Torch and Shield is the kind of game that intrigues me far more than it has a right to do so.While my background is mostly wargaming, I've only really truly enjoyed the excellent Battletech and Blood Bowl as far as gridded games go. While Underworlds was a decent title, I didn't see anything that wouldn't just work better without the hexes - for goodness sake there aren't even facing rules!
Ah, I'm ranting. Torch and Shield. No real major interest in dwarves, sour taste in my mouth because let's be frank, the Hobbit movies burned me, and I didn't really enjoy any of the newer "duardin" GW was putting out. I've since come around on the Fyreslayers (I like the newest Warcry band and nothing else, at all.) but alas, not much else.
But, I do like Landsknects, and when I saw those on their website, I realized I should pay more attention. Let me be clear, I wasn't going to go for anything in the kickstarter but those goofy merc-looking dwarves, but then I watched some videos on the game, and realized that they basically took a lot of Games Workshop design ideas and put it into an honestly brilliant game.
Combat is quick and easy to resolve, and features "buckets of dice" style resolution - you will be rolling around 3+ dice to make hits, you need successes for hits, those come on a 5-6, so throwing more dice is always important.
There's no real structure to this post, so I'll just go with some observations:
While it's a "bring what minis you have" rule (which is a pointless descriptor, every minis game is a "bring what you have" game and there's exactly one company with the clout and power to enforce otherwise...) I found that going WYSIWYG was a massive, embarrassing mistake because one side of Vulkyn Flameseekers (mostly painted!!) was able to trounce a dwarf army of Kainan's reapers (not painted! mea culpa!!) very easily in every single game (we played three) except for one where we got some very unlucky pulls from the event decks and I was having to pull from my Warcry teams to be able to have enough. Now I've been assured that the main game will have a load-out system, so I'll mea culpa that for now, because otherwise having a "balanced" team with pure WYSIWYG is not possible.
Positioning is important and there's something of a "death spiral" in the games - your characters have 3 wounds, and it's possible to get one-shotted easy - but even taking a single wound means you become easier to be wounded. That's generally fine, because the resolution is pretty chunky and - roll a direct contest to hit, then to wound for each hit you get, a la' MESBG. There's knockback like in MESBG or Blood Bowl or Underworlds, and like MESBG and Underworlds if you don't have a place to be knocked back to(you choose where to go, unless the enemy is using a hammer. Hammer dwarves get to choose where to push) the enemy rolls an extra die to wound you. Like Blood Bowl, you can then do a "follow up" and come up to them.
Taking a wound means you're knocked down. It uses a pool system, so if your MS(attack stat) is 4, you roll 4d6 and count the 5/6's for a hit, same with wounds, with armor and resilience reducing the amount of dice the "wounder" would get from its strength score. That resilience goes down by 1 each wound suffered, and all of the demo guys had 2 resilience, so if you took two hits and weren't dead, you were not going to survive another hit.
The card initiative system(each dwarf gets 1 card) was a bit slow going (our first two rounds of six was 50 minutes nearly) but once we had it down pat we were sheathing cards(you get +1 extra card if your leader is alive and can save it for the next turn) and slaughtering each other with ease, with each round lasting about 15 minutes. So for "pro" or "people that know the rules" type players I would say a normal game of T&S would last about 90 minutes. Depending on your life circumstances you could probably get two games in a session. Cards also do stuff like make you lose your light sources fuel or worse like spawning one or three monsters at the nearest entrance to you - meaning you can, at the end of the round, go from chuckling and confident to sweating bullets and having to realign plans. Or you set off a trap and have to resolve a hit against you. Nothing good happens to the player that draws this, and it's the player with priority that gets it. Which is interesting, there's some indication that being the Fated One has positive stuff going for it. As it stands you get to draw from the "fuck you" deck.
Being shrouded is the most "hold your breath" stuff I've seen in a game. Basically you become harder to shoot at but you also lose the protection of the light source, and the light source is a huge part of the game. You will tactically position yourself automatically without even thinking of it, and we started using home-made blood bowl scatter templates to show line of sight. If you're not careful re: light, you're going to have a bad time. Anyone without light becomes shrouded and that means every round you roll 2d6. On a 2, you die, no save (fuck you). You were eaten by a grue. On a 10-12 a monster spawns next to you. Monsters interrupt fights, as dwarves will fight, sure, but they won't stand a monster to live.
You are only guaranteed up to half a game of light. You get d3 rounds of light in the beginning, and after that you roll 1d6 for each light source and it goes out on a 1. Also, you lose 1 fuel if you, the fated one, draw a diamond card. For both teams, draw it again and the lights go out. Then monsters start showing up because you then are rolling for every single god-damned dwarf. Again these are QS rules so I'd recommend you hit up the discord for more questions by it, but this game is very tense and good. It's the diametric opposite of something like Warcry where the point is to just swarm each other like angry ants and beat the fuck out of each other (although there are special skills determined by your card drawn's suit for each guy, similar to Warcry's Yahtzee initiative). You really want to be careful - tactical positioning is extremely important - and objectives are very important. There's still the "cinematic" moments that Warcry offers, but it's more of an "oh shit" as the lights go out and then you suddenly have 12 monsters on around you and it's round two.
So it's a great game. The Kickstarter is running right now and I recommend you get in on the ground floor because, not only is it good, it has Landsknecht dwarves.
- Klang
No comments:
Post a Comment