Flint and Feather Playtest

We playtested our first of several mutli War Band games over the past two weeks. These games will be large scenarios that will appear in the rulebook. Our largest game had four War Bands per side. This game had over eighty figures on the board and had Canoes, Shamans and Spirit Creatures involved. It was a very involved game. We had to re work the scenario and played it a couple of times. It was played on a large size table, 48" x 60", but probably could of fit on a bit smaller size set up. We also had to rework the canoe rules to make them more playable. It seems that canoes, although perhaps realistic, moved too slowly to be very playable in the game. We have therefore This is what the Board Set up looked like. A small river which runs through a swamp and empties into a lake. The Defending War Bands had three War Bands on shore waiting by the edge of the lake in the red area. Thefourth War Band entered in canoes in the corner which is also marked in red. The attacker cou...

Kirk has been helping us with the playtesting of the Campaign Rules which we concluded last night and moved on to try a few Multi-player games before we wrap up the playtest portion of our project. As part of the playing Kirk was inspired to paint some miniatures. He used the Accessory packs for his miniatures so many have been altered from their "out of the box" format. Here are his instructions to painting the miniatures.   Painting Instructions for pre-contact Northern Native Indians Items required to paint figures: Paint colors needed – White, red, blue, burnt umber, burnt sienna, medium brown, tan, green, terra cota and Caucasian skin   tone. Eye dropper for water drops into paint. A ceramic   tile for dabbing drops of paint and water. Flat tooth picks for mixing paints and water on the ceramic   tiles. Paint brushes used A # 3,   # 1 and a triple 000 brushes were used   to paint these figures. 1 flat brush 3/8 th to ½ inch wide. ...

Mike had a great looking water board I realized I hadn't posted in this blog for awhile. Things have been busy as I have about four things on my plate right now. I am of course playtesting this game and trying to get the manuscript in order. We have also been shipping many backorders as resin pieces come in. We are still trying to get the miniatures out to finish off the Kickstarter shipping. Finally we are going to Adepticon on March 23-25 and we have been working hard to get stuff out to our USA sponsor for that show. We hope to see you there. Please drop by Booth 51 and say hello. Shooting down on the canoes Paddling past the shore Meanwhile we have been playing three games over the past month in order to get our Turn #8 sorted out. Our players went pretty aggressive this turn with all players taking a Forage order and then ganging up on two players. The Orenda Points leader (Orenda Points are what you use to determine who wins the campaign) won the initiative and p...

The Attacker closes the gap while the Defender bunches up. We concluded Campaign Turn #7 this past week.We had a Patrol scenario game. We tweaked the scenario in a few ways to get the proper feel for a Patrol. In this scenario the defender starts on the board with one group and brings the rest of his troops on the board once the attacker is spotted. The attacker for his part starts off the table and enters turn #1. The Defender must move through three patrol points in order to win the scenario. The Defender in our scenario was outmatched in terms of figure count, even though it was the second tabletop battle of the turn for the Attacker and he had wounded warriors. In the Campaign Game you can only fight two tabletop battles in one campaign turn. Without going into too much detail, you can take a Forage Order, which is meant to be an aggressive, attacking campaign order, and if you do you can issue a challenge but still be challenged by another player who performs a Forage Order a...

His Great Warrior surrounded by comrades We have been working thru Turn Seven of our campaign game.This turn seemed to hold a lot of discussion. First we had a player make a successful Trip to Kebec. This brought on discussion about what should be available there to trade with the Europeans. Other than the obvious "Shining Wood" we have added the European Axe and the European Knife. Both of these items give you a bonus in close combat. The European Axe gives you a bonus of +1d6 when using the Counter Blow Card. The European Knife will negate the bonus against using a secondary weapon and is therefore good to give to warriors with bows.  You can also acquire glass beads and metal cooking pots. Both of these items have a positive effect in the campaign game. We then ran thru the Aftermath Phase for Turn 6 and started our Turn 7. In this turn we had a player get challenged twice in a turn. This has never happened before so we needed to work out the effects of it in the Camp...

In this weeks campaign playtest we had one tabletop game. We also made a two minor tweaks to the rules to try to make the game slightly more flexible. The first change we made was to the Warband Recruitment Chart. This is the chart that you roll on to determine what, if any, warriors decide to join you on your expedition. We just made this chart more flexible allowing more variance to come up more often in the rolls. This is because we found that the players were rolling the same amount of dice on most turns and had very little variety in the Warbands. The second change we made was to the cost of adding warriors to the Warband. Previously you could put one or two War! Dice aside to buy a Special Character or Key Character to join your Warband. This allowed the player some control over the consistency of his Warband but at the cost of taking less overall total figures with him to the tabletop game. We simply made these costs cheaper due to the lack of War! Dice that appeared each turn. ...

The defender sets up around an objective marker. Once again this week we got together to pursue our creation and playtest of the Campaign Rules for Flint and Feather. Things are going well and all the players are very happy with how the game is running. We are just ironing out things that come up as we play and trying to cover all the bases. For instance in this evenings play we rolled a new scenario, picking and choosing to try the ones we have not playtested yet. Please note, a couple of the scenarios we have played multiple times. As stated we wanted to try something new so we put together a Defense scenario. This is designed for one a player who is on a Forage Order challenges a player which is on a Rest Order. So it is intended as a surprise attack against warriors working in the field or some such. Not necessarily in a fortified village which is the Assault Scenario that is mentioned earlier in this blog. A War-bearer captures an unprotected Objective Marker Archers tr...