Cohorts of the Damned

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...

For the usual Tuesday game night I was very close to subjecting my sparring partners to the rather maths-heavy  Smooth and Rifled  (a set that I do like, for what it's worth), but having had a bad night's sleep I decided instead for all our sakes to go with the old reliable The Men Who Would Be Kings  instead, doing Scenario F: Take the High Road. In this scenario, one side has 12 turns in which to take control of an objective from a smaller defending force. Per the rules, this is played lengthwise on a 6'x4' table, with the attacker having a 24-point force and the defender an 18-point force. Given that I had three players and a large table, I widened the table to 6' and increased the forces by half, so the attackers would have a 36-point force and the defenders 27. I also took the liberty of setting up the terrain in advance, but giving the attackers a choice of one of three locations to serve as their objective: The terrain setup. The river at the back marks the r...

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...