Tom kindly ran a game of
Osprey's new Crusades skirmish game
Outremer: Faith and Blood yesterday evening at BIG. Matt, George, Steve and myself all used identical forces of Arabs in a four way battle of a leader, two spear and sword armed warriors and three peasant bowmen.
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| My guys advance into town! |
The game was a free for all but largely developed into two separate skirmishes as the bulk of my and Steve's bands of brigands clashed in the marketplace.
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| Steve's leader and warrior burst into the market square! |
The rules are fairly straightforward with some nice touches, like making a Faith roll to charge into combat, combat using different dice types depending on the skills of the fighters, modifiers generally seeing dice move up or down a type as appropriate. Each figure is allocated a playing card and this drives when they can take their two actions in the turn as the cards are drawn from a shuffled deck.
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| Bloodbath in the marketplace! |
Combat between unarmoured or lightly armoured figures is pretty brutal and bows soon make you regret not using cover (Steve's archers atop a building taking out both fighters in Matt's and my band!)
We need find some issues that may or may not be covered in the rules (this was our first play and the rulebook layout is not the best) such as disengaging from combat but things generally went smoothly and the game sped up as we became more familiar with the rules and the card deck grew smaller as characters became hors d'combat!
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| Stand and Face Me You Cur! |
Overall all four of us had a great time (thanks Tom) and are looking forward to taking part in a campaign over the next couple of months. If you have been thinking of getting hold of a copy of the rules, I recommend you do.
