Well it has been a strange week, I have not had any chance to do much actual hobby stuff, all I have really managed to do is write more rules!!
I have finally worked out a few issues with the Zombie rules, I think I have managed to get the activation sequence sorted, hopefully I will get a chance to playtest a few short games testing this.
I still need to sort out a lot for the game though, things like the weapons and equipment, these will take some time to get right.
The other big thing I need to do is to get some sort of scenario / campaign system done so that you can go from game one with a starting scenario working your way through games in a similar way to All Things Zombie by 2Hour Wargames, this will take a lot of work if I want to keep things very simple.
But if the activation works that will be a big step forward for the game and I can work on the rest when I find the time.
I have also been working hard on getting the sci-fi rules done, I have now got the weapons / vehicles / troop list almost done, including finally sorting out the points values… this was very hard to get right, although I will not know if it is right yet or not until I have had a chance to playtest the game a lot more.
I have also started working on the datacards for the units and I am happy with how they are coming along, below is a basic card with the first attempt at a background, I still need to do all the images for the units, troops, vehicles, walkers etc. etc. they will take a while to do!
But I am happy with the basic layout, things may change as I work on the rules and of course playtest them, the points system is wrong at the moment and still needs some work to get right.
I am sorting out some of my 6mm sci-fi figures ( good old Epic!! ) Space Marines and Chaos, plus of course my 15mm armies and then my 40k figures, Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines and Orks.
This is so the game can be tested at a selection of scales, so far it seems to work fine with the 15mm and the 28mm, I haven’t really had to think about changing anything when switching scales, movement and shooting all works with inches, I just need to try the 6mm armies.
The only thing I have seen that will need adjusting when using different scale is the turning template and the fire arc template ( the same template ) the one for the 28mm figures is too big for the smaller figures!!
This will take some work to sort out.
I did manage to get in one game this week at the club, it was a quick first time play of “Silver Bayonet” I had seen much about this game and didn’t really know what it was all about, I only knew the basics and that is the game is a weird set of rules that uses Historical figures alongside Horror stuff.
We used Napoleonic figures, I played the Spanish and my opponent played the French, in our game we had to search the five areas on the table ( red tiddlywink’s! ) and kill anything that we discovered and kill each other figures, we would get Victory Points for each thing we did.
The rules seemed a little complicated to start with ( a lot more complicated than I like ) but after the first turn I realised it wasn’t that complicated at all.
There are some nice touches in the rules that make it interesting, the activation felt odd to start with as well but it was really good.
Whoever won the initiative ( a quick roll of two D10’s highest wins ) gets to move half of their figures then any monsters move then the player that lost the initiative moves all of their figures, then the player with the initiative moves the remainder of their figures.
This proved to be an interesting take on activation, the player with the initiative has an advantage of activating some of their figures first before their opponent activates so can get to objectives first or can attack first, then they get to activate the rest after their opponent activates so they can react to what their opponent does.
This does give a nice feel to the turn, sort of swings and roundabouts, this does mean that the loser of the initiative for the turn does get to move and attack with all of their figures before the other player gets to react.
This does force you to think about the order in which you activate your figures.
The combat was interesting as well, we used different colour D10’s when shooting or fighting, one colour was used as the power dice ( in our case the blue dice ) this was used by weapons for damage, so if you rolled above the enemies defence number you then used the power dice to give the amount of damage done.
These damage and combat dice rolls had one or two simple modifiers that could make things slightly easier or harder to hit or damage the target, nothing too complicated again.
And to finish off each player had a pool of different colour dice that could be used to re-roll the matching coloured dice if you were not happy with the result, once used the dice from the pool were discarded, so you only had a limited number of re-rolls during the game.
So all in all a nice simple and fun game to play, if I get the chance I would play this again.
I didn’t manage to do a battle report of the game, but I did manage to take a few photos of the action.
My opponent won easily, but it was still a good fun game I enjoyed it a lot.
Well I am hoping to get in some more playtesting of my sci-fi rules over the coming weekend and I will do a battle report for any games I have, but for now here are a couple of pictures of the miniatures I will be using.
First off some of my Orks and Space Marines, these will be for the big figure games ( it means I might even get some more of my Orks painted )
Then I have some of my small stuff, this time 6mm, Space Marines and they will be fighting against Chaos, both sides may have a Titan or two!!
