Some wargame musings...

This year has been a lot of fun.  After nearly a 20 year leave of absence to finally pick up a hobby again is great - already I've met some new people, played some games that are new and exciting and introduced my kids to something that (potentially) we can all share in some shape or form.

As for the war games I've been playing, it has been primarily 28mm skirmish stuff.  This is a little interesting:*

Initially we were playing Terminator Genisys.  Then, in an effort to inject a little more character into our games, I found I was introducing an increasing number of house rules.  Then I tried a few other systems including Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and more recently Rogue Planet.  I've consciously avoided some of the traditional/big game house titles because... I'm not sure... a perception that the mechanics are stale and stale mechanics contribute to a stale game?  Something like that.

The mechanics in Terminator Genisys are pretty different to what I had encounter back in the dark ages, and the things that stand out the most are (1) alternating, variable length turns and (2) using different die rather than +/- modifiers to die rolls to determine successes failures etc - somethings referred to as "Step Die".  So clever and so different - a winning combination in my book.

Rogue Planet does a whole lot of 'more different' but one element that I kind of miss from Terminator Genisys is the different die.  Brent Spivey, the author has made something special.  Any way, looking for more materials that I can leverage for further Rogue Planet games, I stumbled upon one review of Rogue Planet that talked about "Powered by the Apocalypse" games.  Mmmm... a few seconds later, thanks to Doctor Google, I learnt a bit more.  To cut a long story short, Brent also has another title (published before Rogue Planet) called Mayhem that uses step-die as a core mechanic... maybe that's my next gaming investigation 😀

That's a big difference from the war game scene of yesteryear - this week I could access 10 very different, likely cheap sets of rules thanks to the interweb, whereas once upon a time I had to wait for the ice flows to melt and sift through the scree to piece together some meager pickings.

*By the way, if you're looking for reviews of the above systems, well this page isn't going to fill that void... but you might like to look at some of the battle reports I've posted etc which would give you some impression of how the games play.