On Bloody Ground is a game engine for figure games that now crosses several periods. Father and son team David & Daniel Toone, take the engine and bring out specific period booklets that add in keywords, lists and stats for the period concerned.
I have the Wars of the Roses set and today give them their first outing. Starting with a low density action and a narrow range of unit types would be a good idea. Where better to look than a scenario set in Neil Thomas’ One Hour Wargames book!
Now really, the OBG set is a ‘line them up and go at each other’ type of system, but the scenario I am choosing starts without units on the table. Each turn a side rolls a D6 to see whether they can bring on one of their units. Each side has six units.
This is an enjoyable scenario, designed to reflect a haphazard arrival on a battlefield and while it may not be the best type of scenario for OBG, it should be dynamic enough to set up individual situations to use as a study.
The scenario allows for a 3’ x 3’ table, which has but one feature …. a hill that sits in the centre of the board. Red forces (Lancastrian) enter the board from the top edge. Blue forces (Yorkist) enter from the bottom. The victor is the side that controls the hill at the end of play.
From the randomised force selection, the Yorkist roll ‘5’ giving them 4 x infantry, 1 x archer and 1 x levy. The Lancastrian roll ‘2’ giving them 3 x infantry, 1 x archer and 2 x levy. Note this random roll leaves us without cavalry or artillery, pike (long spear) or any of the fancy pants stuff, but that can only help with our first playing of a new system.
To make the Neil Thomas generic forces more ‘Wars of the Roses’ in nature, we shall call the Infantry, levy billmen, the archers will be retinue longbow and the pure levy will be levy longbow, giving us a blend of just bill and bow units for this game in roughly 50 / 50 proportions.
Building these units with the OBG points system gives us 875 points for the Yorkists and 861 points for the Lancastrians. I have spent some points on each commander to have their command range extended to 18” and from a list of 23 character traits, 1 trait has been allocated to each commander. The book suggest 1000 points for a small game
Sir Richard Herbert’s (Yorkist) trait is; Add +1 to the final score when using a Command Point to re-roll a Leadership Test. Sir James Conyers’ (Lancastrian) trait is; Any Command Point used will be returned on a D6 roll of 6.
There are of course consideration to make when using a Neil Thomas scenario with other rules (his book has his own rule systems). A mathematical basis to his scenarios can be discerned. Units have a frontage of roughly 6”, infantry move 6”, the table is 3’ across (i.e. 6 lots of 6”) and there are 15 turns to a game, but his units cannot fire and move in the same turn, so if we accept that an attacker will generally need to move and shoot and does that in equal proportion, then his scenario might be composed of 7½ turns of movement and 7½ turns of fire.
My unit frontages are 6½”, the table is a 4’x4’, in ‘On Bloody Ground’ units can move AND shoot each turn, infantry standard movement allowance is either 4” or 8” depending on movement type and this scenario requires units to enter play singly and randomly over several turns, rather than the traditional ‘line them up’ type set up … for all of these reasons, I am setting the game to last for 10 turns.
The OBG system uses single based figures in a movement tray for easy casualty removal and figure count. The number of figures in a unit is a factor in combat as are the number of ranks deployed. I have multi based units, so we shall simply class each archer unit as having 14 figures and each billmen unit having 18 regardless of what they actually have and just consider each unit to be a two rank unit. If pike were on the table, they could be treated as having four ranks.
Anyway - who cares! We just want some opposing forces to close on each other and try some of the ‘On Bloody Ground’ rules out.
I must admit that on first reading I had some mixed views and wasn’t over enthusiastic, but then I nodded off a couple of times during reading, so was probably too tired to do the rules justice. A second read and things looked much more promising, though some things I had to hunt for, like it wasn’t immediately clear to me that Command Points are a one off allowance for the whole game. I must say though, the index is absolutely superb, EVERYTHING is there - 4 pages in a 64 page booklet - very good.
On browsing the comments of others, the rules are describes as being close to Warhammer Ancient Battles (WAB) in nature. I have not used that system, but understand they have a very good reputation.
So, here we go. This is just an overview of mechanics, not an AAR.
Turn 1 - The Lancastrians randomly get the initiative (go first). They will keep this for the whole game unless a commander uses a Command Point to try and switch it to the other side.
The first unit to arrive on the table is a Yorkist body of Retinue English Longbowmen.
Movement - Infantry can choose from two types of movement, manoeuvre and march.
Manoeuvre allows a unit to first pivot on its centre, move 4” and then pivot on its centre again. March allows a unit to move ahead 8” and then pivot at the end of the move.
Units that manoeuvre can still shoot in the upcoming Shooting Phase with a -1 penalty, but units that march cannot shoot. There are significant differences between the two movement types.
By the end of turn 3, we have the two situations shown in the photo below.
The English Longbow has a range of 30” (by comparison, ordinary bow is 24” and heavy crossbow and handguns have a range of 18”). The Yorkist archers have arrived on top of the hill and for the first time have sight of the Lancastrian archers on the other side.
On the right we see Yorkist billmen moving over open ground towards Lancastrian archers who are 20” away, so they are well within longbow range, but will be counting as long range with a -1 modifier. It will be interesting here to see how the infantry cope with moving over so much open ground against the archers.
The commanders start the game with a given number of Command Points and these can be spent in some circumstances for reaction or at the very end of a player turn as a mop up of activity. For example at the end of the turn, Sir Richard (Yorkist) wants one of his moved units to attempt to shoot (the Shooting Phase has already passed). He spends 1 CP for the attempt and then rolls for the action. In this case, shooting can occur on a 4+. They either succeed and shoot or they don’t.
This is a buckets of dice system, so things should even out overall, but there is the potential for exaggerated results. Shooting (and close combat) is a three stage process. A ‘To Hit’ value (4+ for English Longbow) is rolled for, 1 dice per shooting figure in the unit, followed by an Armour Save (padded armour is the weakest and that can save against a hit on a 6+), followed by a Wounds phase, so all the dice that scored hits and are still in effect after the Save rolls have been made, are again rolled for creating ‘Wounds’. For English Longbow each roll of 4+ becomes a wound. The number of wounds inflicted is the number of single figures that are removed from the unit as casualties.
Now the first time I tried this it was with the Retinue archers on the hill shooting down at the Lancastrian archers below. 14 archers rolled 14 x D6. The archers got a -1 penalty on their ‘To Hit’ round because they moved prior to shooting, but the target did not (could not) save against any of the hits because they had padded armour (6+) and a characteristic of the English Longbow in this module is that it reduces the enemy armour by 1 level i.e. from padded to nothing.
Anyway, I went through the process and a unit of 14 shooters at a target of 14 figures scored 7 wounds ….. wow, the target halved in strength and so if they returned arrows in their player turn, they would only start with 7 dice to hit and it seems that to shoot first gets this huge advantage that will play into subsequent shooting phases.
However, in all subsequent archery outcomes, things were much more subdued and indeed the next time that the archers on the hill attacked, they only score 2 wounds, compared to the previous 7. So overall I think the archery is quite tame but has the potential, with the right dice scores, to be devastating.
By turn 5, the Lancastrian archers at the foot of the hill had taken 13 losses. For a 14 figure unit, that would have looked very weedy with just one lone figure left standing there. I know there are advantages to ‘seeing’ unit strength just by looking at the movement tray, but I think I prefer using a multi based unit and just putting dice behind it to represent losses and keeping the visual presence of a unit, even if it is on its last legs.
Over on the right of the table, the Yorkist bill actually make good progress against the Lancastrian archers covering the open ground and only taking 2 losses on the way, which felt a bit underpowered to me, I feel like I should have had a greater sense of threat as the Yorkist. Sir Richard want to push the bill harder and at the end of a turn, spent a precious Command Point to get them to charge against the levy archers, needing a 5+, but he failed the roll and so the billmen remained where they were.
(Above) In the meantime, a Lancastrian bill unit had arrived and ‘charged’ to intercept the Yorkist bill before they could contact the archers. To conduct the charge the charging unit can (a) pivot (b) make a manoeuvre move of 4” (c) roll a D6 for additional inches of movement, meaning the charge could fall short or hit the target, but for infantry, maximum charge range would be 10”.
The charge hit the flank and the combat process is the same three part process that archery uses. What surprised me here was how low the casualties were, but this could have been a dice thing. Anyway, what did happen was a shove and push thing that occurred over three turns, with both sides taking losses, which seemed exactly like a wars of the Roses clash should, though the OBG system as written intends games to be just 6 turns long, so I’m not sure that many of these combats will have time to fully develop on that time scale.
One thing that I wasn’t so sure about in this melee was that the Lancastrians attacked the Yorkist flank and the first two rounds of combat produced a draw in terms of losses. Unless the target flank lost a round, I couldn’t see wording that allowed a defending unit in a drawn situation to attempt to turn and meet the full attack, plus the attackers stay in contact with the flank in a limited way, rather than simulating wrapping around it as the attack developed, both sides need this to get more figures into the fray (contact) to increase the number of attack dice, but I think that is probably just an area that I need to go back into and re-study and see what I have missed … in the end I just faced them off anyway !
In truth I’m not the greatest fan of ‘buckets of dice’ and nothing here convinces me to change my mind on that point, but as part of the integrated process of this system, it works.
In this version of the game engine, the English Longbow is given a boost over standard bow (i.e the short bow used in earlier times). Billmen and archers can combine to make a mixed unit. Polearms are given an advantage against cavalry.
As for the scenario and the rest of the game, the Lancastrians did attempt to counter assault the hill with billmen supported by fresh archers, but the Yorkists held firm as two more of their bill units moved up onto the hill. In this scenario, the Yorkists got there ‘the fastest with the mostest’ and won the day. It is ages since I played this scenario and had forgotten just how good its simple construction is for a quick and dynamic game … certainly a good scenario for a midweek throw down game to scratch an inch.
It would have been nice to see a scenario in the OBG book, but within the limit of a 64 page document, given the choice, I would rather have that useful 4 page index that they do provide.
Overall, there was the usual learning curve that one would expect in a first game, but at the end of play, I felt ready for having another go, which I suppose is the Litmus Test of whether this gave a good playing experience, though next time, I will just do a proper ‘line them up and go’ type game, to play to the systems strengths.
Time now to read the rule set a third time and do a bit of mopping up of mistakes!
I have another bit of webspace called COMMANDERS that is a bit more snippet based than here.
LINK
