Thinking Outside the Box

Yesterday we played our first game of A Fistful of Kung Fu  by Andrea Sfiligoi, creator of A Song of Blades and Heroes . Unlike most of his Andrea's previous games based on the SOBH engine, this one was not published by Ganesha Games . It has several subtle differences that add up to make it quite a different game than the few I've played before. Our game was played at 300 points, using a trio of my ninja turtles against Shredder and some of his Foot clan ninja. The turtles were all pointed up as protagonists in an attempt to see if it would work. The rules intend that a list only has one protagonist, one bruiser and any number of extras. The main benefit of a protagonist is the ability to react to failed activation rolls. With more than one protagonist on my turtle list, even though they were heavily outnumbered, they were able to react with deadly intent several times during my opponent's turn. The game was fun, and it was a good learning opportunity, but I will defin...

Yup more stuff from Mantic Games . I might as well be on their payroll for the amount that I talk about their stuff here on my blog. Heck I sorta wish I was. Maybe at least I'd get a discount or they could pay me instead of the other way around. Ah well, I digress. I'm not much of a fantasy gamer, but with all those Reaper Bones figures sitting around from their first campaign, I felt like I needed to do something with them. The only rules I have for fantasy gaming is  Song of Blades and Heroes , but I wanted something a little more structured, mainly because otherwise I'd take months just figuring out what figures to use in my war bands! With that in mind I was browsing over on Beasts of War  and I found a game play video of Dwarf King's Hold: Dead Rising . Sadly for me the game seemed to be out of print only year or so after it's release. The second core game,  Dwarf King's Hold:  Green Menace , is still available from Mantic but I wanted to start at the ...

I've been asking around for a set of rules to play Weird War type scenario skirmish games with lately, and one of the suggestions I received was to try Flying Lead , which is based on the Song of Blades and Heroes  engine by Ganesha Games . I had never heard of the system or the publisher so I dug around a bit and found that there was a new edition of  Song of Blades and Heroes  released in September. A few moments, and $8 later, I was reading through the PDF book and wondering why I'd never heard of it before. The reason I decided on this book, rather than one of the themed books was pretty simple: other than Hordes , I don't own any skirmish rules for fantasy gaming...so I wanted that one. The book isn't very long but provides detailed, yet simple, rules for movement, melee and ranged combat, morale tests, larger scale battles, scenarios and campaign play. At the end of the book are several pages containing a very comprehensive list of profiles for all kin...