Saturday, July 28, 2018

Boxer rebellion playtest

Bruce has been working on a new Boxer rebellion game, using Dragon Rampant as the basic engine and a NPC system from an old western game to operate the Boxers. The basic scenario is five colonial powers must hold off the hordes of Boxers trying to seize their embassies.


The rest of the details I'll leave off as it might spoil the fun for when Bruce brings this out to the club. Maybe needs one more playtest to make sure the play balance is right but I think it is close.


Lost of new terrain as Bruce has recreated the five besieged embassies. Also new figures for the most part.


We had pretty decent luck with the event cards not causing too many problems for us. I'd say that is unusual and problems should be expected! As it was, we had hordes of Boxers appearing. The Germans held many of them off (random entry).


There is also a supply mechanic that gives players the opportunity to interact with one another. Don't make fun of the German accent or you may find yourself short of ammunition!


We had some repeated bad luck trying to achieve an objective, getting caught twice outside the walls by the Chinese.


This lead to a subsequent shortage of manpower for the defenders.


There was also some damage to the fortifications that started to pile up. Fortunately, the Chinese entry points did not correspond to the damaged portions.


We also had some visitors!


By the end, things were getting a bit touch and go as we were running out of troops and had some late appearances by Boxers that were inconvenient.


Fortunately, we managed to run out the clock before the Boxers could capitalize upon the mounting casualties.


Overall, a pretty fun game and I enjoyed playing against the gaming system.

6 comments:

fireymonkeyboy said...

That's cool, both the idea and the execution. Can we get some info on the NPC activations? I can see a system like that coming in handy in other ways as well.

Bob Barnetson said...

So each turn, 3 event cards were flipped during the NPC phase. Most put units on the board at random locations with specified movement vectors (tracked with arrows). Other event cards affected player's supply or triggered NPC sapping attempts (e.g., wall destroyed, barricade moved back). Then players rolled 2d6 for each NPC unit on the board to determine what it did (dither, stand and fire, charge or double charge). Combat was resolved as needed. In this way, the NPC did reasonable things but with enough variation that they were hard to predict. Does that help?

Preacher by day said...

Looks great and sounds like lots of fun. Reminds me of an old Wargames Illustrated article.

Bob Barnetson said...

Thanks. I think Bruce got the original Idea for WI #27?

fireymonkeyboy said...

It does thanks. You guys cooked this up on your own?

Bob Barnetson said...

The was all Bruce--I'm just along for play testing. He saw an article in WI 27 about this. And then added in some of his ow ideas borrowed the Dragon's Rampant mechanics for combat and activation.