New Free Rules – WTF

[Piyan Glupak]

I have put some new rules in an io group (a bit like the old Yahoo groups).  There is a core of common rules plus supplements for Fantasy, Ancient and Medieval, Pike and Shot, American War of Independence and Retro-Science Fiction.  The supplements include a playsheet, troop-types and rules specific to the period.

The Fantasy and Ancient and Medieval supplements are fully ready.  I don’t anticipate any changes.  The Retro-Science Fiction (Barsoom) supplement may get tweaked a little, but is pretty much there.  The Pike and Shot supplement is fine for the ECW and Buccaneers v. Colonial Spanish, but needs me to get more armies so that I can increase the number of troop types and play-test them.  The AWI supplement is extremely new, but seems promising.  Other stuff like Napoleonics might follow later.

The game is intended to be quick-play, with army size usually between 12 and 18 bases for historical armies.  The bases have to be all the same width, but otherwise basing is not critical.  Troops based for DBA/DBM/HotT/DBR can be used.

Playing area depends upon base size.  For 40mm wide bases I suggest a battlefield of about 3′ (about 90 cm) wide by 2′ (60 cm) deep.  For 60mm bases 4′ 6″ (about 135cm) by 3′ (90cm) would be great.  If 80mm wide bases are used then 6′ by 4′ would do.

The combat mechanism is not the same as DBA, although it is intended to be about as fast.  Each army starts with 28 break-points (BP).  BP are lost whenever you lose in combat, and when you have lost more than your 28, you lose.  Units can be destroyed, although it tends to happen a little less often than with some games.  It is possible to win a game after losing more units than your opponent.

I chose the io group method of getting them out because it seemed a good way to get feedback and make it easier to support them.

If you fancy trying them:

https://groups.io/g/WTFwargamerules

[Olivero]

Read through the rules. They look (to me) very much inspired by DBA, only easier to read. The core rules without a supplement feel a little ‘dry”, but you’re through them in 5-10 minutes, and the supplement (ancient it es for me) fleshes out the ideas and concepts (and differences to DBA) quite nicely. The BP idea/concept looks very interesting to me, like, why didn’t anybody had this idea yet?, and I feel very tempted to try it all out on the tabletop. Give it a read/go, by all means. Cool!

[Piyan Glupak]

Thanks for your kind comments.  Yes, the core rules are a bit dry, with most of the interesting bits being in the supplements.  WTF started as an ancients game, and we decided to sling in a few optional fantasy features.  The number of troop types increased to the point that I didn’t want to have to bother with the fantasy features when playing an ancient or medieval game, and I didn’t really need every ancient troop type for fantasy.  I nearly split it into completely 2 separate games, but by that time I had started wondering whether I could adapt it for my English Civil War armies, and began to wonder whether my Martian armies wouldn’t be better served by their own version…

Yes, you are correct in that DBA undoubtedly influenced WTF.  I played DBA and HotT happily for a long time, and I am very grateful to Phil and Sue Barker, and Richard Bodley Scott for the years of pleasure I had from their games.  Unfortunately, I never took to DBA version 3, and got itchy feet.

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