Fantastic Scuffles

 (This is a new version of a post I accidentally over-wrote!)

Earlier this week I volunteered to playtest a new fantasy skirmish game called 'Fantastic Scuffles'. This is being developed by Nic Wright who, as you know, is the perpetrator of a number of games  that I regularly play and blog about here.

Fantastic Scuffles sits in the same space as Songs of Blades and Heroes or Sword Weirdos, allowing a player to run a dozen or less figures in a game lasting around an hour. You design your warband with various weapons and traits and the scenarios are designed with missions and variable battlefield conditions to make things more interesting. The playtest rules currently just have the basics, but there will be sections for NPCs and game-controlled hostiles to really liven things up.

The system is based on that in Fantastic Battles and Devilry Afoot, neither of which I have played, However it's pretty straightforward. Everything works off modified D10 rolls. Initiative is via tokens in a bag/cup or cards in a deck; you get one for each character or group of underlings and can pick something that's not been activated when one of yours comes up. A bonus token/card for each player allows one character/group to take an extra action each turn, which is fun.

A couple of evenings ago I created a couple of warbands and had a game with Catherine. She picked the Elves whilst I used some Uruk Hai.

The Elves had a single leader character plus five underlings, two of which were archers and the rest swordsmen. The Uruk Hai fielded two characters - a leader and a scary berserker, plus three swordsmen. In fact I cocked up the points and the Uruk Hai should have had a fourth swordsman!

The Elves had to get a message from one side of the table to the other. The Uruk Hai were looking to kill the enemy leader.

Here they are in the early stages.

The Elven archers wounded a couple of the Uruk Hai, who charged and managed to cut down one of the bowmen.

The Elven leader, Temu Elrond, is a particularly dangerous figure. I had to kill him with my leader to get maximum points, but decided to soften him up with the berserker first.

Catherine got a swordsman into my rear, but the berserker kept hacking away. They're like that, berserkers. The white counter is the message. My leader had charged the messenger and killed him.

My leader now took on the Elf leader and between him and teh berserker they slowly whittled him down.

Got him!

The berserker was next to fall, as being hacked from behind with a big choppy elf-blade will eventually become a problem.

I'd score my Kill The Leader objective, but Catherine could still get the message off table. My leader was now fighting alone (the swordsmen had all died off-screen). He used his intimidate ability to scare off one Elf swordsman, then killed another. Eventually there was just him and a lone bowman. The bowman shot him.

As with any playtest set, we had lots of questions which I wrote down and sent to the author. But we plodded through a fairly entertaining fight. There's a lot of adding and subtracting factors, especially with shields and  armour in play, but I felt that once you're used to the game these will move quite quickly. I'm sure our tactics were terrible as well. I liked the flow of the initiative as well, plus the difference in capability of the characters as opposed to the minions and underlings. I'll be looking at trying an all character force at some stage, as well as one based around lots of minions.

For documentation purposes, the two forces in this write-up were roughly 100pts each. The rules recommend 50-150points per player for a basic game.

I've managed a second game as well, but more of that in the next post.