Friday 14 October 2016

The Men Who Would Be Kings - Unit Cards

Hi Folks

This coming Monday the shed is going to trial the new Osprey rulebook titled The  Men who would be Kings written by Dan Mersey. This author is the same one who wrote the successful Lion & Dragon Rampant series.

Post game I'll put up a report and how they played however reading through this set you can see it shares the same heritage as the previous two but with a few major modifications.

The first is that all units have a standard set of actions which they don't have to test for...in other words infantry get to shoot if they can see a target, zulus get to move and attack. In the earlier games once a unit failed the entire army failed.

The second main change is the adoption of leadership values for each unit. There's a nice table to build the leadership value and this is great if you want to fight a battle with only a few units. I am going to introduce a simple modifier to this...all units will have a standard leadership score according to my perceived wisdom.

Why...well my game is going to have six players and at least 90 points aside. Having separate rankings for each unit of the same type is going to be a nightmare. I do however like to have generals and officers on the table. Each brigade/impi whatever will have one leader - this will have a command radius of 6" and add +1 leadership to any unit within this area. He cant be everywhere but could influence the game.

Unit cards are a great way of getting the players to better understand and control their troops. They speed the game up and can be used if in sufficient quantity to create random armies.

My aim with the The Men Who Would be King ruleset was to get all the pertinent data onto one card. One face containing all the unit info the other general rules. These have been produced using power point.

As you can see below


  • The points value of the unit is top right in yellow
  • The number of figures in the unit bottom right
  • The card has the Free actions the unit might have
  • The weapons carries the range (short/long)
All the above are carried in separate tables throughout the book so bringing these together is not an issue




Sometimes the units might be quite similar but with a variation - these can be catered for as you can see from the two zulu cards posted below

Both are Zulu units but there are variations - I have given the married units veteran status, +1 discipline and a better leadership value. The unmarried lot are fierce +1 to their combat ability




The cards themselves are index sized

I mentioned that the backs of these cards would contain the pertinent rules. These can all be found on the reference card...



I'll print these all off for monday's game and if all the relevant data is there and works I'll laminate them up.

cheers

Eric the Shed

(PS come back Tuesday to see how it played)

17 comments:

  1. Looking forward to your AAR: we produced similar cards for our Christmas game of Isandlwana using the play test version of MWWBK and they worked a treat, even with 900 Zulus and c.250 Brits/Auxiliaries on the table and with 4 of the 6 players never having played the rules before.

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    1. thank you sir...is their a report anywhere i can read on this action?

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  2. Sadly no proper report - this dinosaur must get blogging! There's a few photos on various colonial/MWWBK threads on LAF. We ran the game to a largely historical conclusion in a leisurely 5 hours - the 24th went down fighting, Durnford managed to escape with about half his command and the Zulus suffered horrible casualties. I should have a set of rule amendments we used if you're interested?

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    1. Yes please to the rule amendments...pm me on the Lead Adventure Fourum and I'll send you my email address..cheers

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    2. PM sent via LAF.

      Played a great game of MWWBK today: a field force of auxiliary cavalry attempting, and ultimately failing, to burn down a Zulu kraal in the face of some severe opposition.

      The individual unit leader characteristics do add to the fun (I was saddled with a right mixture of shirkers, drunks and rookies) but they would add too much complexity to larger games with more than 6-8 units per side - at which point a single Force Leader for every 24 points becomes a very good alternative idea.

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    3. Simon
      Good to see you ahve the bug, I to would not mind a look, we have a big all dayer planned, these bad boys are in danger of over taking SP :-)
      You have my e-mail address.
      Cheers
      Stu

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  3. I should (fingers crossed) be trying these rules tomorrow at the club. So when I read your AAR I will know what I should have done. I will post my AAR in a few days.

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  4. Eric
    A great addition, We have been adding the officer traits to our cards as they are so important for how the games play out.
    Cheers
    Stu

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    1. I think for smaller games I would agree but given this is our first game and the Brits have 16 units and the Zulus 36 units I decided to drop this rule

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  5. I will look forward to the report.

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  6. Eric, Thank you for making these units cards and sharing them with us. I think that something like this is definitely a necessary aid to play. They will be very helpful!

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    1. Hi Bwana Bill - very happy to share PM me on either the TMP or LAF with your email address

      cheers

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  7. Are those unit cards available anywhere? My email is : chadshock09@gmail.com
    Thank you.

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