Cohorts of the Damned

All right, I admit that this is not the punchiest of titles; I'll need to work something out for when I do come up with a more formal Bakumatsu adaptation of TMWWBK. But anyway, following on from the last Boshin War game, this evening it was different armies, different rules, and a different opponent. I had thought I might have played Kings with James once a few months ago, but clearly I remembered wrong, so this would be his first go. It's certainly been an interesting experience: James has been trying to get me into Clash of Katanas  for a while, a set of rules I have to admit I am not fully convinced by, and it seems at the moment that the reverse is also true! In advance of him turning up, I took a bit of a novel approach to terrain generation, which I have humbly dubbed 'lobbing dice at the table and seeing what happens'. Wherever a die landed would mark the rough centre of a terrain piece, with 1 being a miscellaneous feature like a pond, 2 or 3 being a wood, 4 or...

After a moderate absence from the gaming table, I decided on a relatively straightforward return game, which was also a good chance to make use of one of my Salute purchases, namely an official card deck for Sharp Practice, after over half a decade using ordinary playing cards for Napoleonics and a few custom-painted tokens for earlier Boshin games. The basic idea was simply to get two forces on the table with some relatively straightforward objectives and see how we got on. The Imperial force would have two Groups and their Leader already on-table holding a village, while the remainder would try to get up to the village with a supply train in tow. The Shogunate force's objective was to either take the village from the Imperial force  or  to prevent the supplies getting there. With the Imperial force seeming to have the harder time of things, I decided to take them, while my opponent (Gareth) took the Shogunate force. The table setup: The overall size was about 5' by 6', wi...

Being a bit of a prolific collector of rules, I thought I'd procrastinate a bit on finishing off various other projects in order to go over the ones I've used for the Boshin War over the last few years. To just lay things out in advance, I think all of these rules work both about equally well as games in their own right and for the Boshin War in particular, even if there are a couple I gravitate more towards than others. What I will do in this post is run very quickly through each set of rules on its own (on the off-chance that any given reader is unfamiliar, but I suspect that's only likely to be true of one of these rule sets), then cover how they, or supplemental material, cover the Boshin War, or can be made to. At present this post only covers four sets of rules, but that could go up over time as I try adapting other sets for use with the period (I'm already eyeing Test of Honour  and Bushidan , for instance). Sharp Practice (2nd edition) (TooFatLardies, 2016) Shar...