Oooh! Those Hotz mats are very nice, and the price works out at around 28 quid for a 6ft by 4ft mat. That's much better value than the Kallistra terrain.

I'm not knocking the Kallistra stuff mind you - it is lovely. I've seen it at some of the wargames shows here in the UK.

...but my homemade mat cost me two hours work and a permanent marker (It had nearly run out of ink by the end). El cheapo!

Don't worry too much about the rules questions. I'll pick your brains at some point. I imagine the next day or so could be busy, what with New Year and everything.

As for tinkering with the games: I try and do this as little as possible, but I appreciate it when you can do this. I think Te Wapen is very streamlined to be perfectly honest. 29 units with an average 3/4 wounds each played out in just two hours! That is incredible! I can't think of another mass fantasy game that can come close to that. I even preferred it to HOTT.

I did find the retreat rule interesting though. We tended to play that to the best effect - always trying to attack a target with a unit to the rear. This meant we were all hesitant to position units next to each other. Both armies got quite a few hits with the existing rules, even though target units might have 4 clear hexes around them. This felt a bit 'wrong' to me - maybe the retreating units should only take a hit if there is no possible hex to retreat into, rather than being forced to retreat exactly 180 degrees away from the attacker. It bears some thinking about.

The only other (extremely minor) comment was the fact that combat dice remeanined the same even though a unit had been weakened. I personally feel that this is a good compromise to make the game more playable & keep it quick, but I guess you could half the combat dice (rounding up) once the unit had dropped to below half strength or something like that. If you really wanted to. I think this will slow the game up though.

I now need some lizardmen to play the Golden Idol scenario... (he he)

Catch you tomorrow.

DaveA


Phil Dutre wrote:

--- In Te_Wapen@yahoogroups.com, "Dave Ashton" <tonsha@...> wrote:
>
> Wow - I've just uploaded about thirty photos. I took more... but I
> think thirty tells the story well enough! (Phew!).
>
> I'll do a full battle report tomorrow. Just quickly - The gaming board
> was my regular green cloth. I'm getting a new one, so I decided the
> 'hexify' the old one (This is why I haven't played Te Wapen for two
> years). I made a card template then spent two hours marking the hexes
> on the cloth - the morning of the game! (From 6am until 8am - am I mad
> or what?). I'll try to upload the template to the files section at
> some point, so people can make their own boards if they want to. The
> Kallistra terrain is lovely, but at 40 quid a box is well out of my
> price range (I play with paper figures for goodness sake!)

Dave,

I like your setup. The 2D paper figures look really nice. One of my
plans to set up a game with old-style flat German tinfigures at some
point ;-)

Yeah, the Kallistra terrain is expensive. An alternative might be:
http://www.hotzmats.com/
They sell felt mats with superimposed hexgrids. Green, fields, desert,
... I also discovered this only about a week ago.

I'll answer your rules questions later. I'll just say that indeed some
things are not streamlined very well at this point. I also keep
tinkering with the system every time I play a game, but that's the fun
of home-written rules :-)

Phil

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