Irregular Wars Wargaming

Over at the antipodean One Sided Minature Wargaming Discourse page, I have just read another short review of Galleys & Galleons: "What I liked was that it was simple with meaningful moves and decisions. It also has lots of promise for multi-players, different ship types, fleets and monsters." The full review can be found HERE . Following up on that, the blog also a short AAR of an Anglo-French engagement in the Napoleonic period where they have used Ganesha's online fleet builder to approximate later vessels.

I had an enjoyably quiet night of gaming over the weekend, getting Dan Mersey's  Dux Bellorum back out on the table for another run. It really is a smashingly well thought out little game that does a great job at recreating the bloody struggles of the Early Medieval period. Although other forces are being slowly (oh so slowly) assembled by other gents in our gaming circle, at the moment, my Romano-British of Rheged and Ulaid Irish are the only armies, so they met once more. To date, the Irish have been undefeated. Their wild charges led by noble warriors proving unstoppable for the British riders and shieldwalls. We allocated armies randomly and I ended up with the crazy, hound-loving, saffron-wearing, rough nuts. JB, the British player was the repeller (defender) and placed a village right in the centre of the table. Even though my warriors fair better in terrain than any of the Britons, I seemed to have ignored the fact and split my forces into two separate force...

I had a lovely note left for me on this blog over the weekend from Peter Hunt of the Hong Kong Society of Wargamers stating "I'm well impressed with your Galleys and Galleons Rules. They are the answer to something that I have been looking for a long time." How nice! Certainly a sentiment that I appreciate. Even better, Peter went on to note that he has written up a review on the Society website . Here is just a taster: "The rules run to 78 pages and are well written, in a “tongue in cheek” manner that is clearly aiming at a fun game rather than a deep historical simulation, of which the presence of Kraken to drag you down into the deep, Leviathans to pursue o’er the Seven Seas, Rocs to descend on you from the skies, and an Edge of the World to fall off, leaves you in no doubt. Don’t be put off if that is not your cup of tea though; there is a good set of rules here that will serve well for historical games. Almost all the aspects of the Ganesha Games’ system a...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/9742092/song-of-blades-hammer-and-forge

This weekend the 2nd annual Irish Song of Blades and Heroes competition day - The Cú Chulainn Cup - was held in Whitehead, Co. Antrim. Like last year, the host venue was Wee Gamers, a great bunch of guys and girls who meet regularly (several times a week) to play a huge array of tabletop war games, board games and RPGs. This year we had 10 competitors with a really interesting mix of warbands. There were a few limitations placed on warband creation but, as you'll see yourself, that didn't stop our lads from having all manner of models on the table. I'm also really proud to say that no-one went for a real power-gaming, min-max approach to the warbands. They all had a theme and stuck to them. Players must use the same painted 25-28mm scale warbands in each round. Warbands may be no larger than 300 points and must be legal – i.e. no more than 33.3% of the points value of the warband may be spent on models with special rules which define them as ‘personalities’.  Profile...

There is a great little Galleys & Galleons battle report over on  the Valle dei gufi blog. They played the treasure islands scenario between Swedish and French fleets and quicky discovered the hazzards of sailing large vessels into shallow waters! I freely admit that I needed to use Google's inbuilt translator to find out what was going on, but it makes a great read. I encourage you to check it out HERE .