Sunday August 10th saw the debut of "30 Minute Naseby" at the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell. His story is told in a small but perfectly formed Museum located in a former Medieval hospital which later became Cromwell's school.
Myself and fellow volunteer JD ( a veteran wargamer and original owner of the much missed Chariot Miniatures) had taken on the challenge from the Museum's staff of designing a game to be part of its Summer activity programme. In keeping with the Museum's hands-on approach we opted for a participation rather demonstration game. As most of our visitors are "passing trade", and based on our own show experience we aimed for a 30 minute playing time. The Museum is currently running a special display about Naseby so we decided to base our game on that engagement.
We quickly realised that no commercial ruleset we knew of would do the job, so JD took for inspiration some concepts from a little known fast play set he knew but in the event what emerged was a total rewrite, with some specific Naseby factors. After much debate what emerged was a "command and control ( or aften lack of control...( game where players acted as either Charles I or Sir Thomas Fairfax in issuing orders to their three commands. We were lucky that Naseby did follow this classic deployment, albeit we did have Okey's dragoons at Sulby Hedges as a further headache for Prince Rupert. All the players had to do during the 6 turn game was issue their choice if orders from a card deck, position their generals for maximum effect and roll dice to activate and fight. JD and myself interpreted the results from the 4 page ruleset/QRS.
For figures I decided against using my 28mm collection as (a) I didn't fancy them being manhandled by the public but more importantly (b) with their steel pikes I didn't want to risk a health and safety incident! Thus I settled for paper figures from Helion's "Paper Soldiers Book". The order cards with pictures of either Charles or Fairfax on the reverse plus other game aids were beautifully created by another Museum staff member, and we were good to go.
We managed 5 games during the day, and public feedack was extremely positive. The players ranged from people who it seemed had never rolled dice in any game whatsoever, through to a father and 9 year old son who confessed to regularly playing WW2 using Arty Conliffe's classic "Crossfire". As well as the game itself we had a table of Civil War books and commercial rulesets for people to look at, plus a few tame members of the Sealed Knot for added colour. Despite three sessions of playtesting with the Museum staff and our summer workplace students we will take some lessons into a fresh version that can be used again by the Museum, plus there is a chance you may even catch the game on next year's show circuit.
12 November 2012, 11:26:54 AM