Starting with The Men Who Would Be Kings

[Sunjester]

I have recently purchased a copy of Osprey’s “The Men Who Would Be Kings”, the colonial wargames rules by Dan Mersey.  Although they share some of the mechanisms of Dan’s excellent Lion Rampant and Dragon Rampant rules, there are many differences and I think these will give quite a different game to LR/DR.

Although I have quite a number of figures for colonial skirmish gaming, I don’t really have large enough forces to play the rules, but I don’t want to wait until I’d bought and painted more units before trying the rules out. Fortunately Dan has put in the option of “Skirmish Kings”, playing the rules with half sized units. This means I only need 4 or 5 figures for cavalry units and 6 or 8 figures for most infantry ones. Looking at my varied collection of figures I needed to come up with a suitable setting to explain the wide variety of troops I’d be using (including pygmies, Masai, Chinese, colonial troops, askaris and assorted explorers/hunters etc).

My games are going to be set on a fictional large island off the east coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean.

You can see full details of my ideas on the blog http://tringwargames.blogspot.co.uk/

I'll be playing the first games next week, so batreps and photos to follow.

[Belisarius]

I,ll be watching with interest as ,I too, have bought these rules. I,ve enjoyed L.Rampant in the past.

[has.been]

When DBA first came upon the scene, we too didn't have enough stuff to play. We cut out bases and tried out the rules with them (just wrote on them- Blades/War-band etc,) Then having played a few games we started adding figures to the bases.