Cohorts of the Damned

Following some recent weather events, it was back to the usual Tuesday gaming slot with a quick and brutal game of Craig Woodfield's Ronin . While I've been pivoting to En Garde!  for my feudal-era games, I hadn't yet come up with an idea for how to adapt the firearm profiles in the Late Edo appendices or how to adjust the points costs, so back to Ronin  it was. The Setup The scenario I chose was, however, an En Garde!  one, Escort , if for no other reason than to do a big urban setup with many of the buildings I've accumulated over the last two years. In addition to looking at the version in the book, I also checked the Ronin version published in North Star's online magazine , which would have served as its basis. This helped to reconcile a couple of issues I found in the En Garde! version: Firstly, while the En Garde!  version stipulates a 10-turn limit, it doesn't give a table size. I misread and thought that the  Ronin  version calls for a table 36" de

Finally following on from  the last part , I stalled a bit on the artillery because there was just going to be a lot of technical complexity involved, in two main ways: firstly, I hate  painting wheels and have no idea how anyone gets paint between the spokes and along the inside; secondly, I like my wheels to turn, which means a lot of drilling and messing around with brass and pewter to get the axles fixed. Technically  I wouldn't consider the artillery fully done per se, but given that I've got all the guns and crew finished, I will call them just about complete even though I still have a couple of limbers and horse teams still to do. I have to admit it is quite funny that the first image you get when you google 'Armstrong Gun' is this one, showing of one of the half-dozen guns that were built in Nagasaki, rather than at Elswick or Woolwich. I did up the artillery basically on a whim based on what I thought would look fun, in no small part because my attempts to actu

Despite having played The Men Who Would be Kings for a couple of years now, it struck me that I had never got round to trying its much-vaunted solo rules. With my normal sparring partners unavailable and some bad weather rolling in, I thought it would be a good chance to have a go, and also to break in some of my Anglo-Indian forces. The game lasted a whopping 29 turns so I'll try not to do a complete blow-by-blow; instead I'll try to give a relatively general summary of what happened, and my thoughts on the Mr Babbage system. To get a criticism out of the way early on, how exactly to set up is not as clearly communicated as it might have been. That you should ideally just be playing a pure combat encounter rather than a scored scenario is the last of Mr Babbage's ten instructions, and when you are told to 'line your chaps up' you are not told whether to do so lengthways or widthways. Taking a cue from this solo game by Neil of the blog Toy Soldiers and Dining Room