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Earlier this week I announced my return to wargaming with Scourge of Princes. So far I've played the introductory game twice. I'm due to play a larger game next month and now I need to write a list.
As is my wont, I decided to write an army builder spreadsheet first. I planned to build [sic] on my experience writing similar spreadsheets for ADLG & DBA.
This post records my efforts and makes them freely available.
Would you believe it! I've actually played a wargame? My first in over twelve months. To be truthful I've actually played twice; on separate occasions too. This is a positive move.
I have a mate in town who's also a wargamer. He's a lapsed competition gamer who played DBM, DBMM & MEG so we have a lot in common. In late summer he lent me his copy of Scourge of Princes by Sam Mustafa to see if I fancied a game.
In next to no time, I was hooked. Not least because it gives me an opportunity to use my Renaissance armies, which I haven't used since I stopped playing FOGR in 2017.
In 2020 I collaborated with Nigel Emsen on his ACW rules Rebels & Yankees. Mainly, I was indulging my penchant for rules editing and table tweaking.
In the intervening years, Nigel has proved to be a constant source of innovation. His output is prodigious and he now has quite a portfolio on Wargame Vault. It's a mixture of free and "pay what you want" downloads covering many periods. It is well worth a look.
New rules
His latest project is a commercial set of scale agnostic, grid based ACW
rules: "Muskets & Springfields". It was published earlier this month
and was launched last weekend at Salute 50.
I'm pleased to say that I made a small contribution to the finished book: a few of my painted 15 mm ACW figures feature amongst the text. You can see the originals here. I'm looking forward to receiving my copy later this week.
The rules are currently available with £5.00 off the £25.00 RRP, and free delivery, from the Helion website.
Over on my other blog I've written quite few posts about editing wargame rules. The two key posts are:
One word on warning, to be legible the image above is probably best viewed full screen:
There are two reasons why you may wish to look at these posts. Firstly, you may be interested in how I go about editing rule sets. Secondly, you may wish to find out more about a smashing set of fast play ACW rules that are available as a free download.
My last post “A Campaign For The Balkans 1370 AD” has been well received and to a couple of people asking if I’d publish their campaign systems. One such request came from Peter Barrett of Canberra Games Society.
His system is based on Roman expansion in the 1st century BC but is equally applicable to any expanding empire, including mid 4th century BC Macedonia, the Byzantine Empire of Justinian I, the early days of the Arab Caliphate, the Seljuk Empire, the Mongol Empire or the Empire of Timur.
Last Sunday I was due to play in a one day, six player campaign devised by John Davies. Needless to say it didn’t happen.
A week before we had seven players and by the the time I turned up at the club we had three. Flu had accounted for two of the seven leaving us with an odd number and then a couple more dropped out.
The scenario and system is really rather elegant and applicable to more than just DBMM as you can see from John’s design:
