New Rules To Try....

 New Rules to Break..

I don't "do" rule reviews per se (rules are such a personal thing) but always being in the market for new ideas I recently, on a whim, decided to buy and test out the Wars of the Roses "Never Mind The Billhooks" rules (Allan Callan).

The rules are old-school simple - a good thing in my book (I'm done with multiple troop types, type v type oddities, range effects to the Nth and pages of tables and calculations just to play a game; I save the complexities for my solo-ising) - and these rules don't pretend to be anything else; with fairly standard random Leader Activation (by card draw), varied leader "abilities" (as per SP and the old PiPs idea), shooting/combat by dice per figure, saving throws based on troop type/armour, card-driven events etc. etc. 

Although designed for WoR they can easily be adapted for other medieval periods. My game pics are a right mash-up of types (I do not have enough WoR bods). Yet.... 

The rules themselves are relatively cheap, being available in PDF or hard copy (always my preference as home printers hate me). But being UK based myself I also bought the tokens & cards (bit pricey but pretty). However, I then ended up using my SP leader cards anyway for the first run-through then making my own cards for the second go (where I'd made a couple of tweaks), so that was probably an unnecessary extravagance. Still, I got some different (pretty) tokens which will be cannibalised in other games. 

There are a couple of Youtube playthroughs online for those wanting a blow-by -blow account of how the rules work; one example being at:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfqoT8e9_SE5ryjnonXJAwg

Having played with them, in all honesty, the NMTB rules were out of a similar stable to certain offerings from the Two Lardies and so VERY close to my home-cooked rules that I was on such familiar ground as to having to keep having to stop to check if I was working to the NMTB rules or my own rehash of the Lardies' offerings...

Moving and shooting was simple enough, but with lots of dice wrangling (I don't have an issue with this). I got a little lost on the Morale system - but that was me (speed-reading then playing), rather than the rules themselves.

What I did like was in some of the ways they worked regarding different troop abilities (more experienced troops can re-roll certain dice scores and additional effects in melee), permitted exchanges of troop types in a mixed unit (e.g. bowmen being able, in some situations/following a test, to scuttle behind their billmen supports) and, most of all, the token exchange for the Army Morale aspects (basically you get a bunch of tokens based on your force make up. These then get taken away when units fail morale tests/lose fights or get disorganised). This simple method works well and saves any bookkeeping.

In two player games the "pile" of tokens held is concealed, so you never know how exactly how the enemy Army Moral is suffering. Given that in a biggish game it is easy to lose track of what is happening (unless one is being a frightful cad and keeping notes) this would also work for solo*.

(*How, I hear you ask. "Surely you will see how many tokens the AI has when you take one away?". "Not at all" says I. "I put the AI Morale Tokens in a tub with a number of blank tokens of the same size, pulling out tokens one-by-one and examining them when I need to remove an enemy Morale Token, then replacing the "blanks" once an actual Morale token has been found and removed. Then, if on any occasion on which I have to take a token I empty the tub completely there are clearly no Morale tokens left, and I have won – Yay!").

As well as activating leaders the Activation Deck also allows for the gaining of "Bonus"cards (including dummies) which can be built to form a "hand"**. These cards allow certain favourable outcomes to the holder and cam prompt "Special Events" (pretty cards with some nice WoR chrome in these) to affect play - sometimes both players.

(**In solo games I generally get round "hands of cards" systems by using dice throws, with cumulative modifiers per move, with a certain throw total needed to activate an AI cards - see comments in "Battle of the Cards" below).

The rules have points mechanisms for drawing up armies, some nice period chrome and would be accessible for newcomers to the hobby. 

The rules work with unit sizes, but working with my movement trays (which allow for large units that the rules dictate) wasn't an issue and don't really affect things. The system easily could be adapted to any scale/size of figures with a bit of tweaking, even down to 6mm (using a base of 3-5 figures or more as if they were one figure in the rules). I MAY go down this route if I decide to get into WoR properly (which I ought, since that's the period I reenact more than any other - pic).



All in all a reasonably nicely put together simple rule set, some nice pictures, and pretty, but not essential - if you are creative enough to draw and use proxies/have printers that work - tokens/cards bought separately. As always, however, my tweaking fingers got to work so that my second work through was a mash-up of NMTB and my Home rules. THAT fight will be covered in my next post....