"The Holy Grail of Ancients Rules ?" Topic

Neil Shuck played my Sword & Spear Ancient & Medieval rules and had some nice things to say about them on the Meeples and Miniatures website:

"…a new set of rules have come along which, even after a single play, have immediately become the favourite to be my Ancients wargaming rules of choice for the future: Sword & Spear….
We played a simple meeting engagement on an open plain between Early Imperial Rome and Ancient Britons, just to try out the rules mechanics….
It really helps that the rules made sense, so when we hit a situation, we discussed what we would expect to happen, and 99% of the time, the rules did what we expected…..
Whilst movement and combat works well the crowning glory of this game is the Command and Control system, which takes ideas from games such as Saga and Bolt Action, adds its own twists and produces a result which gives each player plenty to think about during the course of each turn…..
I think we've just found our Holy Grail, Ancients rules that are fast, fun, intuitive and interactive to play (definitely not I-go-U-go), whilst offering a number of challenges and decisions in every phase of play. I think we will be playing these rules an awful lot in the future.

In short – these are a great little set of rules!"

You can see the full article here:
meeplesandminiatures.co.uk

And this is Napoleonic?

Sorry, hit the wrong button when crossposting. I've asked Bill to correct it.

Mark,

Do I understand correctly…if I buy the .pdf from you…then buy a hard copy from Lulu.com, you refund the .pdf price?

If so, that is a heck of a deal…

Dave

Yes, that's correct. I'm just making the profit once from each buyer.
It means you can buy the pdf for £6.00 GBP, and see if you like it, before buying the printed book.

My acid test for ancient rules is "Can they be used for Carrhae?"

How do you handle multi-player? Usually there are 4 of us playing…..

4-6 units per player would would still be a standard game. In a 2 on 2 game you simply divide up the command dice as needed.

As I read in an over view, you place one die per unit in the game into a bag then draw 7. So when you draw the 7 is it still "My side", "Your side"?

How do you handle multi-player? Usually there are 4 of us playing…..

In a multi-player game, each player has his own command of troops, and his own coloured dice. Instead of the usual 7 dice that are drawn from the bag each phase, 13 are drawn in a two vs two game. So each player (normally) gets some action dice each phase to activate his own troops. This means that everyone is involved at all times, with no waiting around for other people to have their turn. It works very well for two vs two, and we've played about half of our playtest games in this way. Normally each player has a command of around 7-9 units.

I've also included some variant rules for larger multiplayer games, like you would play at a convention, with each player controlling around 3-5 units.

That sounds pretty interesting.

OK…order sent

MM, what basing works for units in Sword & Spear?

Is this a remake of the game developed by Arnold Hendricks in the 1980's

link

Is this a remake of the game developed by Arnold Hendricks in the 1980's

No, it is a completely different game.

MM, what basing works for units in Sword & Spear?

The game is unit based, and units must be equal frontage. So it is very flexible as far as basing is concerned.

You can find out more information here:
link

And this thread has links to some AARs I have posted on here:
TMP link

I just bought a hard copy -excited!!!

These arrived this morning – a very well produced book and I would echo the comments above -these may be the 'Holy Grail' set. The rules are very well written and clearly explained. My previous favs were Impetus -these on first reading have a similar feel but are much more elegant. Mark -these are an absolute joy (certainly beats sitting around waiting for DBA 3 to appear…).
Better get the toys out !!!

BTW I understand you send out a PDF as well -I ordered from Lulu -how do I get my PDF or have I got this wrong?

(certainly beats sitting around waiting for DBA 3 to appear…).

DBA3 is available here:
TMP link

It's just a flesh wound.

We are now no longer the Knights who say Ni.

mashrewba – thanks for the appreciative comments.
To get the pdf, you need to e-mail me a copy of your order confirmation from Lulu. I don't get details from Lulu about who has purchased the rules so I can't send pdfs out automatically to Lulu purchasers.

I have the download of DBA but it's not actually a thing is it -like a book or a product or anything really. DBA is a great system but it's written by people who are very into the grammar and clauses and I get that but it's not communication and communication is the be all and end all.
This is a lovely thing and you can understand it -how can that be a bad thing?

Sorry folks – unhelpful and irrelevant non appearance of DBA tantrum is now over…

Interesting – might be worth a crack :-)

Just bought mine. The discussion about these rules on M&M made it hard to resist. :)

My pet peeve is any rule system that says each unit must be (arbitrary number) of bases/stands whatever. That seldom reflects any historical army.

IMHO making any group of Gallic/Celtic/Arab war-band type army where "units" reflect clan/household/tribe or similar have the same size is pretty odd. Even when "brigaded" or other term into a larger group they would not all react the same.

But I'm an old curmudgeon and think each figure I paint should mean something instead of having rules which may as well be empty cardboard strips maneuvering.

Some units in the game are 'large' – these have more figures, hit harder when fresh, but take more hits to kill

wballard,

You seem to be describing an individual skirmish game, which would be "interesting" with an army of several hundred figures. Nice theory might take a long time to play

I like units/regiments/cohorts/battles/phalanx Taxis whatever you want to call them and I think most armies did fight in this fashion.

My pet peeve is any rule system that says each unit must be (arbitrary number) of bases/stands whatever. That seldom reflects any historical army.

The requirement that every unit must be equal frontage is a compromise to make the gameplay easier and faster. Whilst I'm sure you are correct in that different armies fought in different sized units (if they even had anything like the concept of units), given that in most cases we can only guess at what those sizes were, it is no less historically accurate to have an arbitary fixed unit size.

But I'm an old curmudgeon and think each figure I paint should mean something instead of having rules which may as well be empty cardboard strips maneuvering.

Personally I think a top-down approach gives a much better representation of a large battle than the bottom-up approach you are referring to, where individual figures are considered.