Back to Spain

I seem to have missed writing a post somewhere. This one is a follow up to the post about the rules writing session I had last Saturday afternoon, which I haven't written.

So last Saturday Mrs T was out with the local Brownies watching the Gang Show so I had an afternoon to work on "Send Not To Know", aided by Phil S.

Having bashed some bits of them into shape (not the armour or artillery rules, but quite a bit of the rest) we had a Monday Night Group session this Friday.

Again making use of Mr A's figures we had some Spanish Foreign Legion, plus Moroccans, Requetes and Peninsula Army attacking a motley force of Republicans made up of IBs, Asaltos and Militia. These were variously hiding (skulking?) in some olive groves, the other side of a small stream, - mainly there for decorative purposes, but also because its banks were to count as providing cover.

Well, apart from the fact that the Nationalist player didn't seem to get the message and it all blundered around a bit and ended up indecisive.

However, we did mange to have a really confusing protracted melee in an olive grove. Where everyone seemed to be surrounding everyone else and the "Close Assault Resolution Table" singularly failed to resolve the close assault decisively. Certainly need heavy tweaking there.

The Requetes occupied the central village (the one without the wall round it) and were wiped out to a man by a stunningly effective Republican bombing raid and massive small arms fire.

In the centre a concerted push by the SFL & Moroccans was making solid progress, although their flank was secured by a battalion of Peninsula Army who were remarkably useless and suffered from deadly accurate fire from some IBs and the odd lucky shot from the Militia.

Finally the Asaltos did a fine job of holding their river bank against all comers.

In summary, lots learned from the game, - mostly that the bits I wasn't sure about failed to work, but the bits I was pleased with did.

What I wanted was a move sequence where play alternates between each side but not by unit. I wanted move sequences to be in variably sized blocks at the players discretion, so the game flares up in some areas then dies down but the player has the illusion of control.

Each side has an effectiveness rating which is calculated from how many odd bits it is made up of. The difference in that, plus the number of units, is the number of playing cards dealt to each side. Players then sort them into blocks of colours (eg 4 Reds, 2 Blacks, 3 Reds, 1 Black). They can move units/perform actions as long as they turn over cards of the same colour. When they can't do that any more, the turn passes to their opponent and so on. Jokers are put into the sequence and are standalone cards that represent air strikes.

Does that make sense?

Now, off to paint some Falangists whilst Mrs T watches Eurovision.