantage, eg. my Highlanders in the Prestonpans scenario were all Elite to reflect the surprise and confusion in the Government ranks.  

And that's about it.  Each variant of the original rules adds in a few period specific rules to reflect the setting, and there a few things we didn't try out (Ambushes and troop deployment) as we were playing a series of linked battles in a mini-campaign.  And this is where I think the rules have a real strength... because each battle is very short, it's possible to play through a campaign in an evening or to use the rules as a way of quickly resolving battles in a map-based campaign.  Each rule book comes with a host of army lists for battles and mini-campaigns with the suggestion that the 1st player to win 2 battles in succession wins the campaign.  It would be very easy to tweak this to suit though, and the rules are ideal for solo play

In our campaign we started out with Prestonpans which reversed history with a Government win.  We then moved on to Inverurie: a Jacobite victory with Jacobite line troops against government highlanders and finally Falkirkmuir which was another Jacobite win, giving me the overall victory.  Had we continued we'd have fought out the battles of Littleferry and Culloden.

The figures are Anthony's lovely 54mm miniatures... lots of conversions and amazing paint jobs and a very shiny 'toy soldier' aesthetic!

Dux Bellorum - 1st game

So having painted my Late Romans and dug out my Late Saxons masquerading as Early Saxons (and some Vikings... shh.. don't tell anyone), it was time to actually get them on the table.

The rules are Dux Bellorum from Osprey which are yet another great set in their blue book series of rules.  They are pretty simple to play but have a suitable Dark Age feel.  I've always felt battles in this period should really emphasise the influence of the individual Commanders and these rules reflect this really well with the use of Leadership Points (LPs).  These allow you to improve the chance of activating a unit, add dice to an attack, cancel hits and enable units to interrupt another units activation... all very useful and of course as the action heats up you don't have enough LPs to go round.  If a unit routs you also lose a LP and this shift in the balance of leadership can make a real difference.

Our battle pitched a Romano British force defending against some raiding Saxons.  As neither of had played before we went for a straightforward scenario without too much complicated terrain although in hindsight the river was a bit of a pain.

The Saxon Horde...

...and the British

The British have Shieldwall infantry which are less aggressive but harder to damage.  A legacy of their Roman training and discipline I guess.  Combined with the LPs allowing hits to be cancelled this can make them pretty tough to damage.  And of course the Brits have Cavalry.

The Saxons are all infantry and have the 'advantage' of an uncontrolled advance.  This means they can charge further  than the British Shieldwall and are more aggressive but they have to charge unless you can make them fail a Bravery test (handily the LPs can be used to help fail tests as well as passing them!).

The  neat lines at the start of the game broke up as the fighting started

The Britons had 3 skirmish units of archers vs my 1 Javelin armed unit.  I'd read people complain that skirmishers are very weak in these rules but the British archers were deadly, combining fire to cause lots of casualties.  To be fair I probably tried ignoring them for too long and should gave tried driving them off sooner.

A very messy fight at the river

Andrew, commanding the Britons, used his cavalry to try and turn my flank, forcing me to split my  warbands and it quickly became obvious that the fight at the river was going to be a sideshow with the battle being decided between the Cavalry and the Saxon warbands on my left flank.

The 2 Warlords slug it out

The fights became very scrappy with a lot of to and fro but the British Cavalry began to press hard and the Saxons units began to disappear, shedding Leadership Points in the process.  The cavalry was also pretty beaten up by this point and could have broken but some careful use of LPs by Andrew stopped me causing enough casualties and eventually the Saxons reached 50% losses and began to melt away from the table.

The rules were very impressive and felt just right for this period.  It was great to actually get my newly painted figures on the table and into action and I've just spotted that Gripping Beast have been previewing the artwork for their forthcoming Picts which would be a great addition.

¡Arriba Espana! - first game

 

Since I'd bought a copy of Bob Cordrey's Arriba Espana rules recently it was a good excuse to get the SCW armies out for a change

The newly reissued rulebook actually contains 2 sets of rules...the original Arriba Espana from the 80s and an updated version for using the Portable Wargames Rules model.  Since I didn't have a hex or gridded mat handy I decided to go with the originals.

We played one of the scenarios in the book... some Nationalist militia troops are holed up in a ruined monastery, under attack from the Republicans.  A Nationalist relief force is on its way...will it get there in time?

The besieged Fascists

There were a few bits we were unclear about in the rules (more to do with me than the rules I think!)... for example we weren't sure what happens after the 1st turn of combat... does it continue in subsequent rounds (and can units break off?) or should it be fought to a conclusion.  We decided on the latter... mainly to speed things up.

The Republicans have an advantage in numbers but are hampered by a lack of cooperation if the units come from different factions to to Commander.  In this the game the overall Commander was an Anarchist so the Socialist and Communist battalions were less likely to obey orders which hampered the Republican advance

The Moroccans and Foreign
Legion arrive in the nick of
time!

Interestingly in these rules firing doesn't actually cause casualties but adds 'Will to Combat' markers which can result in units becoming pinned or retiring.  The only way to actually destroy an enemy unit is in Close Combat

The best tactic is to soften up your opponent with firing until he becomes pinned and then charge home which is exactly what happened here...

The Communists charge in against the Regulares

Commanders have a limited number of orders they can place each turn.  The white markers are orders that haven't been revealed yet.  Each unit also has a rating from Green to Elite so, along with the Will to Combat markers (in red) there is some amount of table clutter which some people can find off-putting.  I don't really mind...I'd never have kept track of unit ratings without them.  We were having a hard enough time distinguishing between Anarchists, Socialists and Communists!

Each side may have a limited number of air attacks.  This depends on who has air superiority and this is affected in turn by which year of the war we are in.  Both of us had 3 attacks which didn't always arrive and weren't hugely effective which felt about right for this period of the war. 

By the end of the evening the Republicans had seized the monastery but were struggling to coordinate their attacks.  The Nationalists were now outnumbered and very much on the back foot.

A good set of rules I think... I need to read them again to see what I missed/got wrong and it would be interesting to try the updated version at some point.

¡Arriba Espana!

 I picked up a copy of Bob Cordery's Arriba Espana Spanish Civil War rules, newly released via Amazon.

The very affordable book (which also comes as a PDF,  but for the small difference in price you may as well get the real thing!) actually contains 2 sets of rules.  The first are the original rules which were first released in 1989.  These look really interesting with rules reflecting the internal political turmoil in the Republican forces.

The 2nd set are a brand new version of Bob's Portable Wargames Rules adapted for the SCW...I haven't played any of the other versions of these but they seem to be well thought of and look good.

Combined with Bob's excellent La Ultima Cruzada sourcebook on the SCW these are great inspiration for getting my SCW armies back on the table.

Five Games That Made Me The Gamer I Am Today

 This is a thing which has been doing the rounds on Twitter (I still don't entirely get Twitter but I use it more than I used to).  It's an interesting question and one I've been mulling over since reading other people's posts.  Some people have gone for wargames, others for RPGs or boardgames or even videogames.  Mine is likely to be a mix of the 1st 3.  I suspect if I was to repeat this list tomorrow it would look different  as I remember other games, but here goes...

Dungeons and Dragons

So this was very much my introduction to a world of gaming.  Sometime around 1978 I came across an advert in a copy of Ad Astra,  short-lived UK science fiction magazine.  I'm not sure if it was for a shop or for a games company but I'm pretty sure the ad featured D&D, Gamma World and Traveller (although this is a little hazy!).

Update... it was this advert...

  I convinced my parents to stump up for a copy of the D&D set and was completely mind-blown.  The starter set included the scenario In Search of the Unknown and the basic rulebook.  

This led me to track down (via now long-gone games shops in Glasgow) rulebooks for AD&D and then onto other games.  Role-playing led me down 2 paths... one was eventually to the games club at Strathclyde Uni and the other was to the Glasgow & District Wargames Club where we played...

WRG 6th Edition

Having discovered D&D I looked around for for club or a group to play with (of course this was the olden days where the only clues were hidden on postcards in shops).  I found GDWS who weren't a Role-playing club but suggested I come along to see what they do.  

Actually the first 'proper' set of rules I played were WRG 5th but these were quickly replaced by 6th Edition (Google tells me these came out in August 1980).  I wasn't very good... I think I lost most weeks... but I loved the game and had a couple of shockingly badly painted 28mm armies.  The club were incredibly welcoming to me and a couple of other young players.  I'm not sure if it would be as straightforward these days for clubs to welcome children in.

 

Star Fleet Battles

Strathclyde Uni's games club introduced me to lots of RPGs and boardgames and I spent many, many hours playing Star Fleet Battles at my friend Martin's... usually culminating in a Sausage Supper from a chippy on Byres Road and beer on a Saturday night.  I loved the depth and range of tactics depending on which faction you were playing.  I bought a new set a few years ago and found it harder to get to grips with than I remembered and a bit clunky (like lots of 80s games can be) but I haven't written it off yet!

Kingmaker

Strathclyde also introduced me to a lot of boardgames.  Kingmaker games would go on for days in the Student Union with endless making and breaking of alliances and a few players who took it a bit too seriously (although not as seriously as Risk which famously led to chairs being thrown!).  Kingmaker was (and is) such a great strategic game.  I was lucky enough to take part recently in some playtests for a planned revised edition which was a great experience.  Over the last year the Wars of the Roses games that I've played using Never Mind the Billhooks has brought my focus back to this period after a 30 year gap.

Black Powder

So having done the nostalgia bit, the game which has probably had the biggest impact on me in recent years is Black Powder.  I know it's sometimes criticised for being a bit generic but it has been the ruleset which has criss-crossed most of the gaming groups I've been lucky enough to be part of in more recent times.  I think one of the attractions is the toolkit aspect which means it can be tailored to suit different periods and the relative ease of play which means it's great for new players to get to grips with.

Honourable mentions...

OK, narrowing it down to 5 was always going to be a challenge.  Here are a couple of games that almost made it...

Laserburn

I played a lot of this when I was at school... proto-Warhammer 40k.  It was the first game where I realised you could make tweak and change rules and design your own scenarios

Gunslinger

I got a copy of this Avalon Hill boardgames on a family holiday to the US and loved the scenarios and the card-based mechanics.

And if I was going to pick a PC game...

Civilisation

I can still lose hours in this game...

Samurai #3... Ronin

 

So the final game of our Samurai trilogy unfolded last week (current score son 2, me 0).  Having played a couple of games of Test of Honour we decided to dig out the Osprey rules, Ronin...

I haven't played these for ages but had good memories of them so we decided it would be interesting to compare and contrast with ToH.  In many ways these are a more straightforward set of rules with alternate figure activation and nice straightforward dice (plus modifiers)... no fancy dice required!

The USP for these rules is that each figure has a number of counters in their Combat Pool each turn. At the start of each round you secretly select some for attack and defence, so you could, for example, fight an entire round on the defensive... hoping to hold off your opponent until reinforcements arrive.  Alternatively you could throw everything into multiple attacks and hope to finish your opponent off, but risk being injured in the process.  Counters can also be used to enhance attack or defence rolls or to boost your chance of gaining the initiative in the round.  I believe a similar system is used in Osprey's En Garde rules which I own but which are still in the great 'unplayed rules' pile.

I used some beads for attack and defence counters: I picked these up at a local Hobbycraft and they have a suitable 'Go' style about them...

Some figures also have additional bonuses and skills in certain weapons to add to the list of things to forget each round.  Our game pitted a band on Bushi (or regular warriors) against some Sohei monks who were defending their temple.

The quiet temple...

The monks rush out to defend the temple...

The Bushi arrive, determined to loot the temple

Ashigaru armed with Teppo (or arquebus) take some
long range shots across the river...

The melee concentrates around a rice store.

Neither of us made any attempts at subtlety.  I had split my troops and one of my Samurai and an Ashigaru armed with a spear made a brave rush towards the river but were quickly driven back by Bow and Teppo-fire, leaving the Samurai badly wounded and out of the fight.

Everyone else was drawn into an increasingly brutal melee which I really ought to have won.  At one stage I had a 2:1 advantage in numbers but my son fought a defensive couple of rounds, holding me off long enough for some extra monks to arrive to balance the odds.

more Teppo-fire rings out but with little effect...

The markers in the picture above indicate light or grievous wounds so you can see how bloody the fight was!  Despite my early advantage, the battle slipped away from me and my troops were cut down, leaving the monks victorious and me conceding a 3-0 defeat in our latest round of games.

On reflection we decided that we preferred these to Test of Honour... nothing wrong with ToH but these felt less chance driven and had more elements of tactics and skill in choosing where and how to balance attack and defence. That's enough Samurai for now though... time for them to retire to the loft to lick their wounds and find something else for our next game.