Creeping Onwards

Although progress is slow, work continues on the new Celtos rules. Another round of playtesting between Sidhe and Fomorian armies took place at the weekend. To replicate a typical home dining-room-table setup, we used six warbands per side on a 4×4 foot board, using Stephen Tucker’s excellent home-made terrain. Rather annoyingly from a personal point of view, and despite a change of dice from d6 to d10, my miserable dice-rolling continued from last weekend, condemning the Fomorians to two heavy defeats.

Those who have been following the development saga will notice that since the last session we’ve ditched the round unit bases. Nice as these were, and they did make it easy to move warbands, they created a whole set of problems of their own, mostly concerning moving units into gaps between other units and the occupation of terrain features. Doing away with them has solved a swathe of rules issues at a stroke, so we’re back to a more fluid feel with individually based figures in free formation (although unit cohesion rules mean that figures must always remain in base-to-base contact with another figure in their own warband).

Less obvious from the photos is a change to the activation sequence, using numbered counters instead of drawing cards (the counters are just visible in some of the pictures). We tweaked a few other bits and pieces, including the allocation of hits between heroes and other warriors but, encouragingly, nothing else major. The two games we played were between Fomorians and Sidhe, because those are the two furthest developed army lists. So the next tasks are to work on the army lists for the Vanir, Gael and Fir Bolg and playtest those armies against each other.