War and Conquest Trial Game

With this being long overdue, myself and Dave K were looking for a game for this Monday night and I suggested a trial game using the War and Conquest rules that we had been talking about doing for ages.

We duly drew up a couple of small 1750pt army lists for El Cid period using the newly available lists from the WaC forum just to keep things simple.

As with any new rule set there was the usual checking to see if we were doing things right but almost immediately fumbled on a couple of points and sought to clarify what the rules wanted us to do. The main one which though really pretty clear on the rules was, I suspect just our luck picking an odd situation right at the beginning of our game where Dave's Jinete's charged my Tribal Skirmishers whose response was to Shoot and Flee, and subsequently Dave's cavalry failed to contact.

Now, all was fairly clear in the rules what we should do, it was just that it appeared the outcome was 'odd', in that Dave throwing how far he moved after failing to get the charge in (throwing 4") meant that he would not have got into missile range of the skirmishers javelins in the first place. We concluded that the outcome was really only a mechanism of the rules and the cavalry had in effect rallied back from their failed charge. Fair enough.

There were, after that, the usual leafing through the rules to check what we were doing was right, so things took longer than usual which was expected, but what we did notice through this process was that although some rule details may have been in odd places perhaps, the fact that the rules were very well annotated and cross referenced with page numbers etc that all in all the rule details were pretty easy to find. To a certain extent a bit of foreknowledge probably got in the way a bit as things were wrapped up sufficiently differently to cause the odd stumble in the flow of the game and a tussle through the rulebook.

We didn't get the game finished which we had expected but did get four full turns in (which is not bad for a first time go with a rule set), which was really just getting to the crunch but the effort did throw up a couple of questions to be looked up for next time and over all the game gave us the flavour and feeling of the rules, which is what we were looking for on the night.

The basic game mechanism of move/shoot/fight/combat resolution/run-away/rally was easy enough and very familiar and WAB-esque with a couple of tweeks to make it a bit different. The rolling for initiative (or Strategic Advantage as called in the rules) is a nice simple amendment which I like. The strategic advantage points for personalities/characters is interesting enough but not fully developed in the rules, though Rob does lean towards you making up uses for these yourselves. The other point here is we both felt that personalities appear to be a bit over costed relative to their effectiveness/value in the game, though it may be a bit early to really gauge their value just yet. There were a few other noticable differences but these are mainly a simplification from the WAB process

There were a few things in the rules which are not expanded upon but refer you to your particular army list for details but as there aren't many fully developed army lists, this does present a bit of a dilemma in that to get into the rules you need the Army List's as a starting point but the army lists are to be developed by the community who would only do this once engaged with the rules.

Over all we found the rules to be as expected for a first run through, it is very WAB like which we had expected, perhaps I found them more so than I had expected. Perhaps the game is more the game that WAB 2 should have been, as there are definite improvements and several points we both liked over WAB. (It still has the runaway and get destroyed and the pursuers can instantly re-join the fray mechanism from Warhammer, that I really don't like though, but that can be easily ammended).

We were both up for another trial game to add to the knowledge of the rules following a refresher on the finer points in the rules, particularly in relation to personalities, but we will wait for version 2 of the army lists along with the promised Andalusian list to flesh things out a bit before we do.