Wingnut Games, 48pp

A sense of humour is as individual in gaming as it is in everything else. But one thing remains constant. However hilarious, or awful, the concept behind them, the game mechanisms themselves must be sound.

Battle Cattle is a perfect example of how to get it right; a solid, well designed set of miniatures rules, which allows players to pit their heavily armed and armoured bovines against one another in high-tech gladiatorial combat.

After a brief and pun-laden introduction (which, like the rest of the book, is heavily larded with Monty Python quotes), we get to the meat of the rules. (Sorry. It's catching). These are laid out cleanly and clearly; far more so than a lot of 'proper wargames' I could mention. After a brief definition of game terms, we get to design our bovines.

Essentially this means picking a breed from the Cattle-log, and kitting it out from the equipment lists. Smaller, lighter breeds can carry fewer weapons and less armour, but have more moo-vement points. All the weapons you'd expect are there, lasers, machine guns, and the like, along with more exotic systems, like anthrax bombs, and bionic enhancements, like the dreaded methane implant. All the systems are costed in dollars; players agree on a budget for the game, and purchase equipment up to the agreed limit.

Turning to the actual combat system, we find a simple, fast-play set of rules, with guidelines for playing the game on a hex map, a square grid, or as a fully-fledged tabletop miniatures game. The mechanisms are conventional enough; players move their cattle in initiative order, the cow with the highest number of moo-vement points going first. Ranged combat is decided by rolling a standard to-hit number for each type of weapon, modified by range and circumstance, and rolling a specified number of dice for damage points.

Close combat works in a similar fashion, factoring the relative sizes of the cattle, the angle at which they meet, and the speed of the attacker together to determine the number of damage dice. Both ranged and melee combat can leave a cow tipped over, and vulnerable to additional trampling damage.

You'll have to construct or convert your own miniatures, of course; those Brittain's farm animals at the bottom of the toy cupboard can come into their own at last.

Overall, silly but fun. But what else would you expect from the people who brought you Og?

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