Subject:
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Simple (but fun) Castley Strategy Game(y)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.gaming
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Date:
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Sun, 6 Feb 2000 23:01:26 GMT
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Viewed:
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1833 times
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The Setup
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We decided on the theme first - classic good vs evil, this worked well as it
allowed me to lead an army of skeletons, zombies and timmies against smiley
castle folks.
As with all these games - the more space you have the better, but this worked
well within 10x10 feet. First we grabbed all the juniorised bits we could -
Wild West log panels, BURPs, etc.. and jumbled together two opposing structures
- not too big, and not too high - only about 3 or 4 levels (including ground or
carpet level). Stuck together with a liberal amount of hope - no time for
structural integrity - we populated these with our armies.
43 soldiers each, of which 13 had horses. There where two wizards on each side,
and five archers.. oh.. and we also had a dragon each :) The dark side had
black horses, and the side of righteous goodness had white horses.
Each soldier was stuck on a 2x4 plate - I was the Army of Darkness, so I had
black of course, and I had quite a few red, so those were the other sides
colour. The plate was used for balance, but also to stick hit-points onto. For
some reason I had a large number of red cylinders (80+) so these were used to
measure hit-points. We were allowed to distribute hitpoints where-ever we
wanted, maximum 6 per characters - this meant that some characters were tougher
than others, useful for strategy!
A plate without any hit-points meant a character one step from death. When the
character finally died, they were seperated from their plate to avoid confusion
with characters that had just fallen over due to clumsy overlords.
For characters on horseback, the horses front legs stood on the 2x4 plate
containing the hitpoints. The hitpoints represented the humaniods life, so when
that was down to zero, the horse was considered dead, dumped on its side and
the humaniod stood upon the bare plate. Horse riders were allowed to dismount
at any time, or swap with another character.
Firing cannons :) I couldn't find where I'd stored them, so we only had 4 or 5
each (I pulled some from a nearby pirate diorama). We found about 100 grey
cylinders for ammo. In reserve we had some non-LEGO (!) firing cannons, about
twice the size of LEGO cannons, and easily fire 12 feet
<http://www.lugnet.com/loc/uk/?n=2621>. A bit too powerful against most things,
so we agreed to keep them behind our bases.
Some random scenery - half built creations etc, scattered the no-mans land in
between. As well as looking pretty (weird), they allowed a certain (meagre)
defence to hide behind during grueling advances.
We hastily built some measuring guides from LEGO, and as such our stud
numbering for distances is entirely arbitary and open to improvement!
The Rules
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1) Humaniods on foot can move 6 studs, those on horseback can move 20, dragons
can fly and move 40. Humaniods can drag cannons 6 studs per turn.
2) Alternate single action. One player moves one thing, OR fires one thing,
before ending their turn.
3) Wizards - on a 4,5,6 they can choose what spell they want to cast. Double
movement to a character within a 20 stud radius, add one hitpoint to a
character within a 20 stud radius, lightning - 1 hitpoint off a character
within a 20 stud radius, or on a 6 the wizard could choose to teleport
anywhere. All spells except for the double movement counted as a turn - ie you
could cast this spell then move.
4) Dragons - have a conical fire breath with a 90 degree arc. For sake of
argument they can turn their heads 90 degrees from straight on without that
costing a turn. So if they wanted to breathe upon someone right behind them
they'd have to turn around first. This costs 2 hitpoints to all characters
within the fire - radius 20. They had to roll a 4,5,6 on a 1d6 to incinerate
though!
5) Combat - humaniods on foot all get 1d6 - no modifiers. The only exception is
if a character is jumping down from a level above in which case they get a +2
modifier. Simple combat, ie - whoever roles lowest loses one hit-point.
Horseback riders and dragons get 2d6 in hand to hand combat.
6) Cannons - if the character, or horse, is hit by ammo and made to 'wobble'
then they lose one hitpoint. It would be easier to just say those figs that
fall over are hit, but horses don't fall over as LEGO cannons aren't powerful
enough! Cannons always need someone standing next to them on foot to operate
them.
7) Archers - these were just ordinary soldiers holding a bow. They could fire
around 60 studs and had to have line of sight. This worked by having a nice
straight implement. They hit on a 4,5,6.
8) Additional objectives - each side had an item that if retrieved would mean
victory.. I had a frightknight bat, and I was working to retrieve a cute white
cat.
9) Forget placing starcases and ladders (unless you have lots of time!) assume
a character can move up or down a level per turn, if they wish!
10) Ammo - For the sake of fun, we assumed a magical ammo supply - that is if a
figure is next to some, then they can pick it up and it magically is
transferred to that players ammo suuply. If a cannon needs to fire, then the
ammo magically appears in the barrel. The alternative is to stock-pile ammo at
each cannon, and have runners to collect more from the battlefield. That is
fine if you have a lot of time, but we didn't, so magical ammo supply it was!
Conclusions
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Using red cylinders for hitpoints worked well, especially as they made the
battlefield look that bit more bloody - we took them from our characters bases
and dropped them nearby.
Using the powerful cannons was perhaps a mistake, as during portions of the
game it just degenerated into a free-for all, trying to destroy each others
hastily built and crumbling scenery.
We should have had a rule to allow cannons to be destroyed once they were hit,
as they effectively made the bases into heavily defended forts! For the same
reason 5 archers were perhaps too many for such a small layout.
Unless you purposely have a structure under siege, and give the agressor an
advantage.. like a fire catapult, or dragons.. then it's probably better not to
have both players heavily defended, as we both hid behind our BURPS and waited
for the other to attack. Apart from minor skirmishes, the all-out battle didn't
happen. This was possibly also because of the alternate single action turn
idea.
This meant that as soon as you move someone out into the open, their turn is
over and they are a target! I played a Wild-West LEGO variant with a move-fire,
fire-move, move-move, fire-fire option for each fig.. and that worked well.
However, I feel that giving each player three actions per turn would have
worked better as this was with bigger armies.
Don't use precious bits if you have firing cannons! Not that anything horrid
happened, but bad-planning meant that I couldn't find all my spare castle figs,
and had to supplement the other side with figs from a 6080. I was almost
missing on purpose at times ;)
It was great fun :) You don't need a lot of bits to play, just a sense of fun
and maybe some imagination - last week we played a version of it at a friends
house (who has virtually no LEGO) - we just stood 2x4 blocks on end and made a
LEGO bat to hit 2x2 blocks at each other. Add in some random scenery and you've
got quite a bit of strategic planning to grapple with.
I took pictures, and will post when they get developed. Not that they show
any great architectural styles - more the opposite - they show how much fun you
can have with low-fi-lego-wars :)
Any comments, questions or suggestions for the next battle apprieciated!
Richard
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Simple (but fun) Castley Strategy Game(y)
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| (...) This is great! I have been working on a Lego wargame of my own, and one of my stumbling blocks (no pun intended) was how to keep track of hit points for figures. I had been placing my soldiers on plates to keep them in formation (and to keep (...) (25 years ago, 14-Feb-00, to lugnet.gaming)
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