Sword & Spear, written by Mark Lewis of Polkofnik Productions and published by Great Escape Games, is an interesting rule set that covers ancients through to late medieval, so it just reaches to the Wars of the Roses era, which currently interests me.
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| Perry 28mm Plastics, painted by Phil Robinson |
My attention was primarily grabbed by this set because it aims at giving a game with around 8 - 15 units per side and so seemed ideal for the Pocket Armies project.
So I put a ‘ward’ per side on the table and ran through a couple of playings, firstly to get a feel for the system and secondly to see whether it was a good fit for my future Wars of the Roses games.
This is just a short post to cover some initial observations.
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The mechanics to the game are interesting and unusual. Without going into too much detail, here are the headline points;
If you are the red army and have ten units, then you put ten dice (D6) into a draw bag at the start of the turn. The blue army might have eleven units, so they put eleven blue dice into the draw bag. A shake or two later! ..... one player draws 7 dice from the bag.
Drawing an odd number means that one side will have more of their coloured dice drawn than the other, so they get the initiative. Those dice are all then rolled and each player allocates the dice to their units depending on the results of each die roll and what is needed to be done.
Those units allocated a die will be active for this phase, once they have acted another seven dice are drawn and so on until the end of the turn, though note, the last draw will likely be less than seven dice.
Every unit has a ‘discipline’ value. Typically ‘4’ for the average type of unit, so say we have a longbow unit. If you have rolled the dice and one of them is ‘4’ plus, you can match it with that longbow unit and it will be able to do something. If the roll is exactly ‘4’, it can do one of four things, but if the value of the dice is higher, say five, then there is a secondary list of actions that it can also consider.
This is the engine of the game and there are many subtleties in terms of decision making that run off it.
The second important design consideration is that you can use a unit size of your own choosing, as long as all units have the same frontage, because distance is worked out as Distance Units (DU) and one DU is equal to half the width of a unit.
Our longbow can move 3 DU, so if you are using units with an 80mm frontage, the 3 DU is 120mm (they can shoot up to 5 DU).
Thirdly, all combat is done by opposed dice rolls. Both sides roll a number of dice equal to their strength. You then match each side against the other, with the dice values set out in descending value.
A win causes a discipline check to see if a hit results, but scoring at least double against the enemy guarantees a hit. Once a unit accumulates enough hits to equal its strength, it is removed from play .... and so the army slowly deteriorates!
Anyway, I set up a typical wing (vanward) using just 6 units per side. The front three units were archers and immediately behind them were billmen.
The two games that I played opened with long distance archery and within a few turns one side clearly gained an advantage as the other sides archers took losses. This then meant that the melee troops on the exposed side were compelled to get going and make contact with the enemy - sounds about right so far.
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| The bow cannot infiltrate back through the bill! |
Everything broadly worked fine for me, except, using this set-up, as the attacking billmen approached the archers, I was unable to get the archers out of the way in readiness for the melee clash.
This is because the system only allows light troops to interpenetrate other units and the archers are classed as medium, so with their own billmen blocking their 'escape', under the rules, the archers are stuck there and it will be the archers that meet the attacking melee troops!
Obviously that is not going to best represent how the armies fought, so what to do? As an aside, there is also the issue of deciding how I want to show units within formations being quite integrated regardless of type (Hail Caesar uses the 'mixed' formation rule to do this and it works well) .
As a quick fix during play, I decided that when the archers activated with a die roll at least one higher than their discipline value, they could retire through a unit directly to their rear.
This became quite interesting, because the archers need to do this in a timely fashion and not get caught out. The two ways of getting caught out are to lose your own head and keep shooting with them, when it would be safer and better to retire ...... but more critically, you need to be able to roll high enough results with the activation dice to make that happen .... not guaranteed! and this really opens the game up, giving some tactical nuance that matters.
Some other good points about the rules are that they are self contained, no need to buy additional supplements and a goodly range of army lists are up on the web site. The rules are fairly short and the melee and shooting phases share the same mechanics which makes things easier.
I am still trying to hold in my head some of the various things that units can or cannot do, such as when do they get the Impetus dice bonus, but overall, this is a straight forward set and I am sure these things will drop into place relatively quickly.
I do like the idea that an army can be built up around 12 units and this allows for the DBA style of army building.
I have ordered the new edition of Bloody Barons from Peter Pig, so that will give me another system to look at and I think those rules (also self contained) have scenarios for all of the WoR battles, so that should be interesting.
Resource Section.
My sister webspace COMMANDERS is a bit more snippet based than here. Link.