This Week’s post looks at my wargaming wishlist for this year and beyond.
Now for the games I'd love to get to the table next.
Lion Rampant
Remember when I said I thought Xenos Rampant would fit better in a different era? This is what I was thinking.
The units being a bit slow and unreliable fits much more with my vision of medieval warfare than sci-fi. I’ve got enough Vikings to cobble together an army for this, so it’s high on my list to try.
Five Parsecs from Home
I made all that wooden modular terrain and then never managed to get this campaign started! Perhaps one for the summer.
Five Men at Kursk/Normandy
I’ve got everything I need to run this in 15mm, but I’ve heard whispers of a new release coming, so perhaps that will give me the kick I need.
NUTS!
Another WW2 skirmish game but this time with a focus on dynamic turn structure, cascading actions and reactions, cooperative play vs an uncertain number of enemies, and a lot of fascinating narrative stuff but...
Look, I just don’t get this. I’ve read it, I’ve watched gameplay videos, I’ve read message boards, but I’m just a bit stumped on how this actually works in play. But still... it holds a lot of promise as a potentially interesting game with some unique ideas.
My dream is that one day I’ll find somebody already experienced in this game to walk me through.
Chain of Command
Now this is one where I think I’m actually likely to find an expert to run me through a game, as it seems to have a good following.
What a Cowboy!
A very strange die activation system on top of a surprisingly granular cowboy ruleset. I’m intrigued, though, and I have the minis ready to go.
Space Crusade
Does this count as a wargame? My partner spotted this in a charity shop and I’m very pleased she called me to ask if I wanted it. Yes. I did.
At the moment I’m paralysed with fear over the idea of painting these miniatures, as they’ve clearly been waiting in their box for a very long time.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Yeah, I keep telling myself that this old thing could be fun to run as a GM, taking some of my GW-fan friends back to the source, but there’s also a lot of grit to the system that I’m not sure we’d enjoy.
Age of Penda / Arrowstorm
This is a fascinating system from Daniel Mersey, the Rampant guy, and has an almost worker-placement system for assigning orders to your army, and an abstracted grid layout for the battlefield itself. The two flavours are early and late medieval, so perhaps when I’ve got my Vikings painted up I could get a game together.
Black Ops
This is an unassuming little Osprey blue book, but it has some nice ideas. A cool system for suppression, stealth missions, and overall seems very simple. Perhaps I could spin it over to sci-fi or WW2 to use the miniatures I already have.
A Billion Suns
Another interesting-but-daunting game. There’s a lot of space fleet action happening at my local club, so perhaps this is something I could lure people into.
Blood, Bilge, and Iron Balls / Galleys & Galleons
I don’t know what prompted me to buy a handful of Age of Sail ships. Painting them scares me. Fitting little sails and flags to them scares me. Rigging?? Don’t even start.
If I ever actually finish this project then I’ve got two games in mind. BB&IB goes hard on detail, down to individual crew members and cannons, and sort of reads like a Classic Battletech style game, where each ship has a big sheet of info to track. This is certainly appealing when dealing with big old ships, but G&G, based on the Song of Blades & Heroes system, might be a more realistic way in for me.
Elsewhere
Murkdice shares a brilliant system for wounds that kinda makes me regret writing up a giant wound table recently
Monte Cook talks about rules clutter, nicely illustrating why I don’t have save modifiers in my games
Brimstone and Lead Arena brings FPS Deathmatch play to the tabletop and has a lot of fun ideas
Coming Soon
Over on Patreon I talk about emptiness.
As so many have said before, an “empty room” doesn’t need to be a literal empty room. Instead, it’s just a room that doesn’t (currently) contain a monster, treasure, or trap.
When you need an empty room, roll d6 instead.
Expect the full post here and on the blog next week.
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I am getting into Bolt Action. Starting off very slow. Also learning Halo right now.
Thanks for the mention!