Testing my ancient rules with One Hour Wargaming scenarios on blog

[Shaun Travers]

There I was playing through Bill Banks Imperator and playing a couple of battles using my own ancient rules, based very much on the Bill Banks Ancients, on an 8×8 grid. But it was too much work and I stopped for a while to decide what to do next.

Then I read Dale’s Wargaming blog where he played scenario 9 of One Hour Wargames…on a 6×6 grid.  That got me thinking. Why not change the rules to work on 6×6 and play a few of the One Hour Wargames scenarios.  My Imperator campaign was about700BC so I created 6 armies of 6 units based on 6 empires from about then.  I then randomised opponents from this list for the OHW scenarios. I created a PowerPoint A4 page for each on the OHW scenarios to play on.   I have written up the first 10 scenarios so far.  More to come or I may restart my Imperator campaign.

 

The reports of the first 10 scenarios is on the blog:

https://shaun-wargaming-minis.blogspot.com/2020/04/ten-one-hour-wargames-scenarios-played.html

To give an example of the 6mm forces on a 6×6 grid here is the setup for scenario 1:

(this one was hand drawn, as are scenario 2 and 3, but the rest are printed).

[Tony S]

The rules play faster than OHW

Not many rules can say that!  Half an Hour Wargames?  HahW?

[Shaun Travers]

Thirty minute thrashing?

Thirty minute thrillers?

1800 seconds of pure gaming goodness?

I do like HAH-W as an acronym though!

[MartinR]

I have tried a few grid based approaches to OHW and yes, it certainly speeds it up. The standard game suffers from the usual curse of ruler based games, players dithering and worrying about millimetric distances and the vagaries of geometry. It seems to be worse with only half a dozen elements to manoeuvre. OTOH, some of the scenarios work better using rulers rather than grids.

It is such a great gaming system, my hat goes off to Mr Thomas.

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[Shaun Travers]

It is a great and well nuanced gaming system,combined with the scenarios it is amazing how it all just works so well together.

[ian pillay]

It is indeed. Such a simple system that can be tweaked if required. There are some good rules adaptations on the Groups.io for all of his rules. I quiet like the Dark Age rules that have been posted up there 😉

 

Tally-Ho! Check out my blog at…..
http://steelcitywargaming.wordpress.com/

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