Brink of Battle: Skirmish gaming through the ages (review)

[Anatoli]

“Brink of Battle: Brink of Battle: Skirmish gaming through the ages” is a pretty unique set of rules. It is not period or setting specific, instead it allows players to create their own bands of warriors and fight a skirmish battle in any year of human history from ancient times up to modern day. To achieve this without making the game too thin in theme, history is divided into 3 categories. “Ancient/Medieval”, “Early Modern” and “Modern”, each have its own set of character traits for soldiers to pick from, period specific weapons and gear.

The focus is entirely historical gaming, but perhaps the most important thing to know is that this set of rules is a toolbox for your imagination.

Both players roll D10 dice pretty much every time something happens and add various bonuses, skills, penalties, cover etc.  Battles are fought on a small scale which means that players takes turns in activating , moving, shooting and fighting with their warriors one at a time. And since the game is played on a small scale, 3-20 models per side, all warriors can be very individual in how their stat line looks like, their weapons and actually conveys a sense of “Dirty Dozen” feel where you can make each soldier different and specialized to a high degree by tweaking the stat lines in the building step.

Check out my blog post for the full review for details on gameplay, rules and my overall thoughts.

http://anatolisgameroom.blogspot.com/2012/03/brink-of-battle-wargaming-through-ages.html

[Arlequín]

That's quite a thorough review, thanks! 

[Anatoli]

Thanks, I will explain additional stuff in my upcoming battle reports. The first one is French Indian War themed, and focus mainly on ranged weapons, morale, cover, doing damage and such.

There will also be one WW2 themed to show a more modern setting, and one ancient/medieval to show the close combat rules 

[constrict]

Nice review, will be fun to se the batraps.

[Faust23]

If you go to the Resources tab at www.brinkofbattle.com you will find the tables for Ratings, Traits, & Gear as well as different Force Rosters for download.

[Faust23]

Just to let you know, we have added the Reference Playsheet for Brink of Battle at our website www.brinkofbattle.com in the Resources section.

You can see a number of important items on there, such as turn sequence, full list of Standard & Combat Action, as well as the cribsheet for Firearms of all 3 periods.

[Faust23]

I'll be working on some Battle reports and some Game Play examples soon!