Bills, Bows and Bloodshed Rules Test

 

#2 in this series of 4 or 5 medieval rules play-throughs.

Presentation

32pp (? - no page numbers! no index!) stapled A4 book with glossy card covers. No diagrams, just some dense "tutorial" colour images at the end. Two copies (nice) of a 2 page QRS. VERY text heavy, not a single real table or even bullet point. Some nice info on livery colours though. Written by Barry Slemmings with Graham Towers. I picked my copy up from Barry himself at Salute. Available from him on eBay at https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/144287669442

Had to go up to the loft whilst the game was in progress, so nice overhead shot!

Set-Up

Mortimer's Cross again, just hit reset after abandoning the Flower of Chivalry game.

How It Played

Far better. The Yorkist horse and bowmen ambushed the Lancastrian left flank. The Courror's brushed aside their opposite number and rode straight on to catch Warwick with only his own personal guard. Luckily Warwick is made of stern stuff and his DMAA managed to fight the Currours. The bowmen pinned the advancing Lancastrians allowing Yorkist Bow and Bill to start inflicting casualties. On the opposite flank the Lancastrian bow crossed the river, but by the time they got to an enfilade position the game was pretty much over. Just left of them, on the "home" side of the river the Lancastrian handgunners did a reasonable job of trading shots with the Yorkist archers. The main effort came as the Lancastrians hit the Yorkist line on an ~3 unit front. They had their best success on the right, alongside the handgunners, routing the Yorkist archers and getting in  a tussle with the second line bill. The other two units though were stopped by the Yorkist archers, who then let their bill and DMAA through to finish off the weakened Lancastrians. The final move of the game saw the lone penetrating Lancastrian bill unit make contact with Edward and his retainers just outside the village, but like Warwick he fought them off and victory was claimed.

Rules Impressions

I think that Bills, Bows and Bloodshed is one of those cases of having a good ruleset struggling to get out. As mentioned above the whole thing is really just solid text, with no nicely laid out tables to help grasp/find the key points. The QRS is basically the same text as the main rules with just some of the paragraphs dropped. The core rules are fine though, pretty classic 1D per stand, roll 4-6s or whatever to hit, plus saving throw. Movement is variable, 2 x Average Dice, which I like. Morale though has 11 triggers (and if more than one roll dice multiple times and choose worse - nice!) and 55 (!) modifiers. To be fair the rules say that once you get the hang of it you'll roll the 2 x Average Dice and if they're good assume a pass, and if possibly bad do the tests, which is what I did start to do, but even so. One issue is that the rules do account for almost every situation, and have lots of Nationality modifiers. 

There are two big (huge?) omissions:

• There is no activation/command & control/ friction system. This is old school units do what you tell them unless they fail a charge morale test. A huge contrast to Flower of Chivalry that almost goes to the other extreme.
• There seem to be no victory conditions or army morale, so every game is a game to the death?

On the plus side though the rules do allow you to have mixed bill/bow units (which modern research seems to suggest was possible/common), allows bow to fire into second ranks, allows bow to risk withdrawing through the bill behind and a host of other niceties which a lot of other rules miss - so Barry certainly knows his period (as befits a long time member of the Lance and Longbow Society) and gaming.

Overall

The rules are good enough though that I'm almost tempted to do my own QRS, or I might just steal a few bits for my own rules. If I as doing a QRS I think I'd do 2 versions, one a "quick play" which just pulls out the main DMs and loses lesser weapons/Nationalities, and one with everything. They would be though JUST tables, quick and easy to read. Despite the negatives the actual rules are as good as, and probably better than most medieval I've played, but just let down really badly by presentation.

Edward's turn to fight off the attack!

Flower of Chivalry Rules Test

 

The next cycle of probably 4-5 games are all War of the Roses based, testing out various rules sets. Christmas delayed getting it all going, and probably not helped by my first choice of rules - Flower of Chivalry (FoC).

Presentation

80 page pdf by the Canadian Wargamers Group, published in 1993! The rules only take up about 6 pages, with about 18 pages of useful background and 50 odd pages of scenarios and army lists. Probably worth the £15-£22 price just for the non-rules content. Simple text, no photos, simple diagrams, pretty old-school.

Set-Up

I used Mortimer's Cross (1641) as the scenario. The FoC scenario implies that the battle was fought E-W, with the Yorkists protecting the bridge behind them to the E. However this gives little depth and the Lancastrians have to reform after exiting the woods and hills to the W and the Yorkists having the river to their backs. Recent research seems to suggest that a N-S orientation was more likely, the  Lancastrians moving N from Hereford towards the crossing, with the Yorkists defending just to the S of it, so this is what I played.

Each side had 3 battles, each with about 3 elements (missiles, bill, DMAA), which took up all my WOTR figures. That gives about 1:25 figure to man ratio, and on a 6' x 4' table each 10cm square is about 50m.

How It Played

Not very well. The Lancastrians fought off the flank charge by the Yorkist Courrors and closed with the Yorkist line. There was an extended melee but after 2-3 hours play I lost heart.

Rules Impressions

Just didn't work for me. Having to decide on a Aggressiveness and the roll for BattleLust for every Battle every turn just seemed over the top - would have worked fine as a per game decision, but then still rolling every turn? There's something in the whole idea, but not in how it was implemented. Firing was pretty simple, roll under target, and the casualties being the number rolled if successful a nice idea. Melee ditto. Morale was a roll under a %, with a -10/20% off per stand lost. So the rest of the core mechanic were fine but the explanations, particularly about the command and control just all seemed so confusing, and the activation mechanism so tedious I just lost the will to play.

Overall

Worth buying for the source information and scenarios alone, but not for the rules.

ACP164: Erma, Toki, Terrorists and Resistance Fighters

 

Finally go the next batch of ACP164 figures done. There are 6 terrorist/resistance fighter figures (mix of lapine and non-lapine) and the character figures of Erma and Toki in EDF battle dress. Particularly like the rabbit in the black leather jacket and the vixen. Erma and Toki came out a bit flat as I was rushing it as I wanted to get them done before the Christmas break.

The terrorist figures will mean I can make a start on the Almata campaign next year (if I get the time!)

P.S. I do have a WOTR game on the table at the moment but other things keep getting in the way :-(

ACP164 Shipboard Action

 

Ahead of painting up my ACP164 Spacers and as part of some testing for a Star Patrol(ACP164)/Cepheus hybrid I've been playing some short sharp shipboard actions. A crew of 6 critters (2 typically staying on the bridge) trying to fight off a boarding action by 3 armoured droids.

As ever the ACP164 card mechanic gave a nice slick game and the morale draws through in some nice curve balls - although perhaps the droids should have been less susceptible.

One thing I did decide was that an SMG/Shotgun close range of only 3 squares just seemed too short in the context of confined spaces, but conversely the movement rates (often 7-9 squares) were too much so I doubled ranges and halved movement and the net result was a far better game I thought.

Out of the 3 games I played I think the critters won all three, for no loss on the first one, one casualty on the 2nd and 2 casualties on the third (with a third critter curled up sobbing in the corner). Since the critters were being played as "PCs" rather than NPCs I'd given them higher Resilience and pulled them out of the fight once they'd had 3 hits so none of them died (although the auto-doc might be busy).

All worked pretty well I thought, now just need to finish off the Star Patrol(ACP164)/Cepheus idea.

Salute 2021

 A good trip down to Salute, meeting up with Adrian and Nick. Guess it was about half the size of a "normal" Salute, most of the traders seem to be there but wargames themselves were pretty thin on the ground - a few nice tables which I've captured below. My purchases were mainly around scenery (esp 10mm) so nothing that really stands out.

Probably the best looking wargame there in my view

Reference shot of some flatpack MDF 28mm sci-fi crates I bought

Another nice table, cigar box mats and hexon roads!

A pretty stunning 3D Stalingrad - think it won best in show

Nice looking dungeon crawl

The SHADO Skydiver and S.I.D, nice models!

The rest of the UFO game with Interceptor, Aliens and Moon Shuttle

And just to prove that the wargamers may not have been the saddest people in Excel that day, a neighbouring hall (and most of the eateries and walkways) were full of Star Trek fans in full cosplay mode.

Roll on April 2022!

Waterloo 60 Article in Miniature Wargames #464

 

Miniature Wargames carried the whole of my 6 page article on our Waterloo60 game in the latest issue (464), with some lovely photo spreads and Dale's piece from Poland too! There was also a really nice intro from editor John Treadaway on what we did as well. 

Solomani/Terran Name Generator

Faced with possibly having to name the whole 480+ crew of the Deepnight Revelation (well maybe only some of them) I started looking for a better way to generate "ordinary" names since the standard (including my own) Traveller Word Generators are very hit and miss - particularly for languages you know! A quick hunt on the web found that https://forebears.io/ had lists of the most common 1000 first and last names globally. Whilst the list is bound to have some biases it certainly seemed to be pretty representative, with strong showings from China/Africa/South America - far better than most "baby name" lists. So I screen-scraped the two lists and dropped them into a little Javascript app that just randomly matches a first name with a surname. The list didn't have any gender information, so you'll have to check that yourself if it's vital, but otherwise I think the app generates really usable names - and moves nicely away from the Anglo-Saxon centric naming that can dominate in some SF RPGs.

You can find the app here:

http://www.taunoyen.com/traveller/solomaninames.html

Next step will be to add it into my Traveller Word Generator so you can get Vilani/Galangic first/last names matched with Solomani last/first names!