Friday, April 12, 2013

Something that may be of interest...

For anyone who might be interested, I run a tumblr blog dedicated to all things Victorian, Edwardian, and British Empire (with some additional oddities thrown in). Have a look here.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

The Lost Battle And A New SNAFU


The following pictures are from a game I played over a year ago. It's been so long that I can't remember much about it, other than that it was a playtest of an earlier version of the SNAFU vehicle rules. Still, I thought you lot might appreciate the eye candy.

In other news, I had a great weekend at Trumpeter Salute in Vancouver. I picked up some of JR Miniatures' rubber roads, and got to play MERCS and Malifaux. I really liked MERCS, and wouldn't mind picking up the minis for it at some point, though they are rather pricey.

Malifaux was quite interesting. It is a diceless game, being entirely driven by a standard deck of playing cards (with both jokers left in). This got me thinking about the card based initiative system in SNAFU. The current card system in SNAFU is based on custom card decks for each game, not unlike the card systems of TooFatLardies rules. The problem was that I always found it a bit awkward with how activation cards worked, and specifically the number of them in the deck vs the number of units on table always seemed very flawed and didn't make much sense. After some thinking, I came up with a card system that uses a regular deck of playing cards. I have played two test games with this system and have found it works very well. I also removed all measuring from the game. Movement is from terrain piece to terrain piece, and shooting is at anything in line of sight like Arty Conliffe's excellent Crossfire rules. I used this new movement system in both playtests as well. Together, these new mechanics make SNAFU more dynamic and just plain better. I will be writing up a new edition of the rules in the near future, though it might take a month or two before it appears online, as I have been quite busy with my other hobby (music) lately.

Anyway, here are the pictures from the lost battle.