Samurai Battles for Triumph & Tragedy

[Westfalia Chris]

Hi Chris

First of all, it was my first game with T&T rule, I never played the original version, so, maybe my approach will be different than the rest of the group !

Game was fun, due to the activation cards combine with unit cards, and big question was how you will organize your strategic/tactical move. Very interesting.

I see how this could be particularly challenging in a setting where you want to get your troops into close combat.

For my point of view, the major difference with the standard version is the armor, and the gain of 1 HP for every miniature. With Basic T&T, standard troop can be suppressed or killed (coz only 1HP). Binary, black or white.

With the Samurai version, you can be wounded, and you must put one token behind your unit. Combine with suppress market, our first impression have been combat sequence was a little bit complicated, and add nothing special.

Ah, I missed that paragraph when reading through the samurai rules. I agree that this could bog down the game considerably, especially with regard to penalties. Personally, I wonder if the extra wound might be replaced by a re-roll of the damage table roll - i.e. keep the to-hit penalties which I consider reasonable, but increase the chance of surviving a hit rather than "ignoring" the first Hit Point loss. The effects would probably balance out over the game, and fights could be streamlined; also, it would keep the leaders and heroes special.

[Lt. Hazel]

A friend of mine and I will use slightly modified T+T for our Late Roman Tactica game. We faced similiar Problems and changed some minor things, e.g. One HP instand of two, but put boni or mali on the to-Hit-roll. That worked well and needed less markers. We also changed the events resulting from lost melees or Morale Tests.

[sf2605]

we had thought to replace wounded by kill, and as you mentioned, only one HP with or without armor.
Reduce the cost of amor as follow:
Do-Maru: 1
O-Yoroi: 2
Hara-Ate: 3

Maybe the arquebus should be a problem, she inflict 2 HP.

The game should be faster with less token.

Any suggestion ?

[Driscoles]

"The game should be faster with less token"


Are you guys always in a hurry

Thank you for the pictures and the report. I am very much impressed.

It is unusual to play the first game of T+T as a large Samurai Battle. Amazing when you recall that the game was designed as a small scale skirmish game for the interwar period. I hope you had fun. I am glad you liked the activation system. Thats the heart of T+T.

Anyway....T+T works for larger games. I also played larger games were I replaced a squad of 8 men with a company represented by 8 figures... larger games need some modification to speed things up.

I personally think units should be broken earlier and morale tests need more modifiers. I am working on that.

I would also suggest that you contact Green Knight. He wrote the rules for Samurai Battles. You should ask him about his ideas. I know he did quiete a lot games, he is a very experienced gamer and he does a lot of modifications for rules systems he likes to play.

The THS wargamers used the T+T rules for a Lord Of The Rings Battle of Five Armies game. I played it at last years Tactica and liked it very much. They modified the rules for large scale battle with units representing big bodies of men and monsters. They did modifications on morale checks that made sense for such a type of game.

I can recall a conversation with Green knight that he wanted the arquebus to inflict 2 hp damage to ballance the slow reload action and to represent the damage of bullets on armour.

Cheers
Björn

[Green_Knight]

From the Samurai Rules pdf it did not state a very essential Thing on Units
of models with more than 1 HP.

HP should be recorded by Unit and only for leader/hero models seperatly.
So if your Unit suffers 3 Wounds and 1 Kill, simply remove 2 Models and
put a wound marker down for the UNIT.

Next time the unit suffers a wound it has to remove another model and the wound marker.

Think of the wound marker für a unit as a half loss.
Maybe that helps, so you did not have such a mess of Counters.

Yes the Samurai Units have a high morale, this is compensated by the fact that i continue to
place markers at the unit and each excess marker reduces the morale by additional 1.

Maybe that helps.