A Rampant Fistful

Well it seems I haven't blogged in awhile but with the unexpected and enforced time at home I thought I'd catch up with what we have been doing; this was meant to be a sort of wargames diary after all.
The big discovery of the year has undoubtedly been the introduction of the Fistful of Lead rules to the club repertoire (thanks Nellkyn).

A big problem we have at the club is that although there are many fine rule sets out there, for all sorts of eras and / or genres, not many cater for a large number of players. Many rules can be tweaked and house ruled enough to make them work for multiple players but not many are designed this way from the ground up. FFoL does exactly that; it will easily handle up to 8 players each with their own force. Now this is a skirmish game with each player controlling about five figures but this is perfect for a club environment where the entry level for each player is very low. It also allows us to try out all sorts of genres with minimum expenditure.
Our first game was over the Christmas period where one of our members introduced us to the rules with his rather nice collection of Border Reivers.

Clan Quilp go a-reiving

After one game I immediately took to the rules and bought a copy at once. With a bit of experimentation I also discovered that they work quite well solo as well. Looking around for suitable figures I grabbed a bunch of pirates from my son's old toy box and set to and had a blast.

After that, I thought I'd go to the opposite extreme and try something a bit more serious. I laid down a couple of my WW1 western front terrain boards and in no time at all I was carrying out a trench raid with 28mm figures.

A  Fistful of Mud

Once again the rules worked fine and I had a great time. So having tried the extremes of eight players and one player, I next went for a standard two player game; digging out a handful of figures from my 20mm VBCW collection.

Peaky Durham Blinders

Another hit and another great game.

After the Christmas break it was back to the club and a test game for this years summer campaign - the Crusades. Having put on a multi-player medieval campaign before I suggested that we use Lion Rampant as our base rule set. In a complete coincidence, it also appears that a crusading supplement for Lion Rampant was in the works and was said to be due out for Salute.

Everything seemed perfect then for the choice of Lion Rampant as our campaign rule set and we set to giving it a run out. We hit one snag though; not everyone liked it! Those players that had played before had a great time but the new players ranged from lukewarm to hating it.

Spot the veterans

The main problem was the activation system, which is probably the most contentious part of the Lion Rampant rules. With this system if you fail a unit activation then its also the end of your turn. For a multiplayer environment that can mean you can wait along time for your turn only to fail it on the first dice roll. Our veterans were fine with this but it was clear that this wasn't going to cut it with everyone. Then came the Eureka moment. A Lion Rampant retinue is in the region of 5 units per player and we have eight players. A Fistful of Lead handles up to eight players with about five figures each. If we consider each figure, in FFoL, to be a separate unit then the two games are identical in scope. Why not then use the FFoL activation system with the Lion Rampant game mechanics? After a quick solo test I believed I was on to something.

Half scale Lion Rampant play test

The system I came up with was to use the FFoL card system to determine when a unit is activated. Once activated then the Lion Rampant play sequence is followed for that unit. The unit still has to roll to move, shoot or charge but a fail only ends the turn for that unit not the whole retinue.

With some trepidation, I introduced the idea to our veteran Lion Rampant players and it was an immediate hit and , in our opinion, actually improves upon the base game to  some extent.

Having shown proof of principle, we then offered it to our would be crusaders. Once again, it was a great hit and it appeared that we had our crusades rule set.

Crusades play test

So it was game on and most of us have been frantically buying and painting figures for the Great Crusade. Although it has to be said not everyone is taking it seriously......

So everything was fine and dandy..........until the zombie apocalypse hit and the world changed. We're still forging ahead with preparations for the crusade though, it just might be postponed a bit. At least we all have painting time now.