Testing My Honour

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 groups, one bow group, and a single musketeer. The Rogues and Ruffians comprised the full character set, plus one of the Trait cards (which seems to be how you're supposed to play them). While in theory the Rogues and Ruffians would warrant the inclusion of Ambush Quest and Skill cards, and I actually had got quite a few extra cards from other sets of figures I had bought over the last couple of years, we decided just to boil it down to the core set for this game.

For the scenario, we rolled a die and got 'Ambush', with one side (in this case the warband) trying to transport a chest off the other end of the table, and the other (the rogues) trying to steal it for themselves. The chest ended up being assigned to the ashigaru sergeant, which we later realised was a bit of an error since he could only move once a turn unlike the samurai. Not, of course, that this would ultimately matter much...

The game started off quickly with both sides moving their melee troops up on the road and by the woods, while the missile troops skirmished on the other side.

First blood would be drawn when the Brute character among the rogues managed to wound and bowl over one of the samurai:

However, he managed to recover and was relieved by some spearmen.

The centre would end up revolving around a fight between the remaining Character figures on the road.

After a charge by the spearmen against the Widow (the dual-swords lady in black) which I was forced to parry, it seemed as though the samurai hero was likely to slaughter her if given enough actions to do so. With 5 Strength dice by default, plus another for the Widow being an unarmoured model, plus another for rolling a weapon bonus during the Aim roll, it seemed certain that she'd be done for... until.

Phew! Unfortunately this reprieve would not last. Not long after, I activated my musketeer, the Drunkard, who proceeded to, er, fire directly at the Archer next to him. Thankfully, he missed.

Fortune seemed to swing my way again when the samurai hero rolled a fumble result on his Aim dice, leading to his suffering a light wound:

However, he got the last laugh when the unarmoured samurai attacked the Widow and scored a pretty decisive Strength result.

While Heroes have a chance to survive an otherwise-fatal attack and instead take an Injury card, I failed the Test of Honour required to do so and so that was curtains for her.

Over on my right, the Brute had managed to chain attacks against one of the spear groups and wipe it out, but was now sandwiched between two samurai (the unarmoured one having rushed off to that flank) and unlikely to make it out alive.

The Witch managed to score a light wound against the armoured samurai, but that would be the last such success this game:

Two attacks from the samurai hero whittled down her defences, and then that was it.

It actually shouldn't have been – I had drawn a Skill card for her that would have given her a 50/50 chance of actually surviving that attack, but, er, I had forgotten it! The Brute fell not long after, and so with all three of my Characters dead, having accounted for none of the enemy's, it seemed high time to quit the field.

In the end, I was quite happy with Test of Honour even if I lost this game quite badly. The comparison to Ronin is obvious: whereas the latter game is a bit more predictable at the movement stage, with all models getting to move, I feel like the single opposed die roll for melée resolution creates slightly too many fringe results to be entirely satisfactory all the time. Test of Honour doesn't necessarily involve less luck, but the need to pass two or three die rolls to successfully land a killing blow does at least give fights a chance to drag out a bit more; there's also a little more opportunity to withdraw from an ongoing combat. While I don't think I can make it work for Boshin War, at least for feudal Japanese games I think ToH may well be taking over from here on out.