At the September PW meeting, Sam Hepford showed up with several dozen Ral Partha 25mm Japanese Samurai and a one-page set of rules. The Samurai were all single mounted figures ... I should correct myself ... there were not only Samurai, but also Ashiguru (wanna-be Samurai), and Chugen (never-to-be Samurai). I feel certain that all WRG Ancients players are so familiar with these warriors that it would be senseless to explain the different types. About the only thing that would have made the WRGists unhappy was that there was not a psiloi to be seen. The good guys were me, Fred Haub and Stefan Patejak, each with a mixed band of 8 little fellas. In my group there were 2 armored Samurai, and 6 of the Chugen-type people. Now here, I must admit that I have absolutely no idea if I commanded 8 'Chugen', or 8 'Chugens'... whether 'Chugens' come in the plural is currently beyond my ken. All I do know is that my Chugeniers had no armor and were to be presently slaughtered by the opposing Samurai. Commanding the bad guys were Sam and Terry Sirk; they, too, each had a mixed group of 8 men. The sequence for the skirmish was standard: Side A moves; bowmen that do not move can fire Melee as Side A closes Each group of 8 men tests morale to see if they fight on Sam had instituted several clever ploys in the rules. The first concerned the bowmen ... as an enemy approached, the archer was not permitted to fire if his opponent came within 6 inches. The reasoning behind this was that with an opponent so close, the bowman would tend to put aside his bow, and commence to draw his close combat weapon so as to be ready if the opponent charged in. Each archer had 15 arrows; they were tracked on the man's data sheet. On his firing phase, an archer could fire a volley of three arrows... depending upon the type of archer, the probability of impact differed. for example, if a Samurai fired at long range (12 to 18 inches), the chance of his first arrow hitting was 70%, the second was at 30% and the third at 15%. If an impact occurred, a 6-sided die determined the number of injury points. A total of 6 points killed, but way before that, a man was fairly well out of the fight if he suffered 3 or 4 hits Taking hits was one area in which the armored Samurai and the unarmored Chugen differed. When the 6-sided hit die was tossed, the Samurai deducted 4 from the total because of the protective factor of his armor. The poor Chugen, in contrast, took whatever showed up on the hit die. As my group charged down field, the swift Chugenese, moving at 12 inches per turn, quickly outdistanced my 6-inches-per-move Samurai. The 6 Chuganites ran into 3 of Terry's Samurai and the battle was on. There were three melees, each 2-on-1 in my favor. But easily balancing the numbers was the fact that it was almost impossible for the Chugenians to score hit points on the Samurai. Melee used a procedure different from that used in firing. Here, 10-sided dice were thrown by each side, and the attacking man scored on the defender if his total was higher than that of the defender's ... the number of hit points equaled the difference in dice scores. When the Samurai tossed the higher die, the Chugen recorded the difference, but when the Chugen tossed higher, here, too, as in firing, the Samurai's armor factor of +4 was added to his defensive die score, making it very improbable that the Sainurai would take a hit. For those who care about such things (and I know there are thousands of you out there), while the chance of a Samurai scoring on a Chugen was an even 50 percent, the chance of a Chugen scoring a hit on an opposing Samurai was 16 percent .... the equivalent of tossing a "1" on a 6-sided die. 'Twas no wonder that my 6 Chugenarians were soon laid to rest, and Terry's Samurai took out their handkerchiefs and cleaned their blades. In melee, as a charging man closed in on his opponent, the man whose weapon had the longer reach would get first crack. If there was no "longer weapon", they would dice for initiative. And another one of Sam's clever ploys allowed a Samurai to judge the strength of his blow. If he wanted to really whack at his opponent, the Samurai could smash down with a "heavy stroke". This gave him a "-2" modifier on his offensive 10-sided die, but if he did toss higher than his opponent, it added 2 hit points of damage to the target. In similar fashion, the Samurai could strike with a "careful stroke" or a "firm stroke", each of which had its own modifiers. This stroke business was denied to the Chugen warriors, who had to be content with their ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill strokes. And here's yet another of Sam's ploys ... (there seemed to be no end of them!) ... here, if there is a 2-on-1 melee, and the first man successfully parries (tosses a higher defensive die than the disadvantaged man's offensive die), then when the second man strikes, he gets a "plus" on his damage die, since the first man is keeping the disadvantaged man's weapon busy, hence he can't parry as effectively. In all, a fairly enjoyable skirmish game, even though my boys were knocked out of the box on Round 3. About the only comment I made on the procedures concerned the strike sequence in melee. As a man charged in to contact, whoever had the initiative would get to strike first. The opposing man then had to wait for the next half-bound, for the melee to continue, to get his own whack in. And then there was another wait until the next half-bound for another round to occur. In short, only one man was allowed to strike per half-bound, and I thought this extended the melee for too long a time period. We tried a second scenario using the rules, this time permitting both parties in a melee to strike during each bound. For this second game, Sam lined up a unit of archers and a unit of arquebusiers (about 10 each) and some Samurai to defend against an attacking horde of Chugenese. The firing line took a huge chunk out of the horde, but the saving factor was that the missile troops were not permitted to fire when we got within 6 inches ... again, the rationale being that the missileers were concentrating on getting ready for the impending melee. The archers and the arquebusiers got in one blast, but because the Chugenites zipped across the field at 12 inches per turn (they actually had a charge bonus move of 16 inches), one blast was all there was. In that sense, the Chugenian charge was a good thing; in another it was bad, for it left their supporting Samurai, moving at 6 inches per bound, far, far, behind. And so we paired off, each Chugen taking on a defending missileman. Each archer and arquebusier had "half armor" ... instead of the "+4" modifier used by the Samurai, these men used a "+2" modifier. Still no bargain for the Chugenanians. Dy the time our slower moving Samurai came up, there was a distinct lack of Chugen on our side. They had taken out some of the missilemen, but had been slaughtered themselves. The new melee procedure, in which each side now struck the other in the bound, accelerated the slaughter, bull that was only to be expected. Back to PW Review October 1995 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1995 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com