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.