On Tuesday I went over to my mates place for a couple of skirmish encounters of a game called Okku. This is a board based Japanese fantasy game, using 28mm figures. I took along my own Frostgrave figures, as I always prefer to use my own figures if possible (I spend enough money and time on acquiring and painting them!)

Unfortunately, what I did NOT take were my reading glasses, so I could literally not read any of the info on the character cards, which is a pretty fundamental part of the game! I could barely see the large figures in the top left of the card, showing the movement etc!

In the first game, I did not even really try to use the random dice we roll each turn, which help enhance the various characters abilities or enable them to use a special skill. This meant that I just moved my figures into contact with Julian's and trusted to the luck of the dice - which did not work out for me!

We then stopped for an appropriate meal of Bento boxes (Japanese takeaway) delivered by Uber eats!

After this welcome interlude, we had a second game that I should actually have won, but I left one of my special characters exposed and Julian managed to get to him on the last move before I would have killed his most important figure....GRRRRR!

Not my finest hour but to paraphrase what they say about fishing - a bad evening wargaming is still better than a good day at work!

Here are a few pictures - no real narrative as I did not take enough of them to keep track of what happened

GAME ONE

The first pics are (rather obviously) the character cards for my force - none of which I could read as mentioned. In fact, the idea of taking pictures was so I could look at them via my phone, but that proved too much of a pain so I gave up after a short while!

 Below are my figures that I used to represent the various characters - this added to the confusion of my blindness, as Julian actually has figures that more or less match the image on each card, whereas mine, obviously, did not!

 One and only view of the actual game in progress - this is very early on - the blue figure next to my sorceress in the bottom left of this image is a Wind Demon ( a Kami) that I was able to summon.

GAME TWO

This time, I used Julian's figures and my force were mainly undead warriors

Julian's "team" had to defend their wizard (in orange) who was supposed to be lying down, close to death in this hut

 My undead force ready to advance

 The guy on the left below with the square head is NOT Wurzel Gummage - he is the Monk of the Crow Clan!

 My Monk was able to summon another Kami, this time an earth demon (top left below)

 The guy in the centre is Okku in person - a kind of super hero Samurai - who I managed to KILL - YAY!

 Below a close up of the earth Kami - he nearly sneaked into the hut to kill the wounded wizard...

 The character card for the Kami...

As I said, I killed Okku and the guy with the hand gun and would have been into the hut next move to finish off Julian's wizard - except, I left the Monk of the Crow Clan out on his own on my left flank and some female Samurai with extra speed dice sprinted across and sliced him in half, ending the game - bloody women!

A few weeks ago, I had a previous run through of this rule set but for some reason did not bother to put it up on my blog. I probably cannot remember many of the details now but decided to post the pics anyway.....so here they are!

As alluded to in my last blog, in this trial game, the Brits were again Veterans but the Taliban were Green or Trained at best, and this was reflected in the result.

 A view of the table set up - Brit fire teams entered from the right

 The first fireteam advances cautiously up an irrigation ditch

 And the first Taliban reaction occurs....

 The fire team continues to advance towards the village

 And another group of Taliban appear on the other flank

 Two groups of Taliban fighters converging from the left flank on the advancing British troops

 Another group appear in the buildings ahead of the advancing Brits

 A Taliban sniper in waiting …...

British SAW gunner opens up from the cover of a crop field

 A good result on the firing dice - three hits on Terry Taliban - as Green troops, they can only take a single suppression and the other two hits count as casualties

 The Taliban on the roof are still in the fight.....

Both British fireteams combine in an irrigation ditch

 The GPMG team

 A fourth group of Taliban appear on the Brits flank and move to attack

 Whilst another group attempt to assault the GPMG team

 Both sides suffered hits in the initial combat

 This melee lasted about 4 turns but the Brits emerged victorious

The Brits in the ditch engaged the flank attack with fire...three hits = a suppression and two figures lost

Taliban return fire inflicted a couple of suppressions on the Brits, but they recovered in the following activation phase....

….then followed up with an old fashioned bayonet charge…..

..from which they emerged victorious!

This initial game just proved that making all the Taliban low grade troops meant the Brits suffered virtually no hits, and the game was a walkover for them. A better balance of troop abilities is needed to make this a more interesting game......