Cohorts of the Damned

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...

Having dithered and dawdled for a while, I decided to finally get going on the Kenshin Ryu mini-campaign that Craig Woodfield wrote up for Ronin , but with a twist: the basic problem with doing it in Ronin is that when fighting against Koryu, Bandits get enormously more mileage out of archers (firing twice per turn) compared to musketeers (firing every other turn), and the number of bandit archer figures out there is, er... limited  to say the least. So, instead I converted the Ronin army lists over to En Garde , which is pretty simple as a process: just subtract 1 each from Initiative, Fight, and Shoot, and then run the unit profile through En Garde 's points system. The end result is that troops are generally  a bit cheaper in En Garde , but I've got just enough figures to make it work. So, with that all sorted out, the usual Tuesday evening game with Gareth would be Scenario 1: Ambush, with me taking the dastardly bandits. Gareth, whose force comprised one Senpai, four Ko...