First Solo Trial of Osprey's "En Garde" Swashbuckling Skirmish Rules

 Ok, so a disclaimer first, I don't think I got all of this right! But the bits I did, seem to have worked quite well....

The game saw two five person bands of swords people clash in a small-town square. I will probably make a few appropriate looking timber framed buildings to add to the background ambience - but for this trial, I used some of my Reivers buildings (which seemed reasonable, given one of the warbands was made up of foot reivers!) For the base, I just copied a cobblestone image off Google, put it into paint and copy/pasted it six times to make it a larger area, then printed the result off in colour onto two A3 sheets at work. Possibly going forward, I might do a couple more and use PVA to glue them to some 2 or 3mm card to make them a bit more robust...

Anyway, on with the report - lots of words in this AAR and not as many images as some other games 

The playing area with some random bystanders to add eye candy!

The Reivers warband

Superfluous spectators 

The Ladies Warband (of course, you knew that would happen!)

Turn One - the villagers scatter as the two bands advance across the square

Reivers win initiative and their commander orders a RUN move of 9cm (I converted scale from inches to cm given the small playing area but actually, it made no real difference as no one did much moving once battle was joined!)

The Ladies commander reciprocated in their movement phase

And we all move into base-to-base contact - let the swordplay commence!

To test the combat mechanics, I decided I would choose for the Ladies side and randomly select the cards for the Reivers.

The Lady commander with a CP rating of 4 chose two attack and two defend tokens

The Reiver commander randomly drew three attack and one defend

The Reiver commander won initiative and played an attack card; the Lady commander announced a "parry" defence ploy and spent a defence card. The Reiver then announced he would use his "mighty blow" attribute, spending a second attack card. This meant the Reiver rolled 3 D6 and the Lady 2 D6.

The Reiver rolled 4 3 and 1 =7 plus his fighting rating of 4 = total score of 11

The Lady rolled 5 and 2 = 7 plus her 4 fighting skill = 11 a draw and NO Hit!

The Lady commander then initiated an attack, also using a mighty blow, and thus expending both her attack cards. The Reiver announced a defensive parry and expended his sole defence card.

The Lady's score was 5 4 and 1 = 9 plus her 4 =13. 

The Reiver rolled 2 and 5 = 7 + 4 = 11 

The result was a difference of two, resulting in a Light Wound to the Reiver.

The Reiver still had one attack card to use and he played it, with the Lady using her last defence card to parry his attack.

The Reiver rolled 9 on 2 D6 and added 3 (his fighting score is reduced by one due to the light wound) total of 12

In reply, the lady rolled 11 on 2 D6 and added her 4 to make 15 and No Hit!

The Lady still had one attack remaining and the Reiver had no defence cards, so 2 D6 to 1 - the Lady rolled a double 1!

From this point on, the images don't match with everything I have written.....

The second combat was the Reivers 2 ic versus M'Lady de Winter (in the blue dress) The Reiver won initiative and attempted to attack, however, M'Lady has a "beguiling" attribute which means, if she has not yet been in combat with an opposing figure, it must role below its CP rank to initiate an attack - the Reiver had a CP of 3 so had to roll 1 or 2 - and rolled a 3! I had picked two defence cards for M'Lady and randomly had three attack cards for the Reiver. So, I think M'Lady could still attack, but she cannot add any attributes (I might have got that wrong though?) As the Reiver has no defence tokens, he cannot employ a parry - so I did a straight 2 x D6 to 1 D6. The result was a 5 to 4 victory to M'Lady. a difference of 1 and the Reiver was stunned, which has no effect on his ability to launch a counterattack, which he did! The Reiver used two attack cards to give him the Mighty Blow attribute and M'Lady used a defence card to parry. Results below, the attacker scored 10 +3 = 13 and M'Lady scored 12 +2 = 14 and No Hit

I redid the attack by M'Lady with 2 D6 to 1, the result was an 11 to 2 victory! After adding attributes, it was a 13 to 6 result, a difference of 7, and the Reiver was killed outright! 

(However, I might have got this all wrong - afterwards, I decided that if a figure only has defence cards, it probably can't attack at all?)

The third combat saw a standard Reiver taking on the Lady Officer 2 ic..Once again, the Reiver won the combat initiative roll and went first. The Lady used a defence card to parry, so it was a 2 D6 each roll off. The result after adding factors was 10 - 11 for the attacker, meaning no hit.

The Lady officer retaliated with two attack cards, employing a Mighty Blow for 3 D6 and the Reiver used a defend card to attempt to parry. Results were 6 and 3 and 1 = 9 plus 3 = 12 total for the Lady and 6 and 1 = 7 plus 3 = 10 for the Reiver - a losing difference of two, resulting in a Light Wound for the Reiver!

Combats 4 saw a standard Reiver take on a standard swordswoman, the result being the lady was Heavily Wounded but the Reiver killed! In Combat 5, the Reiver prevailed, being unwounded at the conclusion of their clash, but with his female opponent also heavily wounded.

On Turn Four, the Reivers once again won the initiative, but had considerably fewer cards at their disposal than the ladies did. The unwounded M'Lady de Winter, Officer and Commander ganged up against the Reiver commander who was lightly wounded and supported by a stunned Reiver!

There follows a lot of text around the combat in turn four!

In the first combat initiated by the Reivers, their lone unwounded figure attacked one of the ladies carrying a Heavy Wound. He used the Mighty Blow attribute to gain an extra D6 and the lady used a defence card for a parry, the result was 7 to the attacker and 10 to the defender, so no hit. The lady replied, also employing the mighty blow and the Reiver parried - a result of 9 to 11 resulted and again, no hit incurred. The Reiver only has 2 CP so cannot attack again. The combat moved on to the Reiver commander versus the lady officer. The commander also employed mighty blow and the lady a parry, so 3 D6 to 2 D6, the result being 7 to 12 for no hit! In reply, the officer scored 3 to 7 as the attacker and again failed to land a blow.

It's going to get a bit boring if I carry on a blow-by-blow account (perhaps its already boring?!) Over a couple of combats, the ladies managed to combine another light wound on the Reiver commander to change his status to heavy wound and then they got a free hack at him as he had no defence tokens left and scored 8 to 3, killing him outright!

In Turn Five, the ladies got the initiative and between them now had a combined total of 14 CP (attack/defend tokens) to 8 CP for the Reivers. With those kinds of odds, the result was pretty inevitable, although the ladies commander did pick up a heavy wound along the way! 

With four out of five Reivers dispatched, the one remaining unwounded Reiver took to his heels, fleeing across the town square, with M'Lady and the unwounded officer in hot pursuit, and that where the game ended.

The two roster sheets for the warbands, as they looked at the conclusion of the game. The ladies took quite a bit of damage, three of them being heavily wounded (it should technically be "grievously" but I mistakenly wrote HW on the token, so just left it at that for this game!)

Not too sure about the rules - maybe if I was running a six player game, I would have smaller groups - five per side didn't seem a lot, but it took about an hour and half to play this skirmish out (there was a lot of down time for rule consulting and recording results of dice rolls for this blog etc, though, so perhaps the game could have been speeded up a bit). I did quite enjoy it though, so will probably give it another go!