Actual Play - Barbarian Prince - Episode 1

If you haven't seen it yet, Castalia House Publishing has a new blog feature called Wargame Wednesdays, for all of us hex-and-counter-philes.  The series has inspired me to push some cardboard around.  All of my kids love themselves some Awful Green Things, and we spent a summer tooling about with the print-and-play games over at the Dwarfstar archive.  We played enough Outpost Gamma to decide it was just too danged tough for the marines, and a game or two of Goblins! before losing interest.

Last weekend, I finally had a chance to sit down and play through the classic hex and counter wargame, Barbarian Prince.  It really is less of a wargame than it is a jumped-up choose-your-own adventure slash analog version of turn based computer RPGs.  But it has lots of hexes and at least one counter, along with a turn tracker, resource meters, and a couple of other wargame signifiers, so I for one am comfortable putting in the wargame family, even if it is one of its distant cousins.

Not only did I get a chance to play, I got a chance to film, edit, and prep a short video to share with you lot.  I've taken the liberty of editing out the dull bits like flipping through rulebooks and tedious die-rolling for combat, so the video moves faster than you might expect.  Barbarian Prince is a solo wargame, so have some leftovers and enjoy watching me play with myself for thirteen minutes*. If there's any interest, I'll probably do another one over the Thanksgiving break.

 

Direct YouTube link.

Links mentioned in the video:

• Download the rules here
• Cleaned up map suitable for printing on a single 11x17 sheet
• Reaper Minis (Dwarves)

*Probably a bad joke to make - I'm going to start getting a lot of weird spam comments now, aren't I?