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Author Topic: Test of Honour issues  (Read 1760 times)

Offline craigjwoodfield

  • Librarian
  • Posts: 107
Test of Honour issues
« on: February 06, 2018, 11:11:59 AM »
Played our first game tonight. Started promisingly, some nice and intuitive mechanics, but then degenerated into a dull end game which took far too long.

Repeated charges by a samurai hero into ashigaru ended in a stalemate, and ashigaru vs ashigaru was far from decisive as well. Made as much sense for ashigaru with teppo to charge rather than reload and shoot, and no obvious penalty for one figure fighting three.

Missing something, or as a system is it overly reliant on luck?


Offline olyreed

  • Mastermind
  • Posts: 1321
Re: Test of Honour issues
« Reply #1 on: February 06, 2018, 12:55:18 PM »
I would be interested to hear if this is how the game plays, there is a lot of interest in it but what I have read, Ronin and Dashio are better games

Offline wkeyser

  • Scientist
  • Posts: 262
Re: Test of Honour issues
« Reply #2 on: February 06, 2018, 01:04:40 PM »
Intresting observations, the same thing I noticed in reading the rules, will have to give them a try as I picked up the core box the other day.

Still for me Ronin stands head and shoulders above the other Samuari skirmish rules.

William

Offline Muzfish4

  • Mad Scientist
  • Posts: 997
Re: Test of Honour issues
« Reply #3 on: February 11, 2018, 10:51:36 AM »
I was the opponent for this and what started as a pretty promising game ended up as an odyssey of tedium. More or less what happened was that we each had two samurai and three groups of three ashigaru (one bow, one arquebus/teppo and one with spear).

My Samurai with their extra activations outdistanced the help by a fair bit. My boss fellow engaged one lot of enemy ashigaru and 'bounced' in the meantime my bow managed a fumble by rolling more xes than swords and shot themselves (gaining one blood drop - is this right?) my boss also manged to fumble a couple of times hurting himself and falling over.

On the other flank the enemy leader made short work of my other samurai (hit, missed the avoid roll and the strength roll as a success so a kill (again, is this right?).

In the middle desultorily skirmishing between the two groups of ashigaru pretty much went nowhere. Finally my boss was overwhelmed after killing the enemy samurai offsider and we expected my remaining ashigaru to be chopped down in short order but instead the combat dragged. Enemy samurai would 'bounce' from the three ashigaru using up their one potential action with a compulsory avoid from a hit but getting a kill was long, tedious work of just rolling a bunch of dice again and again with no real tactical decision making.

We finally gave it away when my last bowman was finally killed and just din't the appetite for another 45 minuets to play out the slow defeat of the spearmen.

We had plenty of questions about this, especially considering this is a pretty highly regarded game being awarded the Wargames Illustrated 'Game of the Year':

* Is this a typical playing experience or have we again managed to 'break' a ruleset?

* What is the advantage to fielding a single ashigaru over a group of three? The points cost is one less but getting three guys (and their advantages when at full strength) seems to pretty heavily outweigh the slight disadvantage of an increased frontage for movement and firing.

* Are fumbles too common or were we just unlucky?

In any event, we plan to give ToH another go and would really appreciate any pointers where we got it wrong.

 

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