Campaign Turn #6

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. We made this change to allow the players more flexibility and control in what they can take to the tabletop game. We will continue to test these changes and make a final decision keeping them.
The Warband portages the Canoes thru some trees.
In the tabletop game we tried one of the only scenarios that has not been playtested yet and made some final revisions to the set up. The scenario that we played is titled "Trip to Kebec". This scenario is one of the harder scenarios to roll on the chart and it is the only way that a Warband may trade with the Europeans and get the Matchlock, European Sword or European Breastplate, at this point in time.
This tabletop game turned out to be one of the longest and most interesting games that we had played so far in our campaign playtesting. We had three Medicine Rolls in our first four Activation rolls. The game also went for seven turns, which was the longest game we have seen in the campaign. Both these things made for a very interesting and fun game.
My warriors close in on the canoes.
In the Trip to Kebec scenario the Attacking player must carry two canoes across the board to an exit point chosen by the Defending player. Canoes are each carried by two warriors and move at the lowest of dice of two d6 in inches per turn. This can be as slow as 1" but the player in our game rolled double fives not once, but twice, in the game and veritably scooted across the tabletop. We also had torrential rain come thru, which limits visibility to 12" and provides a -2CV on Shooting. The following turn we had this change to Heavy Rain, which actually improved visibility to 18" and reduced the penalty to shooting only -1CV. As this is the only card in the Medicine Deck that can improve the weather from Torrential Rain it was shocking, and cool, that we pulled it on the very next turn.
Some of my rather ineffective Warriors with Bows.
The fighting in the game was bloody and long. I had taken a Warband with no less than seven bow armed warriors. The bow fire in the game became ineffective, due to the change in weather caused by the Medicine Cards. So when it came to hand to hand melees my warriors were at a disadvantage due to lack of melee weapons. Also my opponent had rolled a more varied force for his Warband in the recruitment phase. So he had two Veteran Warriors, one of which had been grown during the game and was a named Special Character so he could choose cards. He had more experienced warriors than my generic War-bearers and this proved to be my undoing in Close Combat.
The fight was actually pretty even with both sides trading light wounds in multiple rounds of close combats. Then in the final conflict of the game the dam burst and three War-bearers went down. This of course decided the game but it was a well fought close combat until this point in time. It was great to see warriors that had grown thru the game get a chance and see the difference in Warbands that the rules provided in the tabletop game. The long game and the great outcome were very exciting. We are looking forward to wrapping this playtesting up and move on to playtesting some of the multiplayer scenarios designed for one off traditional wargames.



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