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Anyone try Table Battles yet?

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19 Oct 2017 22:39 - 19 Oct 2017 22:52 #256027 by Sagrilarus
It's on wargamevault for $12 and it looks interesting and easy. I'm going to go with matchsticks and Easter egg dye, and cheap cards in penny sleeves. Should total less than $20. People seem to like it, plays in 30 and is easy to build. Solo rules come with it.

Just curious if anyone has seen it.
Last edit: 19 Oct 2017 22:52 by Sagrilarus.

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23 Oct 2017 09:34 - 23 Oct 2017 09:41 #256196 by Sagrilarus
It doesn't appear anyone else is looking at this one, but if you stumble on this later I'll add that I've started a build process to make Table Battles from assorted stuff lying around the house. Yesterday I painted some matchsticks (the long ones you use in your fireplace) in the five colors required using acrylics from my kids' crafts drawers. I had four good colors for the troop sticks, and I opted to use yellow to track the morale points in the game. I painted them long for a quicker first application, cut them to two-inch length with pruning shears, then touched up the ends and any other imperfections from the first pass. Laid them out on wax paper to dry.

All that remains is finding dice and sleeves for my cheap printout of the cards. I have dice aplenty, and a guy on BGG recommended printing to just one side for each card (the published version has faces on both sides of each card to minimize production cost) so that each battle scenario can be dropped into its own bag for a quick deployment kit. Dump the bag, split the sides, play. In the published version card faces from different scenarios back each other so you can't do that.

I have sleeves somewhere with my WofG stuff. Have to find those, don't need to be penny sleeves anymore.

This is a super-light map-less wargame. Plays in under 30, each unit has its choice of opponents listed on it, which is what lays out the shape of the battlefield. About 10 scenarios with more on the way. From what I've read the game comes alive after three or four plays because there's a feint/counter-feint sort of strategy to the game and it takes a bit to get the hang of it. Units have to be powered up in order to be effective and there are ways to force a unit to act in response to an action, effectively de-powering it. I almost hazard to use the word "wargame" to describe but that's an argument I'll leave to others. It's a two-player head-on game where your goal is to destroy the other player's units.

If I can manage to build with just what I have on hand it will run me $12, the purchase price from wargamevault.com, which is my new favorite game store. Four games purchased (total bill -- $46).

I still want to get An Infamous Traffic onto the table, also from wargamevault.com, which looks as nasty as nasty gets as far as player-screwage goes. This game calls out for whiskey, and not good stuff, something that will hurt going down. If I'm reading my trial play correctly you could go from first place to last place in one big hurry if the other players decide they want to see you dead. It's about setting up illicit opium markets in China for fun and profit, a lovely subject matter to start with. Has a bit of a cult following at the moment.
Last edit: 23 Oct 2017 09:41 by Sagrilarus.

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15 Nov 2017 23:08 #257713 by Sagrilarus
Waiting for my cheesy photos to upload so I can show it off -- it's built and I sat down with my buddy Wayne to play a couple of scenarios. Great little game, on the level of Pocket Battles but quicker to set up and break down. I have it in a Chinese Food take-out bin so the box was dirt cheap too. Saved the environment some waste plastic.

This game has this simple little mechanic that let's you control the flow of play, effectively putting the other guy on defense if you can make it work. It's one of those things where you wonder why nobody thought of it before.

Hollandspiele is really catching my attention these days.

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16 Nov 2017 10:26 #257730 by engelstein
I bought it, but haven't gotten it to the table yet. I was going to steal Catan roads, or something like that.

Look forward to your pics!

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16 Nov 2017 10:50 - 16 Nov 2017 10:54 #257734 by Sagrilarus
This is the broad shot of the components, including my Chinese food container that I'm using as a box for the game:



I had the dice, Chessex 12mm rounded edge jobbies that I prefer. They $6 for 36 but these were leftovers from previous purchases. Two dollars total for twelve. The cards are printed on the cheapest paper, dropped into sleeves with matching colors.



One of the issues in both the published version and the PDF version is the difference between the red cards and the pink. The difference is too subtle. Look to the bar across the top, Parliamentary/Covenanter's Artillery is pink, Cromwell is red. Not much difference particularly in low light. So I got sleeves to match to reinforce the differences in the colors. Pink is pink, red is red now.



The blue cards are a little easier to discern from each other, but the sleeves match here too.

The game comes with about 8 scenarios where each one represents a different battle from a different era. The system is era agnostic; you could create a scenario for Jutland as easily as for Cannae. Each unit has its own strength, its own capabilities, and as importantly its own target opponents, which bring history into the picture. A unit's opponents (if you look at Cromwell on the red card above you can see he attacks Byron then Northern Horse on a frontal attack, can screen, i.e., block, Byron, Tillier's Right, and Whitecoats) which more or less describes his position on the field at Marston Moor.

That Screen option is key to the running gear of the game. If you CAN screen, you MUST screen, and when you do it dumps the dice from that card. Cromwell can take any die on any turn, so he powers up quickly. He also doles out a damage point per die, which grows quickly. So when you're up against Cromwell you have to keep forcing him to screen, forcing him to react to your actions. If you don't he's going to hit you like George Foreman in just a couple of turns. That's the heart of the game, keep your opponent busy and unpowered, struggle to build your own strength while he's doing the same to you. Each battle brings a different set of connectivity onto the field and a couple of them are a little interesting to decipher when the cards first get laid out. First time playing a particular scenario has resulted in my opponent and I having a debate of how to proceed, and how it relates to the historic battle.

There's more scenarios on the way in January but anybody who wanted to take the time could punch out Shiloh, or Agincourt, or whatever other battle they're interested in and publish them in text form pretty doggone easily.
Last edit: 16 Nov 2017 10:54 by Sagrilarus.
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18 Nov 2017 00:17 #257823 by Cranberries
Wargamevault and drivethrucards is the new Cheapass games.
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