What better to test a game on, than an unsuspecting 7 year old?
I didn't take any pictures since we had just sketched out a map on paper and moved some 3mm figures around that.
The rules are…. well, you'll see later :-)
It's a fairly open-ended, narrative system, inspired pretty heavily by the Mythic RPG and to a smaller extent by Matrix games. Mostly fits on 1 page (minus explanations of course).
The scene: A village in German-held Normandy.
Corum had a platoon of Americans and was tasked with finding the Germans and kicking them out.
The village was surrounded by hedgerows and some fairly dense, overgrown orchards.
He sensibly advanced his troops up to the first row of hedges to get a good view of the village, identifying a machine gun position in the process, on the east side of the village in a church building.
The third squad snuck forward into the orchard where they engaged the gun in a firefight. Not great odds but they were in his favour after all. The gun team decided to relocate to another position.
Emboldened, he sent forward the second squad, up the centre, to secure the nearest house in the village.
Unfortunately, this brought him in sight of the relocated gun team though in the brief fire fight that ensued, with odds heavily against him, the squad managed to see off the Germans, sending them heading for the hills.
We decided that a sharp-eyed farm kid in the squad knew how to shoot and managed to pick off the leader of the machine gun team, discouraging the rest.
Taking up position in the south-edge of the village, they spied a small half-squad of German infantry on the northern edge of town.
With the GI's in better positions (and a full squad versus a half squad), they had pretty decent odds and managed to push back the Germans.
Now, the Americans had a solid foot hold and it was time to bring up the left flank. First squad surged forward but ran into another German half-squad in the western side of town.
Corum elected for a straight assault on them to knock them out, figuring they were the last Germans hanging about.
Unfortunately, this went awful. The odds roll failed and when we rolled for the consequences, the result was "catastrophic". Several GI's were picked off as they advanced, and the remainder scurried for cover. First squad would play no more part in the battle.
The Germans proceeded to regroup the retreating half squad with the victorious one, and to make things interesting, pushed forward to drive the American second squad out of the town altogether. They managed to push them back but in the process triggered an unexpected event.
Resolving the event, the German unit was exhausted. Low on ammo, the assault had used up their final resources and they were now bunkered down, trying to hold on.
Confident of victory, Corum brought up the two remaining squads and stormed the German position, winning the game and feeling like a million bucks in the end.
Next time, I'll snap a few pictures.
All in all, system went fine.
Essentially, you just have a simple (very simple) odds table and when something goes haywire, you roll for the consequences, which can fall into 4 steps of severity.
There's a few extra rolls for things like non-combat actions and random events.
You essentially just narrate things as they go by. More info soon.!