A New Gathering

Its been a struggle but the new version of Gathering of Hosts is available from the link to the left 
(or here). The rules are actually fairly close to what I have been using since 2013 but the wording and how things are presented have changed as was determined on last fall.

Habit and expectation initially had me following a conventional approach of defining troop types and having charts for movement, shooting and so on. This works just fine, especially if working with a fairly small number of known troop types but it does get your mind into a certain set when someone says "Peltast" and you think "Reg C LMI w javelin, lts and shield" and since I have been trying to imagine the armies that I am describing as I go, well the writing was getting to be excessive to fit in each change in imaging for very little return and attempts to predefine the building blocks was restrictive unless simple was to be left very far behind.

Here is the last of the 3 games, the smallest (6 units each vs the 9 used earlier) and the fastest, most exciting, with the highest tension and a last minute upset Westman victory largely due to their use of speed and their ability to move through woods to keep melee and missile fire to a minimum. It was extremely close though, several Westlands units escaped when 1 hit away from destruction.  Honours of the Game though went to the new unit of Midlish Mounted Crossbowmen who almost won the game single handedly. More on them in a later post.

So, in a series of small games I experimented with various options to make the game easier to describe and customize from counting noses to having up to 4 single stand units allowed to form temporary groups to, well more things than I care to remember and recount. I finally settled for some old simple ideas with fixed units 1 to a grid area but instead of defining any generic troop types I just described each of the units that I intend to build and added special unit rules that apply just to them. (A touch of WHAB I suppose) It didn't take long to find that some special rules could be cut and pasted in for various similar units in various armies which will simplify gaming but I have skipped the bit where I explain what it represents and why the unit has it. This sort of thing will be added to illustrated army lists over the next year, along with personalities and potted history. One page per army. 

But that's for the future. There is painting and basing to be done before I play again!