Barbarian Prince, A Second Playthrough

Vassal is one of those tabletop simulators that is all the rage these days, and during the course of tinkering with it one thing led to another and the next thing I knew Cal Arath Junior had been usurped from his father's throne.  This time around he wound up being dumped by his loyal servant high in the mountains above the Tragoth River.

Junior had a much easier time getting across the river, and was smart enough to stop after a week in the foothills north of the Mountains of Zohr where he spent a week hunting, resting, and recovering from near starvation. 

One day he met a dwarf, but the surly miner cared nothing for the troubles of a lost barbarian prince and never paused in his journey.  Good riddance to bad rubbish so far as Cal was concerned.

Feeling much revived, he journeyed down to the Temple of Zohr where he fell in with a bad crowd.  His first night at the Temple, the convinced him to aid them in an attempt to steal a large sum of money from the poor box. 

Being the quick and clever sort, Cal Junior pulled down a cool 200gp, of which he kept 180.  (Ten percent to the thieves guild is only proper.)  He then hot-footed it south where the next day he wandered into a swarm of goblins patrolling the region around their keep.  Allies of the Temple, tipped off by the angry priests?  Unlikely, as Cal Junior fled back to the Temple, where no one was any the wiser.  After securing more provisions, he decided to head north.

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?