You'll find a little of everything here. Genres covered in this blog include (so far) prehistorics, fantasy, old west, swashbucklers, pulp, Blood Bowl, Ghostbusters, gladiators, nautical, science fiction and samurai in 6mm, 15mm, 28mm, 40mm, 42mm and 54mm sizes. You'll also find terrain, scenery, basing, gaming, modeling, tutorials, repaints, conversions, art and thoughts in general about the hobby.


Sunday, May 19, 2013

42mm gaming: Playing Battle Events games



A point on something I mentioned in my last post (don't forget to check it out; I posted it at the same time as this post): Steve Barber's samurai range is not necessarily small. Relatively speaking, yes, there are only a few choices. But they are good choices. Steve has created just enough different figures (and the right figures) for a player to actually field a large army; there is infantry in a few poses with spears (and a couple with guns and an archer), a couple "officers," some banner men and a few samurai, all that you need for a basic army. In any case, you can do a massive battle with the figures available.

But do you need a lot of figures to play a massive battle?
I don't play large armies myself, but Steve's range is great for skirmishes as well as something I would call Battle Events, occurrences that happen in the midst of a larger battle.

For example, you could have a samurai general challenging another, and around them surge a few ashiguru. Or maybe a line of teppo (gunners) are trying to survive the charge of some ashigaru? Or you could just have a couple lines of ashigaru fighting over varied terrain (trying to take a section of castle wall, or fighting for a captured banner, for example).

As for rules mechanics, these are still essentially skirmishes, but the narrative is different. Instead of your campaign being a chronology of small skirmishes over time, they are a series of simultaneous events within the same large battle. Perhaps you could do a full set of events which would effect the next set of events, the totality of which you could use to determine the results of the over-arching battle?

Going about a battle in this fashion, you don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on a ton of figures.  All you need are some basic infantry and a varied set of leaders and samurai, (all of which, as I mentioned, are provided by Steve Barber's range.) Battle Events could much more easily be accomplished in 28mm, especially with a range as comprehensive as the Perry's. But for fights with fewer figures, I prefer larger figures, because I want my battles to be much more personal affairs. 54mm samurai are too expensive; 42mm are not. 

2 comments:

  1. I love these, great painting and basing. Great idea for the Large Battle skirmish game. I suppose if you look at a large battle in macro detail, its just a huge number of skirmishes strung together. I can see lots of random event cards and such stuff coming in to play.

    Keep up the great work

    Airhead

    ReplyDelete