Squads In The Jungle

I played a couple more games of Squad Hammer this evening, on a smaller board with terrain pieces having a smaller footprint. It gave a much more satisfying game; I used a 16" square board with all distances and ranges halved, which works OK for the 40mm frontage elements my Space Marines and Orks are based upon. It equates to a 32" board, so maybe I'll make an 18" square cloth for that traditional 3' x 3' board equivalent. I went for a more jungle terrain as well.

Anyway, in the first game I gave each side four squads plus a heroic leader squad.One Marine squad could deploy by teleport whist one Ork squad could use the Charge ability to increase damage.

Marines dropped into the Ork rear, catching a squad of Boyz in a deadly crossfire. They survived, and their return fire took out the Marines.

The main fight centred on the Orks trying to take a hill on the Marine's left.

Casualties were surprisingly light - a couple of squads each, but the Orks won by totting up a few points for table objectives (markers which score points for each turn a unit is near them, as opposed to terrain objectives which give a single score at the end of the game if held).

I randomly rearranged the terrain for the second game, and added a tank to each side (sightly simpler designs than the ones I used yesterday). The Marines got a good deployment, with two objectives close to where they set up, plus another in easy reach. This left the Orks on the offensive.

On their right the plan was to use a screen of Boyz to assault the tank through an enclosure, with the Madboyz (who had the damage boosting Charge ability) making the final hit. But poor activation rolls left the Madboyz sorting themselves out in the deployment area

On the other flank they brought up their tank to attack the Land Raider, but it ended up close to some ruins that were soon occupied by Marines.

The Orks actually did OK against the tank. Marines dropped down in support, but were driven off, and the tank had to fall back with heavy damage.

Damage mounted on both sides. Units were lost. The Marines were accumulating a fine score from proximity to objectives, and held two they'd score from at the end of the fight as well.

I randomised the end of the game instead of running it for 1D3+3 turns. From Turn 4 onwards I rolled at the end of the turn; the game ended on a 5 or 6. This made the end unpredictable - there would be no desperate last turn objective grabs.

Soon the Marines were down to only two squads, whilst the Orks hung on with three. As the game went on the Marines were building up a fine score, whilst the Orks rushed to grab vacated objectives.

When the fight ended the Orks had scraped a very narrow victory. Had it ended a turn earlier the Marine's desperate defence would have given them the win.

I think I mostly have the flow of the game sorted now, and have worked out how to run the combat factors with the setting and my style of terrain. I can see how the rues being a bit free and easy in terms of such things kind of works as a strength here, since they make no assumption about how your terrain depicts things or how your figures are based. You can adapt the factors rather than try and tweak them to fit a setup not intended by the rules.