Flint and Feather Playtest

The other players rolled an Assualt Scenario. We got together to playtest our rewrite of the Campaign Rules this week. All the players started with new Warbands. In this new system you get an amount of dice equal to the current CV of your Great Warrior. These are called War! Dice. All Great Warriors get to take a Companion and up to three Striplings with them as part of their Warband. You can then choose to either take a Key Character with you by giving up a single War! Dice for each Key Character you want to take with you or roll on the Warband Size Chart. The total of your dice determine what warriors you convince to go with you on your campaign turn to fight your tabletop battle. For my Warband I took my Great Warrior, Companion and three Stiplings. I then put a War! Dice aside for a Veteran Warrior and a Healer. I then rolled my three remaining War! Dice for a total of ten and got five Warbearers to fill out my Warband. We then rolled scenarios. I rolled an Attacker Ambushed ...

On Wednesday evening we pushed forward our campaign rules playtest. We have been continuing along with our playtesting. In our third week we sat down to play again with one player being very dominant in his wins of tabletop games. This is good in playtesting as you can see how the system works with one player being successful. We used a Bear to represent the Totem.  We had an interesting situation in one game with a Medicine Roll on the first turn. The player got the event Totem Appears. This is a medicine event from our extended list that we are now playtesting. The event causes the Warband to go to Inspired for the rest of the game. It also gives the player a spirit creature that has a CV of 5 and four hits to appear with the Great Warriors group and it stays for one complete turn. It happened early in the game so both players maneuvered to avoid or put the totem to use in close combat. The later was finally achieved and the Totem obliterated a War Bearer from t...

We were at Council Fires in Brantford Ontario on October 21st and we ran a complete set of teaching games. We were also at Fall In in Lancaster Pennsylvania on November 3rd and 4th and we ran a demonstration game with 14 players on the Saturday night. Thanks to all who played! We threw the players into a series of one on one games in order to help them learn the rules and although Howard Whitehouse and myself had to run around the games teaching rules, it was a great experience. We were very busy but we feel this helps the players learn the rules and keeps the games moving. It was also the first time we played with the Shining Wood in our playtesting games. The Shining Wood had quite an effect on the Warbands when they were fired. As we move into campaign game playtesting there has been a lot of questions about dropped weapons or thrown weapons. The rules let you throw axes, spears, tomahawks and even knives. So the question is whether these items can be picked up again and how? Afte...

First off we apologize for not posting on our blog for some time. We have been busy with holidays, shipping Kickstarter stuff and attending shows. However, at our two previous shows we have run four games of Flint and Feather and taught rules to seventeen players. This is a slow process getting the rules out there and teaching them to gamer's everywhere. At Historicon in July we had eleven players around two games. The first game was run by Howard Whitehouse and had five players competing over an assault on a village complete with a long house and surrounding log wall. The attackers consisted of three groups of five warriors in one warband while the defenders had ten warriors. I am told the assualt of the village failed but both sides suffered tremendous casualties. The Iroquois advanced through a throng of trees to the north of the village. They were met with stern bow fire from the walls as they approached. The first group of attackers went against the wall and were repul...

Tom's Archers huddle behind the rocks for cover. Oshweken is a village on the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation Indian reserve near Brantford, Ontario, Canada.We were in Brantford for a local show at the Legion Hall and ran a day long campaign game of Flint and Feather. My goal was to work through a couple or few games using the campaign rules in between tabletop games to see how they ran and tweak any issues. We were successful in that we did get a chance to get a good assessment of the campaign rules. We had two players lined up, Tom and Wayne, who sat down to bash on each other. Neither had played the game before so it would be a good test of the rules. This was also the first convention playtest that we used Shaman rules and Orenda. We also used the Warband Record Sheets for each player. Four Sheets of six man Warbands had been prepared the night before. Each Warband was created equally using a Great Warrior, Companion, Veteran Warrior, Warbearer, Stripling and S...

One of my friends had bought me some Christmas wreath material that he swore was great to use to model corn rows. He was right. However, when modelling corn rows for the legendary pre-contact era one must take into consideration that the first nations peoples planted in clumps rather than rows. Also, they grew the three sisters together, which were corn, beans and squash in the northeastern area of North America with which we are concerned. So I decided to try and model the three sisters together rather than simple corn rows. So here is a quick demonstration of how to model the three sisters for your Flint and Feather tabletop skirmish games. I don't think this is anything new to the gaming genre but adding the three sisters in may be a bit of a novelty. 1. I started with wood rectangles of 1/8 thick wood, cut to 2" x 4' size. A glue and water mixture was slathered on top and fine grain sand drizzled on top to provide texture. This was allowed to dry and then painted bro...

I am very proud to report that we sat down with four players on Sunday evening and started working on the campaign rules for the Flint and Feather game. We started by making up 100 Fur Warbands each. We had four players, two of which had played before but in the earlier playtesting versions. So we put two players on each side and started teaching the rules with our new upgraded warbands.  We found a couple of key things out about how the rules were written. In no particular order these are: 1. Furs Markers should be set up no closer than 9" to either player edge and at least 6" from another marker in order to play on a 36" square board. 2. Huge Club is still in equipment but has no effect in the basic game. 3. Monsters move at the end of the active players turn. So, Active Player takes first action, Reaction by opponent, Active player takes second action. Monsters now move. Second Player become Active Player and does first Action, first player Reaction, second pla...

The Great Warrior We were at Little Wars in Lombard, Illinois playtesting the Flint and Feather game on the weekend. This area was inhabited by the Potawatomi people of the Great Plains. During the Beaver Wars they fled to the area around Green Bay to escape attacks by both the Iroquois and the Neutral Nations who were expanding their hunting grounds. The Potawatomi called themselves Neshnabe and they were part of a long term alliance with the Ojibwe and Odawa tribes. Marching across the frozen tundra. We set up our table with a new tabletop mat that we purchased from Cigar Box Battle Mats that we purchased at the show http://www.cigarboxbattle.com/ This mat added a great look to our tabletop. We thru in some frosted pine trees with excellent basing by Dave McKay. This mat really makes the battlefield look nice with a minimal amount of work. Moving to cover behind the rocks Taking cover from bow fire. We taught the game to six new players and they picked it up ...

We would like to issue a formal update about the Kickstarter for Flint and Feather. As you all know we have been working on getting the Kickstarter ready to go to present to our supporters. We had the preview posted last week and we have since taken it down. Thank you for all who provided feedback on the Kickstarter. However, two things came up over and over again from those who provided feedback for the Kickstarter. First, people were looking for the rules. The Flint and Feather rules are in playtesting right now. Some of you have played them at conventions. This is great and we will continue to run games such as at Little Wars on the upcoming weekend. We are scheduled to run a playtest game on Saturday night. If you are available please join us. The second thing that came up was the fact that some people only wanted one set of miniatures rather than both box sets that we were offering in the basic pledge. So we had to reconsider the Kickstarter given these two requests. After...

My Companion and Shaman hide in the trees. Our playtest started with each of us choosing twelve figures to play. I had the brown based Mohawk while my opponent had the green based Huron. Both players separated their Warband into two groups. I had my Great Warrior with the Veteran Warrior and some Warbearers in one group with my two Companions and Shaman along with the Stripling and a Warbearer in a second group. My opponent had a similar setup. But he had a Companion with the Veteran Warrior with the Companion with the Great Warrior. This is the first time we had used Veteran Warriors so they were a neat addition to our force pool. It was also the first game with Shamans and Orenda involved (see the previous entry). Moving towards a Furs Marker. I won the initiative and took the first movement. I rolled a two and the Huron player rolled a five and in these rules the low roll is good, so I won the initiative. I immediately moved my Great Warrior at a walk forward to attempt to...

Orenda is a word that means "spiritual energy" in the Huron (Wyandot) language, and has often been used to refer to gods and spirits in the Iroquois tribes as well. Although any divine spirit could correctly be referred to as Orenda, the name is most commonly used to refer to the Creator or Great Spirit, or, among Christian Iroquois people, to God. Stone Coat represented by a WOTC figure. Stone Coat is the name of a mythological rock giant of the Iroquois-speaking tribes. In some tribal traditions there is only one Stone Coat, while in others, there is a whole race of them. Stone Coats are described as being about twice as tall as humans, with their bodies covered in rock-hard scales that repel all normal weapons. They are associated with winter and ice, and they hunt and eat humans. In some legends Stone Coats were once human, and became cannibal monsters as a curse punishing them for evil deeds, like the Windigos of Chippewa mythology. In othe...

The Thames river which meets the Avon River in Stratford Ontario is called Askunessippi (Anishinaabe language: Eshkani-ziibi , "the antlered river") by the Odawa and Ojibwa inhabitants, who together with the Neutrals have lived in the area since before Europeans arrived. We were in Stratford at the HotLead Convention last weekend and got a chance to run some new players through the Flint and Feather rules. We set up three games side by side on a 5' x 12' table space. The players were very interested in playing, most having a genuine interest in the period we are depicting with the rules. Many others stopped by the table or watched the game with peeked interest. With my trusty comrade Kurt we set about to teach the rules and give them a real test as to play ability and speed. Each player was given eight warriors and the two sides were lined up opposite each other and told to dispatch their enemies. I believe the games were a success. The players were able to quickly ...

Turn Two advancing through the woods  Here is the after action report from our most recent Flint and Feather playtest. I will try to go through the rules so those following along at home can learn with us. We set up a pretty basic eight figure skirmish. Each side was given a Great Warrior, Companion, four Warbearers and two striplings each. The striplings were bow armed and one warbearer was bow armed on each side. The Great Warrior and Companion on both sides were chosen as the figures with the spears. No skills were given out yet. We find we can play a game in this manner without filling out Warband Record Sheets, its even for both sides, and it is a fun little basic game. Just what we need at this point. A small copse of trees was placed in the middle of the table and some small hills around the edges. The copse of trees was the only terrain feature that played any effect in the game. Turn One an injured Companion already! Both war bands were placed about 24 inches a...