Rules Page update

I have added no less than three new rulesets to the 'Rules' page (available via the link or the header of this blog), which are free to download, use and distribute by the way, and are the results of more than ten years of gaming experimentation:

• Gudugan Pudugan, a fun little set which is only seven pages long, of pre-historical/ancient big battles and a flexible unit/army component system

• Victorious Eagle Warfare 2, an update on my go-to Napoleonics set, with better command options and explanations on unit behavior

• The Brave Lieutenant, a Pike and Shot period set which spent many months in the making, only to bin it altogether in the end and just adopt the useful parts of VEW2 with Renaissance spice.

Please do browse through them.

A Few New Rules

 I've added no less than three new rule booklets to the 'Rules' page of this blog. 

The first is Heart of Battle, a block wargame. I'm considering painting block armies because they can represent anything and take lesser space than figures, and I needed a simple game for them.

The second is One Page Meeple Warfare, which is basically a mayhem-type large skirmish game that is quite on the rules free side of things. I produced this to awake the feeling of old games I played, with only a handful of board game figures.

And the last is D6 Naval War, a derivative of the Inter Arma d8 Naval rules, which takes a unique aspect at modern war at sea, or at least that's what I hope.

More rules added

I've uploaded a few more rule booklets to the appropriate blog page. These include the 'EasyBattle' family: Campaigns in the Ancient World, Arborleone's Little Wars and Generic Fantasy Battles. All of them are based on the same enging with some sugar and spice added. There's also Simple Age of Sail, a 2-page rule set for naval warfare.

If any of these (or the rules uploaded earlier) is of interest to any of my readers, please visit the Rules page in the header for a browse.

A Rules page update

I have published two new sets of rules on the 'Rules' page of this blog.

Inter Arma 2.0 is a generic skirmish game. It can be used up to the end of the black powder era, with 4-40 figures per side. It has a module for special abilities figures can be enhanced with.

Easy Rifle & Sabre is a variant of the earlier Easy Tricorne game, with the period 1860-1901 in mind. It has modified rules compared to Easy Tricorne regarding combat and the speed of shooting, allowing repeater firearms to come into play.

I have no less than three more rules coming to be published after some final editing work, so please stay tuned.

Naval rules published

Just a quick note for my readers that the aforementioned naval wargaming rules are available on the blog page related to that subject.

A new ruleset added

I've just finished writing a new set of rules, and published it under the "Rules" page. Its title is "One and a Half Page Gunpowder Skirmish", and it delivers on the promise in the title. It is quite vague in some aspects, but my goal was to get rid of all the fuss a commercial rule set means when introducing players to a game. 

On that note, I'm fine tuning my dreadnought-era naval rule set as well, and I should be able to make it public in a little while. I have removed "Coal and Steel" from the Rules page, as it was one of my early developments, and this one is better in every aspect.

Victorious Eagle Warfare - 1809 Italian Theatre Solo Campaign Rules

As promised, I'll be conducting a small campaign using my homemade rules in the following days. Before I post the AAR of the first encounter, I thought I could share the rules so everything would be clear later on.

Augmentations to 'Victorious Eagle Warfare'

Two modifications I thought about are attached artillery and reactions. 

The idea with the first one is that activating attached artillery diminishes the rule that only the same type of units may be activated on one command. 

Attached artillery - I suspect it would be only one base - may be activated alongside infantry and cavalry formations, and of course should shoot, move and reload regardless of what the other units in the group are doing. 

This would give a more integral feeling to the game, instead of having to activate detached batteries and sacrificing the momentum of the infantry and cavalry - artillery should be used as an offensive weapon, and not something to pelt the enemy with from a safe distance.

By extension, this also means that artillery should not be completely defenseless against melee attack - I'm still thinking about an elegant solution, as it should also be the duty of the units in the brigade/division to keep their guns safe.

Giving the players a chance to react means taking control of a risky situation by sacrificing their available Command pool for their coming turn. One die or command card may be played immediately to react to enemy advance or shooting. The idea is that the crisis has gained the commander-in-chief's attention, while the rest of the field is ignored - a card or die that could otherwise activate two or three units is played to control a single one. This may be limited, so as not to tamper with the IGOUGO system too much, to one, two, or half of the available Command dice or cards.

It is an automatic success if we use dice activation, unless the unit is untrained, in which case it must pass the command test. For example, if the opponent declares a cavalry charge, a reliable infantry formation may form square instead of waiting to be caught in the flank. 

Reacting to enemy fire with counter-fire means that the effects are applied simultaneously, and both units could rout as a result. 

This, as a movement (re)action, could potentially allow shaken units to retire before they are destroyed, with the added difficulty that they must show their backs to the enemy.

I may also be able to bridge the two points together, and state that an artillery unit that's charged may fire canister as a reaction (if the guns are loaded).

By the way, I'm steadily increasing my painted Napoleonic forces, and if the summer heat allows, I'll be able to play a game this weekend.

Free Napoleonic wargame rules & Army lists

OK, I've included "Free" only to get your attention.

After some more proofreading and incorporating the results of two test games, I have finally completed the core rules for my Napoleonic adventures. They are called 'Victorious Eagle Warfare', and are the results of a few months' refinement and playtesting. 

The rules are very flexible in the regard of basing: the only requirement is consistent base sizes for the three arms, infantry, cavalry and artillery. Card activation is the key point for representing friction, a deck of 32 playing cards is required for each player.

A 4-page army builder provides guidelines for a point-based system and attributes for the major participants' forces.

I would like to urge everyone to give the rules a try and get back to me with their results. You can access the rules from the Rules page in the menu above, or from here:

WEV rules

Army builder

Hex Conquest!

I've been tinkering with my Ancient/Fantasy rules Battles of the Riverland for a while, and also playing with the 1990 computer game Centurio: Defender of Rome. The love child of the two is Hex Conquest, a small 11-page PDF.

I have also created five sets of printable "armies", or to be precise, one type of unit in five colors. These can be printed at a thick card, or normal thin paper, then glued on some sturdier piece - the idea is much alike that of the printable Napoleonic armies produced earlier.

Here's a Blue battle infantry unit for a teaser:

You can access both the rules and armies from the links below, and from the Rules page:

Hex Conquest rules
Hex Conquest printable armies

Naval Rules Revised

During this week I have built a lot of small warships out of wooden bits. They are in the dorm but I'll bring my camera and take photos.
Because the Inter Arma rules for naval warfare are a little bit insufficient, I've worked on them a little and here is the result: Inter Arma d8 Naval Supplementary. As usual, Google Drive messed up the pages.
Mediafire link with .zip file: Link 
I have tried uploading it to mediafire and converting it to pdf but it was still messed up.

Read through it if you wish, comments are welcome

I have painted a bunch of Copplestone figures this weekend, but there won't be enough time for basing. Photos are on their way. I'm expecting two other orders to show up next week, the PSC German infantry and Caesar's fantasy adventurers.

Inter Arma point system test game - Poles vs. Swedes

Initial setup: Swedes are defending earthworks around a lake. The terrain is quite rough with a lot of hills and wooded areas.

Commanders are level 3.

One Page Fleets Seafarers mod

I have been tinkering with the OPF rules for a while. It's a solid little ruleset and very easy to play, but it needs some work to make it better. Here are the links through which you can access both the original version and the one modified by me. I have not made major changes in game mechanics and mostly copied the integral parts of the original set to have it on one page, as its title advertises.

Here is the link for the original One Page Fleets rules.

Here is the link for the modified rules for naval use.

A mighty battle rages between pirates and a convoy guarded by three frigates.

During the playtest the rules have proven effective. We fought a frigate duel to try different riggings and the battle above where we covered the basics.

Inter Arma Supplementary

for the wars of the Polish Commonwealth.

I. Generic rules

All as in the Main book & Campaign supplementary.

Thoughts on OPF (One Page Fleets)

This little rule set is made for space combat with the aim of being simple and fun, both of which it manages to achieve. There are a few observations though which I'd like to share, had anyone got the idea to use them.

Here's a link to the rules in PDF. Written down they really take only one page. 

Dice beating highest. When rolling an obviously higher die (example: 7 on d8 against a d6), it saves some time to apply the damage directly instead of triggering an opposed roll.

Flanking speed& Aft shields critical save. When a unit's die is d4 on DV and is shot in the rear 90° of its perimeter or performed a flanking move (and according to the situation it would be interpreted as d0 - a single hit, no matter what the defensive roll is, would destroy these units, which is really unfair), no attack die is rolled, but the unit being attacked rolls 1d4 and remains on the table if scores a 4.

Above, a photo of the first test game with various ships engaging each other.

While I am used to play with an I go, you go mechanism (where one player is the agressor and by winning initiative is able to move all his troops at once, and the other player may only react to these) the movement sequence used by OPF is alternating movement between single units or fighter squadrons of each player which sort of defines the whole gameplay and requires more situational awareness (as it really matters which unit a player chooses and where that unit is moved on the table). It also, surprisingly, doesn't give such a good flow of events as the games in which one entire army is moved then the other one follows. Combat is more fragmented.

Here's a shoutout to two new readers, Geordie an Exiled Fog (blog here) and j.d. (blog here). Welcome aboard guys!

Inter Arma and tanks

More of the endless play-tests, but this time with tanks. The secret 7th addidion to the rulebook will be the 'modern and armored' combat regulations. Including tanks. Surprisingly, I have some tanks so I decided to run a really quick test how they act in combat.

Germans

1x Pz38t, Light armor, Light gun

1x PzIV, Medium armor, Medium gun

Soviets

1x BT-7, Light armor, Light gun

1x T-34, Medium armor, Heavy gun

The situation can be seen above: the German armor arrives from two different directions, the Skoda behind the house and goes for the stone wall in the middle of the field, and the PzIV has to cross the bridge before engaging.

Errors

As I was translating the Inter Arma rulebook's text to Hungarian, I have found a couple of errors and contradictions, imbalanced secondary skills etc. These will soon be fixed and the Google doc under the Rules page will be duly updated.

And a reminder that the half time passed for the poll to end and the results are yet inconclusive. If you hadn't done it, cast your vote now.

Codex Inter Arma

"It’s done, the great act of creation.
 The maker rests. The wheel’s in motion(...)"

(A Hungarian poet, who has seen this moment coming in the 1800s)

Awwww-rite, you can inspect the finished, refurbished, re-read and re-re-re'd complete ruleset under the Rules page or

this permalink.

There are lots of interesting features. Please do try the rules if your time allows and get back to me with preferably less swearing words than having fun.


If someone does not like metric, just half all distances to convert them to inches. I don't like inches.

Caracole

While being home ill, I have set up a small table to try some further rules added to the skirmish set I use. 

Caracoling (cavalry shooting at a closed infantry formation in order to break them) goes somehow like this:

Cavalry shooting carbines/small arms is simultaneous with any opposing way of combat. Caracoling cavalry can fire small arms in three ranks deep, distance counted from the first rank for all ranks, thus simulating movement.

It is essentially a 'moving without movement' rule. As the ranks need to pass each other to fire their arms, each counts as it was the first rank. This is a poor excuse of a post to show the expanding 30YW plastics I own and to have some fun rolling dice.

Bit of 'rules lawyering'

Only because it suits my studies and it's time to take a little break!

Inter Arma is reaching a fine condition and seemingly works well. With the following, on which I'm going to work more on Tuesday after two more exams, I think I'll do a .doc or .pdf version too ~ Codex Inter Arma with all its 'patches' and additions. 

This also means I will remove the rules from pastebin so if you wish to, you can still view them as they are now from the links on the Rules page in the header.

Main book

Morale tests -
1. Single morale test for units in closed formation (besides the ones already in the book) - no option for rolling on each single fig:

• When casualties are higher than 20%, both in actual turn or during the game overall
• When under enemy volley/artillery fire for 2 turns without reaction
• When nearby closed formation is attacked in the back

2. Strictly determining when morale tests are necessary (both for single units and closed formations):

• Commander is killed in sight of unit
• Unit nearby routs
• Outnumbered and survives combat
• Regulars and Conscripts/Militia: when a ranged attack misses the unit by 1-2 (hitting roll)

Fantasy

Higher level (5+) Magic users have a Disorient effect which they can use 1/2 times in a session. Disorient effect causes the targeted unit to roll direction dice and move one running distance in that direction.

Campaign

This still needs to put to more testing.

Special combat

Looks all right at the moment. The 'buildings on fire' title needs to be more clear.

Gunpowder

• Link the 'closed formation' rule to the main book. 
• Modify the 50%+1 rule to 50% (determining bonuses to closed formation initiatives).
• Revise ranged weapons' distances (still requires more testing)