"Gloire Rules Review (vs Flashing Steel)" Topic

After looking through Flashing Steel, and The Savage Worlds of Solomon Kane, I checked out another swashbuckling ruleset

link

The other review (2006) is much more warm
TMP link
so you might want to check it out as well

Hope this helps someone!

It's an interesting review and I think I can see how you come to your conclusions, but it in no way reflects my experience of playing the game. I have found that Gloire plays quickly and easily with plenty of swashbuckling flavour. Our average game features half a dozen figures a side and we get finished within two hours easily.

Perhaps it is because it falls into an unusual category, somewhere midway between a RPG and the usual 6-20 man skirmish game and thus invites comparisons to both.

I would say a game taking two hours for six per side is rather long. Remember I am comparing it to games like Flashing Steel where a similar encounter would take 30 minutes.

Some may feel the extra recording and large skill lists are well worth the investment.

All those are fair points. A lot comes down to what you expect from a game.

On the time front, I should qualify the time required with the information that we play slowly, because we get distracted easily and generally socialise as much as we play. In our last game, my hero seemed to spend a lot of time manoeuvring the baddies into position and then throwing them off a bridge into the river below. This necessitated a lengthy discussion on how that fitted into the canon of swashbuckling movies, so you can see that our games take time.

Another point worth considering is the depth of the experience. Our Gloire games are not just a straight-up slugging match for the most part, which would certainly be over a lot more quickly than the 'less than two hours' quoted. Instead we mostly play with one player as GM and the other as the heroes, although occasionally we go head-to-head with encounter markers to provide additional chaos or help. In most of our games the board needs to be explored to find the objectives (encounter markers) and any hazards then have to be dealt with, while avoiding the attentions of the other side.

You can see how our two most recent games have played out on the blog below. I hope this is of interest and puts the rules in proper context:
link

Thanks Wukong – I did link the nicer review to provide some 'context' but your blog link is more helpful.

Nice blog btw – I like your terrain!

Thanks, I'm pleased it's useful. Also glad you like the terrain. My gaming buddy, Steve, made all the terrain and designed the scenarios for those games.

If he ever moves to Australia let me know :-)

Will do. :-)

That was a very interesting read. A while back I fell in love with Flashing Steel for Pirate games and have been considering the Gloire rules as well, but for more detailed conflicts with few figures. Sounds to me like they may each scratch a different itch for me and sit side by side on my rule shelf!

Thanks
Chris