Battle Report: Watling Street, and thoughts on Bear Yourselves Valiantly

Boudicea's vengeful horde

 We took a first crack at Alyssa's Battle of Watling Street scenario for Enfilade last night. She's using the Bear Yourselves Valiantly rules, with a fair number of modifications to suit the scenario, and this run through was more playtest than anything else.

Roman defenders, ready to stick it to the hairy barbarians

 Bear Yourselves Valiantly is a decent rules set, IMO. It plays faster than it looks, and I do love the card activation. I'm also a fan of the big bases (in this game, each base was 120mm wide). Still, it's not what I'd call my perfect ancients set.

Chariots and naked warriors smash into the Roman line

 It uses a d10 for combat resolution, which can feel rather swingy - without a bell curve, results feel like they can be all over the place rather than trending toward an average with less common outliers. It's much the same gripe I have with Savage Worlds, to look at the RPG side of things for a moment. Because of the importance of the Morale Value for each unit, it's also rather fiddly to get the MV just right - too high and your units break instantly, too low and they never do. But given that even an MV of 3 means that a unit will fail a morale test on 25% (I think) of its checks, MVs have to be rather low to begin with... This is less a flaw or a feature of the system than just part of the way it works.

View of some Celts - Alyssa's been on a painting tear with these, doing everything on the table in the last four months or so

 The writing, too, is not quite as clear as I'd like - despite the author's claims that it doesn't require charts, I think a simple quick reference sheet for players is extremely helpful - especially one that lays out exactly which dice you need to roll for each situation.

End of game due to time, though clearly it still had several turns of potential to come to a conclusion.

Speaking of dice, BYV uses special dice - six of 'em - to give results for leadership checks, random order checks, tests to close and tests to receive the charge. This is probably my favorite part of the system, as once you get used to the dice it makes the game play quite quick.

Overall, I'm ok with the system. I'm looking forward to playing a few more games of Bear Yourselves Valiantly and I also plan on checking out their Fate of Battle variant for Napoleonics.

An April Summary

This past April was rather light on both painting and gaming; I've been rather distracted with a number of non-gaming things. Oddly enough, my historicals this month were confined entirely to sea...

Enfilade playtest

Post-Battle

Early in the month, Andy ran us poor landlubbers through a playtest of a scenario he's working on for Enfilade - I'll say no more than that, save that was a fun experiment with a refereed double-blind game, and that it involved the Pacific Theatre.

England expects every man to... muck it up and run into his fleetmates!

Later in the month, we broke out Alyssa's enormous Sails of Glory collection and tried that game out for the first time. It's an adaptation of the flightpath system used in Wings of Glory and the X-Wing Miniatures Game, tuned to work for naval warfare in the Napoleonic era.

Three British 3rd rates face off against French counterparts

 The game - even with all the optional rules - plays very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that with six newbie players each commanding a single ship, we were able to knock out three games in the evening.

Maneuvering: Harder than it looks

 There were perhaps more ship-to-ship collisions than might have been expected, but...

See above!

...it was remarkably good fun. So much so that I went out and bought several more ships for my own collection. Looking forward to playing this again.

Historical Games Day

Saga - Scots vs Vikings, Viking win

 As usual, we had the Historical Miniatures Wargames day on the third Saturday of the month, coinciding with the Sails of Glory game evening. I demoed Sails of Glory to Gabe and saw a Saga and a Lion Rampant game go down.

Lion Rampant - Hundred Years War, IIRC

Warmachine & Hordes

I drove down to Corvallis at the beginning of the month for the little Just-A-Games Con at the Elks lodge there. This year the tourney wasn't really well attended. Only six players, and one dropped after the second round, so... I took Zaal 1/Zaal 2 theme forces for ease of packing, and found out that neither one is a good answer to Butcher 3 after I had to play against him twice, losing terribly each time. My opponents were perfectly pleasant, and the organizer did his best, but... well, the highlight of the trip was the sandwich I had for lunch at Togo's. And it was a pleasant drive, so there's that.

Of course, this was all cast deep in shade by Privateer Press' announcement this month of the next edition of Warmachine and Hordes! Mark 3, as everyone except PP is calling it, will be pre-released at Lock & Load in June, and released at retail on June 29. This has had two effects in the local group: everyone's very excited about Mark 3, and no one has much motivation to play competitive Mark 2 games. So we're seeing a lot of very oddball games lately as people try out those weird things they've been thinking about for years, before the new edition rolls out.

Painting

Painting-wise, I've been focusing on a particular commission - some Saga Pagan Rus for CGR Painters. Pictures of that to follow when I get it done in a week or two. I must say, it's a pleasure to paint Gripping Beast figures.

As for May, well... once this commission's done, I'm going to try to knock out a few Warmachine models before the new edition, and then get to work finishing my 15mm WW2 skirmish stuff. But the highlight of the month promises to be Enfilade. Really, really planning on not buying (too many) unpainted figures this year...