SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
I, like a lot of gamers, began my love affair with table top battles through Games Workshop and specifically Warhammer Fantasy. I dabbled a little in historical games (again under the GW umbrella) with Warhammer Ancient Battles but never really committed to anything beyond Warhammer Fantasy, 40k or the various offshoot games set in the same universe. It was my introduction to Bolt Action that changed all of this. I was (and still clearly am) blown away with how well Bolt Action plays and how much I enjoyed assembling and painting the delicate "real life" scale miniatures over the heroic and exaggerated characters I've been used to. Like most wargamers I'd find myself looking at other products from trusted manufacturers and weighing up if I fancy giving new gaming systems a go. It was on a lazy browsing session I first stumbled upon Test of Honour. My initial thought being, "Well this looks brilliant, but can I really add another game to my ever expanding collection? I've got so much painting to do....." However the miniatures looked so good. The game itself is set in an unquantified "Feudal Japan". Single shot muskets, lightning fast katanas and deadly naginatas all feature. Common troops can perform one action per turn but more powerful characters (Loyal Samurai, Ronin, Ninjas, to name a few) have more actions. Feudal Japan isn't the easiest of settings to get right yet the models seemed to do just that.... but my sensible side won over and I decided not to buy the box set. Then Warlord Games started giving away the rulebook as a free pdf (limited time only). Obviously the rulebook got downloaded and the system read incredibly well. As with all good games it’s difficult to master but so easy to pick up. Very few mechanics to learn but enough to offer depth of choice. Sticking to a "you go, I go" turn system seems simple. Add to this the dodge mechanism and suddenly drawing a token from a bag has a huge bearing on every choice you make but the token means you don’t know which of your units you can activate. The extra "fate" tokens and their subsequent upgrades keep every round fresh and can seriously change a scenario in an instant. When the third fate token is drawn, this immediately ends a turn. This forces you to decide between caution (possibly missing your chance to activate a character/unit) and all-out attack (possibly exposing or over committing a valuable piece). Almost everything in the game is accomplished by rolling the game’s bespoke dice and hoping to get three swords or more (roll five and fun bonuses occur). Risk management is balanced with a need for offensive play. Still a good rule set isn't always transcribed onto the table as well as expected. So once again my sensible (boring) side won me over. Other than moving, which can be done freely, an action requires the successful passing of the relevant test. The more powerful a character is the more dice they have to attempt to pass. Seems simple.....but the addition of bonuses for 5 swords or more, and the hilarious consequences if more X's than swords are rolled, keep the action fresh. Each weapon has its own specific bonuses (which activate if five swords are rolled). Weapon bonuses vary on the test being rolled at the time (attack, dodge, damage etc). However the most significant test the game demands is the Test of Honour. Used in the same way as leadership or morale in other gaming systems, a model’s test of honour can lead them to flee, show courage and stand or (in the case of a samurai) fight on through a near deadly wound (drawing a samurai Injury Card and press on in a weakened state). Within a week one of our club members starts talking about a new samurai game they've just bought. Asking if anyone would like a demo game....well I leapt from my seat. As easily as that I was stood at a table playing the game I'd frequently toyed with buying; and it played incredibly well. Quick, smooth and riddled with intricate choices in every scenario. Even a straight punch-up requires tough choices on how to draw your enemy out or bog them down. I've been absolutely hooked ever since. It obviously helps that the models are stunning, multi-part and completely dynamic through construction. My sensible voice has been banished, sent back to the farthest depths of my mind where it belongs. Test of Honour now proudly sits on my shelf and is played as often as possible. The moral of the story? If the game appeals to you, go for it. You'll most likely thank yourself.
Until very recently I played amateur American Football (just 'football' from now) for a team not too far away. When I first began training, I had dreams of playing in 'skill' positions. I wanted to be delivering crunching hits and tackles as a line-backer or catching and holding the ball under pressure as a tight end. Unfortunately, my body and general lack of athleticism, which had deserted me about the same time I started an office job, denied me my delusions. But I was not to be dissuaded and the head coach of the team at the time, with football being such an inclusive game, said, "We have just the spot for you!" Now I was a tackle and an offensive lineman for my first team. Spot the difference: professional lineman v me Once I had I place, as you’d imagine, training felt easier and camaraderie came quicker. Playing as a lineman you are colloquially referred to as being "in the trenches". It's here that games are won or lost. You see at the line of scrimmage you have 5 offensive linemen, whose job it is to protect the ball carrier. Lined up against them are commonly 4 defensive lineman and 3 line-backers whose role it is to attack the carrier be that the running back, running with the ball, or the quarterback passing the ball downfield. At the line you have a series of one on one physical battles and if an offensive player loses his it can 'blow up' a play and stop the chains from moving, grinding the offence to halt. It's in these trenches I found the simple joy of headbutting. Getting into someone's face, in competitive environment, and battling for the team. Sacrificing myself so the team could prevail. Well, this is supposed to be an article on my Blood Bowl experience. So how does this relate to the table top? I have played Blood Bowl since 1996 when I as introduced to it at school. In many ways it enamoured me with football long before I began playing it myself. I enjoy Blood Bowl for many of the reasons I love football. Blood Bowl is, after all, a game of fantasy football. Lineman are replaced with ogres, mummies, zombies, orcs, and even the occasional halfling but the principle is just the same. You win your games of blood bowl in the same place: in the trenches. Your fine athletes or diminutive goblins are all putting themselves in jeopardy so you, as a coach, can move the ball to the endzone and ultimately win. Crucially, this time it’s your little plastic players' bodies on the line, not your own. As it turns out, I find their bodies far more expendable than my own. Again, just like football, there are many different play-styles to make it to the endzone. You can run the ball like the Dallas Cowboys with an orc or dwarf team, or you can play a high flying passing game like 'A-ron' Rogers and the Green Bay Packers with many of the elvish teams. All of the teams in Blood Bowl have their strengths (except maybe the goblin and halfling teams!) and there’s a lot of enjoyment in finding the system that works for you. As you might have guessed, I prefer a tougher harder hitting team but it isn’t necessarily going to more successful than a squishier team that just stays out of harm’s way and actually plays the ball (Blasphemy)! Your team will find success if it is well-coached and, ultimately, the players are willing to do their jobs and put themselves in harm’s way. Much like football, Blood Bowl coaches pour over the x's and o's and develop cunning ploys to victory. You can see from the following the images that the fundamentals are not much different and the core is the same. In both cases the goal is to move the opposition players and you create holes and opportunities for your team. First you hit the defence at the line and then move to those players at the second level to create a wedge which the ball carrier can burst through and hopefully score. The great thing about Blood Bowl is that the hits are so much more meaty, shockingly violent & utterly fantastic. These tiny plastic players perform feats I could only dream of on the pitch. For example, when your plucky enslaved hobgoblin stands up to that ogre on the other side of the line and fends him off turn after turn. Or when the goblin defence has had enough and starts throwing bombs at the opposition, only to be sent off moments later, his work done! There’s heroism, of sorts, there too. In short, my Blood Bowl experience is really living out those delusions I had, and some of you may share, when I first started playing football - and even when I was a teenager and began playing. All of these 11 little figures that make up my team fulfill a different desire. Crushing blows, outrageous catches, mind boggling runs. They’re all there for you and your opponent to share in. Hopefully the club’s 2019 season will bring more of those moments to life for me and the whole league. Everyone can appreciate the spectacle and the simple joy of headbutting.
Chris Peat's long-awaited Battle of Hastings wargame took place last night, recreating the events of 14 October, 1066, but with a rather different outcome. Alec and Tom commanded the English, reversing history's verdict by smashing Chris and Dave, who commanded the invading Normans. The battlefield was amazing. I think it's safe to say a higher power was with Tom and I this evening and the travesty of the original result was well and truly redressed - Alec Alec's view of the historical Norman victory as a 'travesty' is a popular one, but Duke William seems to have earned his triumph through a combination of snake-like guile, military experience and sheer political chutzpah that would do any wargamer proud. And probably a bit of luck too. Maybe we think of it as a 'travesty' because we imagine the Normans to be French and think of this as a defeat at the hands of the Old Enemy. And indeed, French were present on the right flank of William's army, with Bretons on the left. But the Normans were odder than that. The Normans were the descendants of enterprising Vikings who had carved out a Duchy for themselves a century earlier. By William's time, the Normans ('North-men') were Christians, but they retained their ancestors' affinity for hare-brained violence and whacky haircuts and, as far as the French were concerned, there was always something a bit 'off' about them. Really, the events of 1066 were about the attempts of various Scandinavian nobles to seize the legacy of the Norse King of England, Cnut the Great. That's why the English King Harold Godwinson had to see off Norwegians at Stamford Bridge before he could deal with William at Hastings. Harold Godwinson's claim to the throne was pretty sketchy too. The super-wealthy Earl of Wessex, he was the richest man in England: a sort of 11th century Richard Branson (if Branson was 6 feet tall with the athletic grace of a young Nureyev and the easy power of Ali coming out in the first round...). His father Godwin had been a kingmaker and Harold wanted to go a step further. When Edward the Confessor died childless, he left the country under the 'protection' of Harold. Vague enough - and Harold quickly got himself crowned on the back of this testimonial (not unlike Branson, whose headmaster told him he'd either end up in prison or be a millionaire). Still, lots of the great and the good in England saw Harold as an upstart. But what availed so many valuable gifts, when good faith, the foundation of all virtues, was wanting? - Oderic the Chronicler sticks it to Harold (and Richard Branson) Harold's gift for shooting his mouth off and promising all sorts of things to all sorts of people was going to rebound against him. A couple of years earlier, he'd been shipwrecked and found himself the guest (= prisoner) of Duke William of Normandy. Supposedly, Harold had promised William his support in getting the English throne. If Harold was Richard Branson, then William was Donald Trump, except that William was 5'10" and ridiculously strong with a voice like the guy who does horror movie trailers. Once news of Harold's coronation reached Normandy, William went into a frenzied campaign of slurs and fake news, representing Harold as an oathbreaker, his coronation a usurping of the throne and the bishop in charge of it a heretic. William got the support of the Pope (who sent a funky banner), the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Sweden - so maybe not like Trump at all then.
The two forces that met on that October morning were well-matched. Historians think William's forces numbered 10,000 and Harold's 7000, but Harold had a great defensive position and his men were fighting for the homeland, whereas William's troops included lots of mercenaries. The main difference was fighting style: the English kept to the tried-and-trusted strategy of a shield wall stocked with axemen and a few archers to spice things up: William brought with him newfangled cavalry, with those weird stirrups they'd pinched from the Muslims. Probably, though, military experience was decisive and William had this in spades, whereas Harold was fundamentally a Christmas-tree-and-budgerigar salesmen made good (or was that Richard Branson...?). Instead of staying on the higher ground, the English charged after the retreating Norman knights. It was a feint, of course, and the English fell for this time after time. Once Harold died (probably not shot in the eye, but chopped to messes by William and his knights), the English morale collapsed, although Harold's hearth-companions fought a doomed last stand around his corpse. [William] demonstrated – not without difficulty – the superiority of Norman-French mixed cavalry and infantry tactics over the Germanic-Scandinavian infantry traditions of the Anglo-Saxons - historian David Nicolle on Hastings (and, perhaps, Brexit) The rest, of course, is history: fast-forward to Christmas Day and William is being crowned in Westminster Abbey. Over in East Anglia (Harold's stomping ground, before he inherited Wessex), one Hereward the Wake will lead a romantic but doomed resistance to the all-conquering Normans. Maybe Chris will set up the Siege of Ely (1071) for a future game? But it wasn't all bad, was it? The Normans gave us archery and centralised government and a decent tax system. In return, the English kept their word for 'knight' (Anglo-Saxon 'cniht' instead of the French 'chevalier' which tells you something) and within a generation, the sons of Norman conquerors were growing beards and wearing their hair long and wavy, to the despair of their parents who thought they looked like girls... or - wait for it - Richard Branson!
It was the summer of 1978, the nation was retro-rocking to Grease and I was visiting my mate Simon in Welwyn Garden City. Simon had been my friend at Junior School and was much cooler than me, as evidenced by his musical tastes (2-tone, ska) and the fact that his parents had divorced and remarried (mind-boggling in 1978). Anyway, when I arrived to spend the weekend with him, he revealed his new hobby: fantasy Role Playing Games (RPGs), namely Dungeons & Dragons. The ground had been laid for this already. I'd read The Lord of the Rings and was a huge fantasy/SF fan, a massive Greek/Norse mythology nerd and board games player (such as they were back then: I'm talking Waddingtons, not Avalon Hill). Earlier that year, my mother had showed me a newspaper article about D&D which sounded intriguing, but the concept of a game without a board or a winner surpassed my understanding. So Simon produced these rulebooks: the Players Handbook and the Monster Manual and the old blue 'Holmes' Basic Set (you see, the Dungeon Masters Guide had not yet been published so people had to cobble the game together as best they could). I created a character - Tristan, the Elf - and Simon was Dungeon Master and in search of the unknown we went, venturing into the now-classic introductory dungeon. I was instantly, utterly and compulsively hooked. On and on, into the night we played. Then I lay awake, scouring the books by torchlight, poring over the black-and-white illustrations that held rich and unnerving fascinations for me: flesh golems ... green slime (it drops on you!) ... trolls ("loathsome and rubbery") ... demonesses with actual breasts. Yes, I was Sandy and D&D was my Danny Zuko and I was Hopelessly Devoted from that moment on. Tell me more, you say? Well, I dashed home and told my parents I wanted D&D for Christmas (5 achingly slow months away). To Welwyn Garden City we must go, to the department store that sold this odd and (to my father's mind) hugely overpriced game. I think it cost £10, which was a big deal for a Christmas present then, and the box was unprepossessing. But Christmas finally came and I unpacked the slim rulebook, the oddly-shaped dice, the venerated dungeon module (so replete with secrets, but not, I discovered, any actual green slime or breasty demonesses) and subjected my hapless parents to the game (they played along, mystified), then recruited likelier gaming buddies: fellow 12-year-old boys. From now on, D&D owned my imagination and my very soul. The following Christmas brought the long-awaited Dungeon Master's Guide, which was a monumental piece of reading material with some vocabulary-expanding prose in it. White Dwarf subscriptions ensued and, when I moved to Scotland at the age of 13, I made new friends by seeking out the only kids in the school who played D&D. Puberty, romantic love, sexual angst and moodiness came and went - or I presume they did, because I was too busy drawing dungeons to notice. A lot of ink could be spilled on the subject of why D&D grips adolescent boys so compulsively. It's an escape, obviously. It's a fantasy alternative where problems can be solved with magic or brute power. There's world-building, problem-solving and narcissism. Those demonesses aren't wearing any clothes. And so on. But I don't want to knock it because it was a pretty constructive hobby. I was DM in an ongoing campaign with schoolfriends Andrew, Chris, Gareth and Douglas - or Micdor the Mighty, By-Tor Madrigal, Bron-Y-Aur the Gnome and Riethor Thalion the Ranger. You guys, your characters names are still as familiar to me as Frodo and Bilbo and your adventures were, frankly, just as worthy of big cinema adaptations. Who can forget when you stormed the assassin's guild? or the vampires of Wizard Street? or the land of the Frost Barbarians with its comedy berserkers? True friendship, epic tales and my mum bringing us a tray of tea and sandwiches as the Sunday afternoons slipped away, away, far away and long ago. If there's a heaven (and how can there not be?) then surely we will all meet there, unwearied by age and uncondemned by the years, and play our D&D campaign again. And my beloved mother will bring us tea. But I digress (and am making myself tearful). A long interval must be dispensed with: university, career, marriage; important things but the turning of the wheel was waiting for me when I started teaching schoolkids to play D&D again, running little clubs, presiding over a new generation of heroes, watching the spark kindle a fire of obsession in some eyes, but not others. Why some and not others? It's an interesting question. I've probably introduced a hundred people to D&D in my life and I've never yet met someone who didn't "get it" - who couldn't, after a few moments of following along, realise that you were playing a character, imagining a story and who wouldn't immediately start making their own contributions to the narrative: "I'll hit him!", "I'm going to open the chest", "I'll search for secret doors", "I'll hit him!", "Can I jump over it?", ""I take the treasure", "I'll hit him!" and so on. Nobody is too clever for this to appeal to them or too stupid to grasp the basics. It's so immediate and so accessible that it feels eerily as if storytelling like this is some sort of innate human potential, like singing or playing with babies or cheering at sports, something that we all do naturally and would do a lot more often if our culture didn't direct us away from such activities. Perhaps that's true - perhaps our culture teaches us to think of imagination and storytelling as activities assigned only to experts and people employed by Disney, encouraging us to be passive consumers of other people's stories when really it's our human inheritance to create our own. But even though everyone 'gets it', not everyone likes it. I've introduced D&D to people who've said afterwards (or half way through), "Yeah, it's OK, it just goes on a bit - I'm going to wander over there for a while and watch bugs hit the window." And I've got to say, I play RPGs much less now than I used to. They're tiring, imaginatively and socially. Board games feel much more like relaxation, especially if you're not super-jazzed about winning But then time passes and I get the old itch. I want to get a bunch of people to the table and deliver a round unvarnished tale, then sit back while they squabble and scheme, twit each other and have dazzling insights, crack the funniest jokes ever, draw more creativity out of me than I knew I had, rush to each other's rescue, piece the clues together and screw everything up on a final calamitous dice roll. Yes. Yes I think it's time to play D&D again. Fresh faces very welcome.
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