Tag Archives: Nordic Weasel Games

5 Leagues From The Borderlands

Friday, 15 June 2018 10:27
Written by Mike
0 Comments

Welcome to the edge of civilization, where brigands rule and where the shadows are long.

Five Leagues From the Borderlands is a set of solo miniatures rules for fantasy campaign games.

Taking inspiration from gritty "medieval-fantasy" like The Black Company and Harn, this is a world of brutal combat and ever-present danger.

With a handful of miniature figures, your dice and these rules, you can adventure in the war-torn Borderlands, fight tactical battles against evil and hopefuly get a few coins in the process.

Your characters will advance as you go along, find loot and might even make it to the end.

Five Leagues is a descendent of the Five Parsecs series of games, offering a game experience written specifically for Solo Players:

That means that all the mechanics you need are built right into the rules, instead of being an afterthought stuffed in the back of the book.

We've aimed to make the mechanics simple and straight-forward, to make it easier and quicker to play on your own.

And the adventure and encounter tables will do pretty much all the set-up for you.

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Please be advised this is a tactical game: You will need miniatures, tokens, markers or something else to represent your characters in combat.

A typical battle will have 8-10 figures on each side.

This game is intended for Solo players, though it can easily be played with a friend: Just split the party between you and enjoy adventuring together!

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This is a complete game: You get character creation rules, encounter rules, a town action system and mechanics for factors such as Luck, Will and Story Points to tailor your game.

Players interested in a more open-ended group game may wish to also check out Dungeon Scum, available from Nordic Weasel Games.

Please note that this is NOT a dungeon crawling game, its a game of tactical fantasy action.

LINK

The Acrid Smell Of Powder

Thursday, 12 April 2018 13:49
Written by Mike
2 Comments

Welcome to The Acrid Smell of Powder - Mass skirmish rules for black powder warfare.

What is Mass Skirmish ? It's "1 figure equals 1 soldier" warfare but on a grander scale than the norm.

Written to be usable with any figures based 3-5 to a stand, you can grab your miniatures based for games like Fire&Fury and put them right on the table in a "what you see is what you get" skirmish fight, using close to realistic weapon ranges.

The rules use a creative Initiative Dice system, adding uncertainty to what your troops can do each turn, without ever wrestling control away from the player completely.

Combat is handled through the popular FiveCore system using a combination of "kill dice" and "shock dice" to resolve a volley of fire in a single dice roll, without looking up modifiers: Simply roll and you know if you hit them and if they are retreating.

The close combat system attempts to portray the importance of morale and the relative rarity of hand-to-hand fighting: A well disciplined unit may be able to break through the enemy line simply by a determined advance. . . if they stand up to the enemy volleys that is.

We round out the mechanics on offer with the "Flow of Battle" table, representing that your action is part of a greater battle: Flanks are menaced by cavalry, infantry columns advance and the skirmish lines are reinforced from the line.

Of course should you wish to follow your skirmish company across multiple battles, we've provided for that opportunity as well.

Mechanics are included for repeating and rifled weapons, allowing you to use the rules from the 7 Years War all the way to the Franco Prussian war (and possibly beyond).

It is my sincerest hope that you will find The Acrid Smell of Powder to be a refreshing take on "mass skirmish" warfare in the age of black powder weaponry.

Each troop stand represents 3-5 individual soldiers.

A good starting battle might require 15-25 troop stands per side, plus a few individual leader figures.

Options are provided for scaling up to quite large battles. Who said skirmishing had to be about 7 guys searching for a bag of potatoes?

This is an Early Version of the rules.

The core mechanics are fully operational though they will of course benefit from additional testing and tweaking.

The full version is anticipated to add:

*Set-up instructions for randomized battles.

*Random army generation tables.

*At least a rudimentary points system.

*Promotion system for your leaders.

*A bunch of optional rules, variants, rules for special troop types, early machine guns and all that jazz.

*Illustrations, more examples and more general goodies.

Most of these items are already completed, but i decided that it would be better to get the core rules out there in the wilderness for players to chop apart.

That way, the core engine can be fine-tuned as much as possible, before adding all the chrome.

We've endeavoured to make the Early Version as complete a game as possible. It is a complete game that you could get many hours of enjoyment out of.

If you purchase the Early Version, when the full version is released, you will be able to get it by only paying HALF the difference in final price.

Not bad eh?

LINK

Winter Hammer – NWG

Tuesday, 27 February 2018 09:31
Written by Mike
1 Comment


Following up Trench Hammer and October Hammer, the world of easy-to-play war game rules comes to the Soviet-Finnish Winter War.

Requiring only a pair of D6 and 8-12 troop stands each, Winter Hammer includes rules for everything from barrages to KV tanks.
Games are playable in an hour or so, including a quick and easy system for rolling up random forces and conducting a war games campaign.

Time is short and none of us get to do as much gaming as we want to.
We all have wargame projects we never got around to finishing because we needed 200 painted models to play and the book was 348 pages.

Why not jump into Winter Hammer? 6 bucks, 45 pages and 10ish troop stands and you're ready to play.

Fancy that. More time spent playing games and less time perusing the "To hit adjustments for left-handed gunnery when vehicle is on a modest incline Subsection B" table ?

LINK

Five Parsecs Bug Hunt Arrives

Saturday, 17 February 2018 09:43
Written by Mike
0 Comments

"All scifi gaming eventually leads to the movie Aliens" someone once told me.

Maybe that's not quite true, but the 1986 sequel to the original Alien certainly does loom large over miniatures gaming.

A squad of heavily armed marines alone against the ravening hordes of extra-terrestrial killers. Good stuff.

So now, you can indulge in the same sort of thing using Five Parsecs.

Create a handful of characters and lead your crew of soldiers as they accomplish objectives and fend off the alien terrors.

As with other Five Parsecs titles, everything is aimed at solo play (though you can play with a friend and even earn some bonus rewards, to account for the fact a human opponent usually is more devious).

Everything flows in a campaign structure with random events and unexpected things happening, though we've changed the structure quite a bit to account for the military nature of the campaign.

New mechanics include a fire team mechanic (many of your supporting troops will be squads of soldiers), new takes on the "contact" mechanics introduced in Salvage Crew, a Reputation mechanic that lets you cash in mission success for occasional benefits and a system for Mustering Out which should make Traveller players feel a tiny bit nostalgic.

Of course, you also get all the tools you need to transfer your Bug Hunt character to another campaign.
Start in the army, go AWOL and join a gang, clean up your act and get a salvage job. It's all up to you.

Updates are coming shortly to the existing game line, to allow transfers into Bug Hunt.
The new rules are all up to 1.03 standard though I'd expect a small update shortly after launch to clean up a few vague wordings and the likes.

LINK

Five Parsecs Salvage Crew

Saturday, 13 January 2018 09:19
Written by Mike
1 Comment

The third step of Five Parsecs adventuring is here: Salvage Crew!

You can check out the new logo too.
When I get a chance, that will get added to the existing Five Parsecs games too

So what is Salvage Crew? (SC here after).

It's a new campaign you play, using the same mechanics and systems as the two previous Five Parsecs (FP) games.

Build up a random crew with their own backgrounds and ideas and then take on the universe.

Salvagers tend to be a bit less militant so you will find your crew may end looking a little different.

Campaigns work in a similar fashion: Assign your crew to jobs and play out table top missions.
Money is a much bigger issue now: Salvagers earn more of it, but they also begin the campaign owing a lot of money for their ship and license.
Bottom out and you can have your campaign ended by your ship being seized (seems like a great chance to delve into a Gang Warfare campaign then huh?)

Turn to turn game play is what you expect, but we now have rules for things like "contacts" (which can turn out to be enemies or not, a bit like PEF's in 2HW titles) and exploring "points of interest".

This is where the big change is:
Your salvage crew is mainly here to loot. There are things to be found on the battle field and you may or may not run into enemies. You'll have to evaluate the risk of getting a particular piece of loot or not, if it might trigger an enemy squad of bandits.

The result is an experience that feels pretty unique, even if the starting point is the same.

The rules are fully compatible with Five Parsecs From Home and Gang Warfare (the GW update will be live in a day or two, sorry for the delay) and you can transfer characters around.

Does it stop here? Probably not.
Five Parsecs could theoretically go any number of places.

Fighter pilots? Mercenary captains? Colonists? Private investigators?
There's really nothing you couldn't do.

Stay tuned.

LINK