Day: September 19, 2016

To culminate gaming weekend to commemorate Ma’k Morin’s visit to the Aberdeen area, Mark ran a test of his fantasy rules at Wood’s Hole (Dave’s basement).  It involved “bad guys,” like Orcs, insect men, fire-spitting salamanders, goblins, and others, attempting to capture the tower from the “good” guys, composed of humans, dwarves, elves, and Roomans.

You can see a lot of cards around the table.  Each unit in Mark’s game has a card with all its attributes, characteristics, and special abilities.  Mark wasn’t sure how many players we would have, so he planned for eight.  With only four players, we had a lot of figures to control, and it was hard to find the right card.  When players have the right number of units, I think managing the cards would be easier.

In this picture you can see Mark’s Roomans (with reddish fur) and my Roomans (in green) preparing to defend a strong position against the bad guys.  Both Dave and Eric sent forces to attack this position.  I managed to fend off the succubus and the first fire-breathing salamander, but by the end of the game, Eric’s second salamander was approach and his Elite Death Guard Cavalry was about to get behind me.

There are a few things that can be done to streamline and improve the rules, but it went pretty well as a first test.

We had been gaming since Friday evening, and we had to quit this game around 1400, so we didn’t fight the battle to a conclusion.  I think the outcome remained in doubt when we quit.    It was a fun game, and it was fun to see a lot of Mark’s troops on the table for the first time in 30 years.

This weekend our club got together for a series of game in my war room.  The second game of the day was Duncan’s War of 1812 skirmish game using Combat Patrol(TM).  Duncan has been working on an adaptation of the Combat Patrol(TM): World War II for the Napoleonic era for some months.  A purpose of this play test was to work through Duncan’s artillery rules.  While we think that artillery doesn’t really have a place in a black powder skirmish game, since its effects are sort of “nuclear” in a game with just a handful of figures, several Combat Patrol(TM) players have asked for artillery rules.

This skirmish game involved several British units converging on an American supply dump in the upper Niagara area.  The British and Canadians had to gather supplies from the cabins and wagons while we Americans had to stop them.

Because we wanted to test the artillery rules, part of the Canadian objective was to capture this American gun emplacement.  The story was that the Canadians could bring a small ship to the dock to haul away supplies if the gun was silenced.  I was on the other end of the table, betting slapped around by Canadians, but I understand that the two shots of canister that were fired had a devastating effect.

One of the things that is different between this set of rules and the base WWII rules is that between shots, figures must spend an action to reload.  You can see some white pipe cleaners in the pictures.  Those were used to mark when a musket had been fired and needed to be reloaded.  In this picture you can also see a white rubber band around one figure (marking him as wounded) and a black rubber band (marking him as stunned).

There was a lot of fighting around this field.

With the small modifications that Duncan has made, Combat Patrol(TM) is working very well for the black powder era.  We have accounted for the differences between close order and open order units, cavalry, and now artillery.  This supplement is getting very close to being releasable.  Stay tuned.