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.
That's a nice addition to the game Peter - I've been considering something similar for my Fantasy games. Does a defeat affect Army morale?
ReplyDeleteI like the use of old 1d (Penny) coins. I could get four white "chocolate" mice for one of those in the olden days...
I have not included any implications for army morale mainly as I currently do not have an army morale rule, but I like the idea. I found the old pennies when tidying up last week, they will be useful markers for some of my games.
DeleteInteresting idea peter - we have had personal challenges in WoTR games and they often have hilarious results, such as the leader of teh obviosuly victorious army in the main game, being killed in the moment of victory!
ReplyDeleteYesterday, we played a large game involving five different samurai forces invading Korea in 1592 - no personal challenges but the samurai leaders were of almost super hero level and there were also lower level heroes as well as a ninja in each force, one of whose roles was potential assassination of other samurai lords! see here http://stracmark.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-japanese-invasion-of-korea-1592-93_30.html and here for AAR's http://1808534.blogspot.com/2024/06/sunday-game-japanese-invasion-of-korea.html
Some beautiful figures from the Perrys plus superb custom built scenery from our talented mate Mark (who also painted all the samurai)
Personal challenges are always fun, but can be risky. Thanks for the links will be reading through your post and Mark's. At first glance Mark's units look wonderful and are all beautifully based.
DeleteI really like this as an idea, and the way it costs 2 actions and won't benefit fresh units should stop it being used except in dire need. Have you thought about allowing the challenged unit to choose to ignore the challenge at the cost of an immediate hit as the followers lose some respect for their lord?
ReplyDeleteI decided to hold off considering the option to refuse until after a few games to see how it plays out. At the moment for a unit contemplating this (normally with a high number of hits) a loss in personal combat will most likely see them eliminated the following term. If it is over used, another option is to limit the option to initiate a personal challenge to units with more than 50 percent hits.
DeleteSounds like a good fun rule Peter. High risk and reward.
ReplyDeleteWhile it may get you some time to reorganise and remove some hits, there is a good chance (25%?) it will give you nothing and waste a turn.
The challenge rounds keep going until one or other loses. Then the action is over. Not clear in the segment of the rules I posted. So there is a good chance of removing a couple of hits.
DeleteAn elegant addition to the rules Peter.
ReplyDeleteThanks. It adds a bit of interest when used.
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