Chris Palmer and I (ably assisted by Kurt Schlegel) ran a large (14-player) Bear Yourselves Valiantly: Look, Sarge, No Charts: Fantasy, Ancients, and Mediaeval game at Historicon Saturday morning. We ran the large game partly to expose people to the still under development rules and also to demonstrate (to ourselves at least) that the rules could support a game that big without bogging down. I think we accomplished both objectives while also providing a fun game for the players.
We were running this large fantasy game back-to-back with our battle of Laon Napoleonic game (see previous post), so for the fantasy game we used the same scenario; we ran Laon with Elves and Goblins.
In this scenario the Elves were trying to keep a road open while the Goblins and their undead allies were trying to cut the road. There was lots of room on this 15-foot table for maneuver, so this was not your normal lines of troops packed in across the table game.
The rules worked really well for this large game. Except for a couple of folks from our local club (the HAWKs), none of the players had any experience with the rules. They quickly picked up the mechanics and could largely play the game without us after a couple of turns.
The goblins tried to work their way around the Elven left flank while also fighting tooth and nail for control of this town. The town had no impact on the victory conditions, but like moths to flame the two armies converged on it. I guess they liked the blue roofs.
I brought all my troops, but we mainly used just Chris’ troops. Apparently we have enough between us for an even larger game in the future!
My wife had the good camera, and the room was pretty dim, so many of these pictures turned out very dark.
In the end, the Elves held about two more feet of road than the Goblins and were declared the winners.
I like this picture, because the guy closes to the camera is obviously enjoying himself.
