Bearded Dice

So yesterday seen the first #ManDay of 2016 and it was a blast! Hosted by Glenn at North Down Wargaming Centre we had a Malifaux tournament, a Warmahordes Invitational and some Guildball action.

I was interested in trying out a new ruleset, Mayhem, a fantasy mass battle system which is scale agnostic and offers players to use whatever they have lying around. What makes Mayhem interesting is that all stats are dice based. A mounted unit could have D20 movement while foot soldiers are reduced to D6 or D8, while their combat value and ballistic armour rating could be D10 or D12. So this means that players are free to make up any units they want with any additional traits or weapons they like (spears, shields and abilities) to bring out any flavour in the unit they want. Each turn a player generates Command Points to spend on activating units. Units can be given more actions but cost additional Command Points the more they act.

One of the highlights was the Rat Ogres charging into the Phoenix Guard, gaining an Impact hit from the charge taking their D12 down to a D10. In combat lower is better so rolling a natural 1 gives a critical hit and wipes out the defender. However if the defender also rolls a natural 1 then both units are taken out. Guess what happened yesterday?

By the end of the game the dice system became very intuitive and the trait system gave an easy way to evoke different units on the battlefield.

We also managed to get a demo game of ‘Of Gods and Mortals’ in to see how that worked. Nice and simple system with little rules complications.

All in all a great day’s gaming.