You wait for one and 5 come along at once...

 Having not played a game for several weeks due to illness and being too busy, last week Monday and Tuesday gave me the opportunity to play 5 games over the two days...

Field of Chivalry

On Monday I went to Anthony's and we played a game of Field of Chivalry rules using his 40mm Dark Age figures from Expeditionary Force.  We have played medieval games using Flower of Chivalry a couple of times before and enjoyed the experience.

Flower of Chivalry are from the Canadian Wargames Group who have always produced slightly different, interesting rules.  In FoC you have three battles of units and each battle has a leader.   You start each turn by deciding what you want each battle to do - this can be things like charge, move, etc.  You then roll percentage dice to see if the battle does that or something slightly different. So, on Charge there is a small chance they will simply manouevre, for Manouevre they might stand there or charge and so on.

Each order increases or decreases the battles Battlelust rating by a certain amount and when you reach 5+ your troops become tired and if you reach -5 they become demoralised.  It is a balancing act of getting your troops into action and not wearing them out or defending but not lowering your troops morale.

Each Army leader has a rating and this determines the make up of the order deck they have which consists of cards between 1-3 and a joker.  A better leader will have more 3 cards.  Each turn you draw a card and this is the number of actions your units can EACH perform.

So with 3 actions you can sometimes end up meleeing 3 times.

The balance of juggling battlelust and deciding when to risk closing with an enemy (you decide on orders before you find out how many actions you have) make the game inteesting and a challenge.

I was playing Vikings against Saxons and rolled really badly for morale at the start of the game, with units running back and I had soon lost 10 out of my 12 army morale.  I retreated, regrouped and managed to force the Saxons to within one point of their army morale as their units died across the line.

In the end it came down to who could manage to knock off one more army moral and the Saxons managed it first giving Anthony the win.

It was a very close and exciting game.

Pikeman's Lament

The Osprey Blue Book rules are quite popular at the Guildford Club and on Monday evening I played in a 4 player Italian Wars game.  We were the Florentines attempting to attack and take (or burn) a venetian held village.

There are various house rules that we use for the games (such as only Shooting, Charging and Skirmishing stopping your turn if you fail an order) that have impoved the flow of the game , and improved them for multiplayer games.

It was misty/dark so you could only shoot at 12 range and we quickly advanced across the table towards the village.  Unfortunately, my initial die roll was as poor as it had been that afternoon and I failed to hit anything with my skirmishers or win the initial fight across a stream with pikemen.

Things improved as the game went on and my dice warmed up and I was soon getting 7 hits out of 8 dice while needing to roll a 5-6!

Eventually we beat the Venetians back and forced them out of the village.

Pikeman's Lament always gives a fun, enjoyable game especially with multiple players a side and plenty of opportunity for laughter and socialising. 

Battle of Little Big Horn

My friend Ian Marsh (of Fighting15s) who I first met at the school Napoleonic Wargames Club was staying over night on Tuesday and we managed a few games while chating and drinking wine.

The first of these was a version of the old Waddington's game Battle of Little Big Horn.  Anthony had the board scanned and printed on a mat by Deep Cut Studios and having played the game I also bought a mat.  The figures are Britain's Deetail plastics which come painted on metal bases.

The rules are quite simple (as you would expect from a children's game from 1964) but give a few challenging decisions on when to move and how to exploit strengths.

In the end, we played two games swapping sides and the Indians won both times.  it is a hard ask for the US Cavalry to win.  Which is, I guess, fairly historical.

Colt Express

Colt Express is a boardgame where you play bandits on a train trying to rob the passengers and fight off other bandits while avoiding the marshall.

It has a number of neat features such as the cardboard 3d train, a system where you play up to 5 actions in a turn into a deck which is then played through.  This means you can end up in the wrong place and your subsequent actions go wrong as your preprogrammed turn is played through.

This is similar to Robo-Rally with a preprogrammed turn and has a neat twist of the fact that every time you are shot you gain a bullet card in your deck.  You draw 6 cards from your deck at the start of each turn and the bullet cards are effectively dead cards that you can't use.

We played two games and I won the first, with Ian winning the second.  I feel it is a better game with more players as there is moreinteraction and a longer train but it worked okay for 2 players.


Flying Goblin

This is a game for 8+ and I bought it because I didn't have a dexterity game.  Basically, the box is a castle with different rooms in it and you flip goblins into the castle to try and land in certain rooms to get coins or diamonds.  The flipping is a free for all and when one person has finished you only have one shot each left which means some goblins can be left unflipped.

Other rooms can left you spin the castle, steal diamonds, lose a goblin, etc

With the money you can buy more goblins, a really big goblin or thieves or parts of a totem which is placed on roof in the castle.

You win if you have built 4 parts of your totem and it remains standing at the end of the turn or if you have 20 diamonds.

Ian won the one game we played in which neither of us managed to knock down the other player's totems, we both had 4 levels but Ian had the most diamonds.

It is a fun, very silly and quite racous party game that you gradually get worse at the more you drink!