John Shirey has been out of action for a couple of months... he fa' down and go boom!... but it was a big BOOM!, necessitating surgery and leg splints and long screws pinning the bones in place... not good at all. And so it was with pleasure that, in mid-April, I greeted John as he appeared at my house, crutches still in hand, to demonstrate his version of a set of Samurai rules, called SENGOKU, for 15mm figures. The first thing I noted about John's rules set was that he had definitely done his research... he had listed some 11 types of warriors... from mounted Samurai to Bandits to Ashigaru to Ronin to Armored Monks. I have a collection of Samurai single mounted figures, approximately 35mm in size, and my rules contain provisions for about five different types of troops... these are generic in nature, and starting with such specific troop-types as Samurai, there are also such things as "Warriors", and "Nobles" and "Wanna-Bees". These last are fighting men who are a class lower than "Warriors", they are armed with the dreaded Nakka-Nakka, and if they do well, they may be promoted to Warriors and given a spear. But back to SENGOKU (which means ??). In our demonstration game, John gave us each a number of "clans", which are, in effect, 'brigades', each composed of several units. I had four clans, John had three, and my goal was to have all clans advance straight north and capture the Temple of Bu. Each clan was given a diced-for "Loyalty" factor, L... it ranged from 2 to 10. Before a clan could move, a 10-sided die roll had to be equal to or less than L. In our first battle, one of my clans emerged with an L of 4... it was obvious that this clan wouldn't be doing much moving without assistance, and so I sent two courier figures over to help out. Each side was given two couriers... these men, assigned to a clan, would each increase the L factor by 1 point. Thus my do-nothing-clan's L of 4, augmented by 2 couriers, was now a 6, and they performed much better. The combat system interested me most... it was unique in that both the firing procedures and the hand-to-hand procedures were combined into one combat phase, and adjucated on a clan-by-clan basis. All troops tossed 10-sided dice. Each stand in a bow unit was given one die, artillery (a single stand) was given two, each stand of arquebuses had two, and so on. The Big Guy himself tossed 4 dice, as did each mounted Samurai stand. All stands had Defensive factors, D, ranging from 9 (mounted Samurai), down to 4 (artillery). Most of the troop-types had D's of around 6 or 7. These Defensive factors were pertinent to both missile firing and to actual combat. To illustrate the procedures, assume that John's Abu clan and Babu clan attacked my own Cho clan. a. If John's clans closed with mine, we'd pair off all stands including those firing missiles and those in contact, and first calculate the number of dice to be tossed by each side. b. Assume the Abu clan had 8 dice, the Babu had 5, and the Cho had 6. c. John would toss his total of 13 dice, looking for numbers exceeding the Defensive values of my troops. Similarly, I tossed my 6 dice, looking for large numbers. Take the largest toss, compare it with the highest enemy D, take the next highest toss, compare it with the next highest enemy D, and so on. d. Each time the toss exceeded the D factor of the enemy, that was a 'hit' on the opposition. At first, John wanted each hit to denote a kill. That is, that the target stand would be removed. But it turned out there were many, many hits... so many that there wouldn't be too many viable units left after the first few contacts. Filter And so a 'filter' was used. Here, each hit was marked by a token on the clan itself, and not on a particular stand. When the clan accumulated three such hit markers, the opposing player could select one stand of the clan as destroyed. First to be selected were those stands actually in contact, after that, any stand was fair prey. This 3-to-1 filter worked well. Most interesting was that, after a stand was removed when a clan accumulated its 3 hit markers, the hit markers themselves remained with the clan as a semi-permanent indication of the clan's casualties, lack of endurance, inefficiency, etc. . At the end of the bound, there was a rally phase, during which the hit markers could be removed. One 10-sided die was rolled... with a lucky toss of "10", all markers would vanish... other than a "10", and the most you could remove was 3 markers. After one combat phase, I had bumped one of John's clans rather severely... it had a total of 15 hit markers on it. We had previously determined that if the number of hit markers exceeded the clan's Loyalty factor, L, the clan would have been so smashed up that, on the next turn, it wouldn't move into combat. Now, with 15 hits on the reduced-size enemy clan (remember that each 3 markers knocked off a stand), I thought it would be out of the battle, and remain immobile for the rest of the encounter. But in his rally phase, John tossed an amazing "10", and all the markers vanished, and the clan came on again with a vengeance. One of the procedures tossed out during the playtest was the dicing to see if a clan moved. Initially, it had to toss under its L factor, but to speed up the game, John determined that all clans could move forward as desired... no more dicing. The only impediment to movement was the number of hit markers... if they exceeded the L factor, the clan couldn't move until the markers were removed. SENGOKU took a lot of its procedures from the DBX-family of rules. I was happy that the dreaded pip system was not used for group movement. Stands within a clan could spread out to a maximum of 2-inches from each other. And to maintain some sort of command/control procedure, all stands within a clan had be within 10-inches of the clan's Big Guy. In all, SENGOKU was quite enjoyable, even though I never found out what it meant. I assume that John will be back with SENGOKU 2nd, even SENGOKU 3rd. I'm looking forward to it. Back to PW Review April 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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