"our latest and greatest take on One-Hour Wargames " Topic

Well, we spent a ton of time, effort, playtesting, and cold-testing with everyone from total newbies to minis to people with 50+ years of miniatures, and from 1-1 games to 3 on 3 games.

Here's our take on early medieval / late dark ages rules, which we have focused more towards Feudal period. However, two "Dark Ages" types in the form of cavalry and light cavalry with javelins are distinctly present, and several of the list suggestions in the force matrix area are late Dark Ages, really.

I think these would be excellent for any beginners to the game, altho the "One-Hour Wargames" book would be useful for scenarios.

link

I'm very pleased with them. Even though I'm not necessarily the driving force I feel they check all the boxes for me, including some I didn't know I wanted before I bought my copy of OHW:
- decision-driven
- Scenario-focused
- tactically interesting
- reward mastery of historical / game tactics
- fast-play
- relatively few pages of rules
- tight mechanics
- ready to play for the 90% of battles
- easy to tweak for scenarios
We learned a lot about both game mechanics and the "physicality" of wargaming as we figured out ways to drastically cut down on time spend puttering around with bases and figs.

It's been a great time, and we're looking forward to a lot of interesting games in the future.

I'm not a big fan of OHW's roster-driven rules--anyone's roster-driven rules, come to that--but I really like OHW's scenarios and overall concept. In fact the OHW ten unit army has become one of my standards as I try to bring order to the collection.

QueenC how do you plan to record hits?

Looking forward to giving this a whirl, I need to get cracking painting my 6mm Normans again.

@robert, you can avoid Rosters with OHW, either with the unattractive option of dice to record casualties:
link

or fiddling with the rules so you do not have to track 15 hits, but a smaller number and you can use casualty markers:
link

I use green dice to record hits. If a unit is past its 5 hits that cannot be rallied off, then I use one red dice with a '5' to remind myself.

Since I use big bases, it is easy to slip a few dice onto the base, but overall I don't find them to be a problem, aesthetically. I'm mostly looking to play a good game fast, not make it look totally perfect.

I think that rosters make a really good alternative – it helps lower player knowledge of how close a unit is to breaking. While one can get a feel for that in real life by watching how a group of soldiers is acting, I think it's a bit more realistic to say, know that a unit is past 5 or past 10, so would be OK with a roster system.

I've looked in depth with using other hit systems so that units have 3 hits, etc. While it mathematically works out to be the same, the swing in randomness is more extreme. I'm not interested in an emotional roller-coaster in my gaming since my work life is pretty demanding, so I use the D5 / Average Dice. A D6 makes things a lot more variable [and makes a nice alternative for a unit with less consistent performance] but overall, I think that the system is fine as-is.

Remember, there are very specific mathematical progressions with a d6-2, d6, d6+2 going for 15 total hits, e.g. a Knight with d6+2 Hits can wipe a unit out in 2 turns rolling a '5' and a '6' for 15 hits. A d6 attack unit needs a minimum of 3 turns to accomplish the same thing.

I think my buddies blog has a post about the math involved, somewhere.