Cohorts of the Damned

Gosh, I've put a lot of things on pause, haven't I? This blog, for one, including all those Japan photos still left over from January. The Ronin campaign has, I'm afraid, sort of fizzled (for now! we might finish next week!), but I only need to make one last push on the British project to call it feature-complete, so that's good at least. Anyway, instead of progressing on any of those, I've been painting up more 28mm samurai in order to finally have a proper go at Test of Honour. After playing through the introductory scenario a few weeks ago, over the weekend my dad and I had a go at one of the six basic scenarios in the book, pitting a mainly conventional samurai+ashigaru warband against the Rogues and Ruffians set, which I had bought in order to pad out my bandits a bit when I first conceived of the campaign. Both sides fielded 24-point forces, the conventional warband consisting of a samurai hero, an armoured and an unarmoured companion, a sergeant, two spear gr

While browsing Reddit recently, I ended up stepping into  this thread  posted by user /u/tehulzpare, asking how he might 'sell' rules with greater asymmetry and complexity to his friends – more specifically in this case, how he might get people to try Chain of Command rather than their existing staple, Bolt Action . As someone who is also sort of facing this question (both my current and previous groups are CoC devotees, but I'm going to be moving away for the next couple of years, near some friends who are mainly BA players), I had my own thoughts going in. As I was reading through tehulzpare's post, though, I started being put in mind of  this blog post  by Chris Pringle, author of Bloody Big Battles , from back in 2015, musing a bit on the various directions that rules can go in. To cut it very short (but you really ought to read it for yourself), Chris suggests that rather than seeing rules as falling on a sliding scale from more 'war' to more 'game&#

So, here's a turn-up for the books! Unfortunately, Gareth was ill last week, but this week his son Tim turned up as well, so they ended up splitting between them: Gareth and I would play through the Assassination scenario to give Tim a chance to re-familiarise himself with the rules, and then Tim would take the Koryu for the Duel. Game 2 was... well it certainly was something. Owing to the En Garde points changes, the ninja force comprised six men rather than the five from the original scenario, and I chose to deploy four to begin with, with two held in reserve to try and stop the Sensei's advance. This, er, did not work out quite to my advantage. My Ninjas all had a less than stellar performance in melée against all the lesser figures, and one was completely swept aside by the Sensei. Right at the end, I managed to win a critical Priority roll and close in with my Chunin... who proceeded to be cut to pieces almost immediately. This left a single Ninja to flee the field in terr