Over the past week I’ve added three more warriors to my SKIRMASH collection. An Orc Champion, an Assyrian Officer and a Goblin Shaman. I’ve had these guys for ages so it’s good to finally press them into action, and to have a fun little game like SKIRMASH I can throw odd figures into.
Here are my current collections of goodies and baddies:
Playing with my last posted version of the rules I felt a niggle. It was that if a character was built to be tough there was very little that could be done to take them out, other than maximising the number of attacks against them till the weight of dice finished them off. There was no way to take a figure that was specialised for removing tough characters. An additional niggle was that the roll to determine a figures number of actions was slowing things down, so I think I’ll be opting for a far simpler system moving forwards. As much as I enjoyed the game I posted recently, the first couple of rounds were a bit of a slog with twenty figures on the table in total.
With Christmas approaching, and with my roster of individual warriors reaching 44! I’m thinking of revisiting a Christmas tradition of mine from a few years back: the Zero Player Duel Game!
This originated in Christmas 2020… four years ago, gosh!
https://deathzap.co.uk/2020/12/24/zero-player-duel-wargame-rules/
Maybe to include my full roster without any repeated stat lines I’ll need to bust out my D20s. It would be cool if I could play with the same stat lines as SKIRMASH or maybe I’ll just play 1v1 SKIRMASH. I’ve always been curious about which statlines were better, and maybe this will be a way of finding out.
There was a more complicated version of the duelling rules that appeared later, however they didn’t have the speed and ease of play I was after:
https://deathzap.co.uk/2022/07/21/harry-the-executioner-vs-ankh-the-egyptian/
https://deathzap.co.uk/2022/07/24/death-duels/
I remember the difficult design challenges of duelling. Trying to replicate the toing and froing of a duel while also capturing the visceral feeling of successful hits all in a players mind with static figures is a difficult thing to pull off. Of course I handicapped myself further by trying to keep all of that simple and by making it quick and easy to build characters, while also having any character build roughly balanced against any other.
Maybe a new version is incoming…
Deathzap 