I had a good time playing Buck Surdu's Blood at Swash at Cold Wars. Since then we have been using them to play all sorts of skirmish games. After gaining some experience with the rules we have made some modifications that we think make the game even more fun. Hopefully you will find some of these ideas useful.

We found that many players would give every action to their best character. The rest of his figures would just stand around like statures until the leader was killed. Then the second best figure would start using all the actions. To put a stop to this we set up a deck with one card for each figure in the game. Only this figure may act when his card is pulled. A wild card is added to the deck for each player. When the wild card is pulled the player can give an action to any of his surviving figures. This allows him to retain some flexibility. If you want to avoid a lot of shuffling you can of course simply increase the number of cards in the deck. For example five cards for each figure plus five wild cards will last a long time.

Our club has a strong dislike for saving throws. In some of our games a player would have a character whose saving throw was 17 or 18. This character would be almost invulnerable. When two such characters got into a fight it could take a long time to resolve. Our solution was to eliminate the saving throw for a character that has been deliberately targeted. If your opponent hits you that's it. You take damage.

Saving throws are still used in other circumstances such as if you are unfortunate enough to be in the line of fire when somebody misses with a pistol or if you are in cover. We found that this change in the rules made for a faster game and fewer die rolls.

Changing the saving throws necessitated an increase in hit points. Each character is given an addition 6 + 1D6 hit points. We also lowered all the numbers on the Attribute Table by one so that all rolls are successful if your roll is less than or equal to the attribute. Another minor change was to replace the Sword attribute with the more generic Melee.

Blood & Swash by Buck Surdu and Chris Palmer, $8 from Jodie-press PO Box 372, Oceanport NJ 07757 JodiePress@yahoo.com