As I continue to work through my home-brew samurai rules, one of features I want to include are personal challenges (and heroic deeds). Even during the 1550-1650 period, the time period these rules are aimed at, samurai would occasionally issue personal challenges to their opponents. They were often employed as a tactic by retreating samurai units, hoping the time spent issuing, accepting, and fighting the challenge would allow them to either escape or reorganise themselves.
I wanted the rule mechanism to be easy and fun to use, and also provide variable outcomes. I opted for an approach using coins to decide the outcome, where coins are flipped by both participants with heads winning. Whenever the result is two heads or two tails, then another round of combat occurs. After each round of combat, unless killed, players can remove one of their unit’s hits as they reorganise or are inspired by the challenge. While this rule offers little to no benefit to fresh units, it can be advantageous for depleted ones that have accrued a number of hits.
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| Challenges are issued and accepted. |
Below are the draft rules, followed by an example…
Personal Challenges (and Heroic Deeds)
The leader of a samurai unit must spend 2 actions to issue a personal challenge to an enemy samurai unit, whether on foot or mounted, within movement range. Challenges can only be issued between samurai units, foot or mounted.
When a personal challenge is issued, both players move their commanding samurai bases to an equal distance between the units to commence personal combat. The process for combat is as follows:
Combat. Both players flip a coin for their samurai leader, then compare on the table below. Heads will win unless the other player has also flipped a head.
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| Personal Combat Table |
Combat Results. For each round of combat a samurai leader survives, remove 1 hit. When combat concludes, the winning samurai leader returns to their unit with their opponent's head, while the loser is removed from play.
Example of personal challenge combat…
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| Blue mounted samurai who have taken 7 hits are now facing off against Red’s foot samurai and Ashigaru. Wanting to delay until further reinforcements arrive they successfully roll 2 actions and choose to offer a personal challenge to the foot samurai who currently have 1 hit. |
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| The leaders of both units are placed equal distance between the two units. |
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| Blue flips a heads while red flips tails. Blue wins and can remove another hit, while red loses. |
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| Blue leader returns victorious to their unit which now has 5 hits. Red leader is removed as a reminder they cannot issue a challenge. They have removed 1 hit for surviving the first round of combat. |
All being well I hope to try these rules out in a couple of games over the next week. I will also be considering whether to add victory points to the game where personal challenge wins can add victory points.
