Thursday 4 August 2016

Horizon Wars with a real person.

Tonight I played my first game of Horizon Wars with a real person (who found me via the blog!). We agreed to play a small game to test the rules some more and went with a 3x2 urban setting with the objective for the attacker to hold the large complex just below the centre. He had to hold it for an entire turn after the turn in which he occupied it. 

I didn't take many photos because I didn't want to hold up play and as we were just messing around a bit.

Attackers: 
1x P3 mech, heavy armour and attack.
3x Heavy Cav.
3x Light Inf with a buff to their armour.

I defended with:
1x P2 mech CHQ.
1x P1 mech
3x Light Cav with an F bonus, I think.
3x Heavy Inf.


The game went pretty smoothly and we had the basic movement, attack and defence mechanics under our belts very quickly. There was one point I charged infantry who were inside the building with another unit of infantry. I wasn't sure what the rules are about charging a unit that is in a building? I couldn't find anything specific about it in the rules. We also had a situation where an F-0 unit was charging...not sure if that was allowed. Will put these on the rules thread over at The Wargames Website. We also had a tank charge at infantry who were inside and just justified it as the tank shooting through openings.

Heavy Cavalry advancing.
 I can see the benefits of playing on a larger table, because we got into combat quite quickly, and it was just so easy to apply all damage to movement. By the end, at least one of the heavy tanks was just a bunker. The shooting mechanics are great though, and it feels like once you close the range all of a sudden you start dealing large amounts of damage.
End of the game with the attackers occupying the complex, even though it is under attack from defenders.
I look forward to playing again, maybe not in an urban setting this time. I intend to do some more terrain building over the coming days. I want some generic vegetation, and I will also be building forest CD features.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing :)
    I see you are a fellow fan of the "upside down cup and packaging material makes good terrain" club!

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  2. These are all part of my "get terrain for my table so I can play a game" push. I filled it up quickly and now have the luxury of making more complicated, prettier buildings. Although right now it is all about mother nature, trees, hills, foliage.

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  3. It was a fun game, thanks. I look forward to another soon, after I've had more time to read and digest the rules. (I suspect many of our questions are addressed somewhere.)

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  4. By the way, I just posted this (below) in the HW FB group. I think it's a slightly easier way to keep track of activations and reactions...


    One thing puzzled me about reactions. The book has some reference to flipping the element's remaining action counter to black. The 'to black' bit doesn't seem to make much sense unless the counters used happen to be black on one side, as I guess Robey's are - the only reference I recall in the book was using pennies.

    In any case, I don't see any need for flipping counters. My alternative suggestion is to give every unit two counters of different colours (red and yellow for example). Only the red can be used for a reaction.

    That would mean a unit can use its yellow counter for its first action and hold on to the red one if it wants to react later in the turn. Or a unit that has already reacted has only its yellow one left and therefore cannot react again.

    It seems to me that this works just as well. I don't know whether the time saved not having to flip counters over is negated by having to sort out different counters for each unit at the start of the turn. However, its main advantage for me is that it works without needing two-sided counters; in my case, I have a set of red and yellow ones from a cheap Connect 4 rip-off which are the same on both sides.

    Just thought I'd post that in case anyone else was short of two-sided counters (or in case anyone more familiar with the game can see a flaw in the plan).

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