Nightwatch: The Airom Reconquista

Oh, those lovable, roly-poly weirdo beardo dwarves.  Always delving too deep.  That's what the ladies say about them, anyway.  Over on The Channel we kicked off a second campaign of Patrick Todoroff's "Nightwatch" with an easy mission to cleanse the desert of the plague of nasties that have been, er plaguing it.

Our four heroes have sworn a vow to retake the homeland or die trying, and even pledged the first 60 sp worth of loot to finance the economic rebuilding of the old place once they clear out the squatters.  The names of our heroes (Jonal, Gav, Arthru, and Bob) were swiped from the commentors, and all fit the theme of slow and steady.  They are heavily armored, but a bit plodding as they trudge their way to glory. 

Yeah, we use dollar store plastics for monsters in our games.  We are old-school, and tend to sneer at those who think spending money is the same thing as playing the game. There are more people out there with that mentality than you think.

Two bucks for fifteen miniatures that work great in scale isn't just frugal, it's smart.  Bright and cheery, these reptiles are still fearsome and menacing once you put them into the proper context.

In "Nightwatch" your AI-driven enemies spawn every turn from one of four randomly chosen points.  In my first campaign, I struggled to remember which point was which, so for this go-round, I made it easy.  I whipped up some quick stone circles with ruined tiles that have the spawn number right there on the board.  When you're running solo, every little reminder like this frees up processing power for the rules of the game, and I think the little tiles look smashing on the table, too.

 

Nightwatch - Revised Character Sheet

 After playing through four games of "Nightwatch: Terror and Treasure in the Dark Corners of the World", I've found the character sheets needed a little tweaking.

This should be enough to carry your Guildsmen through the full Long Hunt.  It has more room for the notes that you most often refer to in the game.  That means more room for class abilities and spells, and less space for those rare artifacts.  

Nightwatch: The Solo Wargame

 

This is a game about killing monsters. All kinds, anywhere, any time.

So speaketh Patrick Todoroff, the scribe behind Nightwatch.  

This little gem of a wargame is a solo wargame that features a fairly simple core mechanic upon which you can bolt all kinds of weird and wonderful special rules.

The short version is that you take four heroes onto a table filled with terrain and have to accomplish one of the standard wargame objectives. Break a thing. Cross the table. Find a hidden thing and get off the table. That sort of objective. The trick is that there are four spawn points where increasingly strong monsters are going to be pouring onto the table to stop you.

The core mechanic is that each figure gets four actions: a free move and three potential interactions. You've got to roll above a target number of 4+ to succeed. You get one each of the d6, d8, and d10 with which to try and take actions beyond that free move, and that's the core. Each character class gets two things it's good at, and so it can roll two dice looking for a success. Tanks get to roll two dice in melee and resisting damage. Wizards get to roll two dice when casting a spell or moving.

The enemies that spawn on the table have four classes as well. All get a free move and then they scale up in actions from a single d6 to a pair of d8s to three d10s. So each class grows in power exponentially. From one action to three per turn, and an increasing probability of moving and striking, it gets pretty tough. The last class is the big Big Battle, and that last boss has multiple wounds, multiple abilities, and four actions per turn, making it the end-state goal of a seven-plus mission quest.

If it all sounds a bit generic so far that's probably because it is, but that's all part of the beauty of the system. It's meant to be a starting point for you to use your own figures to really make the game come alive.

Got a giant bat swarm? Fine - they are vermin who who fly over obstacles. A minor threat, but one that can zip freely around the table.

Got skeletons? Give them a +1 to resist damage from bladed weapons.

Got a dragon figure? Make it the Big Boss and give it fire breath, flight, and ferocity. It'll make for a serious threat.

It's a refreshingly open game system, and one that looks robust enough after a couple games to allow for just the sort of tinkering that every wargamer does anyway.

Highly recommended.

More Vendeean Eye Candy

Been playing around with Osprey's En Garde! while waiting for the Big Battalions package to arrive, and it's been nice to fiddle with a new ruleset and some blackpowder scenarios.  My fantasy town works well as a backdrop if I leave off the wizard tower and skull mountain pieces.

The game doesn't work all that great as a solo game, what with a big part of the combat requiring some bluff and counterbluff.

Random draws for combat ploys often results in pointless rounds of combat where not much happens.  That happens in two player games as well, to be fair.

In the first battle fought, the press of numbers proved overwhelming with two Rank 2 figs supported by five Rank 1 figs dominating a team composed of a single Rank 3 and four Rank 2 figs.  It also included the usual first volley bloodletting followed by everybody charging straight into melee.  A completely historical result if my years of Hollywood movies are to be believed.

The Wargaming Don

The Oldhammer guys are pikers.

Since staring the Joy of Wargaming channel, I've been doing a lot more gaming than ever.  It has all been solo wargaming, but not because of the 800-pound virus-gorilla in the room.  It's because I prefer my own company to that of the typical specimen of wargamer that hangs out at the local FLGS.  No slight against them, they just aren't my kind of people.

It's been nice to roll more dice, but something has been off with the experience.  It took going back to the very beginning to figure out what was jangling my danglings.

Instead of looking back to the 80s, I turned my attention back to the 60s.  I'm talking way back to the 60s.

To 1973 to be precise.

Donald Featherstone is the father of modern wargaming, by way of his authorship of numerous seminal texts that outlined and defined much of how we wargame today.  Full of theory and suggestions and guidance, much of what he wrote has filtered down to us through various iterations of wargame rules, and much has been lost along the way.  Working in an analog world, he found means to do things on the table that computers now do for us.  He also does it in a way that is very inspirational.  Here he reminds us of a truth so obvious we tend to forget it sometimes:

No expert on the man here, as it has been more than three decades since I pored over what few texts I could find in the local small town library, but I'm learning more all the time.  After a read-through of Donald Featherstone's Solo Wargaming, he laid out in clear black and white the deeper and more foundational difference between group and solo wargaming. 

Solo wargaming can be so much more than merely lining up to forces and slamming them together.  He has a lot of thoughts on how to craft wargaming challenges at which the solo wargamer can tilt for a more satisfying achievement.  Proto-AI, fog of war, random terrain and deployment, and a host of other arrows lie in wait for the serious wargamer to add to his own quiver.

It's an engaging read, and it has changed my approach to wargaming in some fundamental ways.  In upcoming videos and blog posts, I'll walk you through some of his more obscure recommendations.

Meanwhile, you can expand your wargaming horizons by reading it for yourself.  Go back to the start and see if you can chart a better wargaming path for yourself than what the corporate gaming interests have handed to you in a slick box.

Get a digital copy of Solo Wargaming here for just ten bucks.  It'll be the best ten bucks you spent on wargaming this year:

Barbarian King: A Yuge Win!

Broke out this classic print-and-play solo wargame for a little playing with myself in a way that won't make me blind or lower my T, and holy cats was it a blast!  My daughter is my good luck charm, as she rolls like a beast.

 

If you've never played, this is one of the best solo adventure games ever produced.  It's a bit of a rogue-like in analog form, and thanks to the reliance on sheer dumb luck it is a hard game to win.  You start at the northern end of the map and have seven weeks to get your hands on 500gp and get back to the north.  You've got to juggle food, money, and not get lost.  Thanks to the way the terrain effects work, each type of terrain has 36 different possible encounters, with sub-tables that blow the possibilities up into the hundreds.  You can get lost, starve, find followers, get mugged, explore ruins, catch a mount, and all sorts of fun stuff.

 

A couple of settlements offer a chance to appeal to powerful allies for help, though this can be risky as these potential allies are just as likely to threw you in a dungeon.  In a dozen plays I've never come close to winning.

This time around, we made our way for a town that chased us out, then down to Huldra Castle where the Baron gave us 50gp and an escort to get the heck out of his countryside.  That's all it says, and in the best game fashion, it's up to you to decide what that means.  We decided that it was the Baron's daughter who took a shine to our brooding barbarian and the Baron paid us off and gave us the boot in a polite, yet firm manner.

We decided to head north and see if one of the temples would be more amenable.  Along the way we met a swordsman who helped us kill a dragon - and lost his life in the fracas. 

He will long be remembered in the annals of our rulership, as the 200gp we found in the dragon's horde put us halfway to victory, and gave us the precious Eye of the Dragon.

Here's where our luck really turned for the better.  The priests at the Temple of Zhor are fickle.  You roll 2d6 for their reaction, and need something like a 9 or better to gain favor.  However, if you roll and 8 - and you have the Eye of the Dragon - which we did and we did, the High Priest showers you with aid.  They gave us 300gp for it, and we thought we had it made in the shade.  All we had to do was move four hexes north, get across that river, and we were home free and ready to pay off the mercs and ascend to our throne!

And then we got lost.  And lost.  AND LOST.  We spent two weeks on the south bank of the river searching for a way to cross.  Luckily our hunting forays were successful, because we had enough food to share with a priest who happened along.  He showed us a secret ford the next day.  No joke, that's how the dice came up.  Two weeks of being lost, meeting a priest and befriending him, then crossing the river the next day.  It's the kind of dice-birthed serendipity you just can't make up, but that make up the best tales.

 

So, with 500+gp in our belts, we crossed the river, made our way to town...and then couldn't find out where to read the victory conditions.  It's pretty vague as to whether you win by crossing the river or getting to the nearest town or what.  We figured getting across the river was enough. Any of the Usurpers Guards that met us would be more than happy to take our 500gp and escort us back to him for some well-paid justice.

 

Dang, it feels good to finally notch a victory on this game.  And all it took was world-wide plague of Korean Death Fars.  Take that, CoronaChan!