So I got this yesterday.

I got home from work, set the new resin 3d printer going (did I say I got a new resin 3d printer somewhere?) and settled down to read this book with a cup of tea – One Hour Skirmish Wargames.

I reckon it’s flipping awesome – and might just be the thing to get @warzan out of his hobby funk.

The no-dice, playing-card-based system is just genius. It adds the “granularity” of a two-dice system, but without the annoying bell-curve that weights all the results around the number seven, which then require +/- modifiers to give characters special skills.

I wanted to try out the rules. My wife reluctantly turned off the soaps and joined me. We both had a blast. The cards created a naturally balanced game: for every poor result (low card) you got, you knew you’d get a good result (high card) later on in the game. My only concern was that, as poker players we both had developed a “feel” for the deck: you just get an idea of whether a deck is “hot” (contains lots of high cards still to come) or not. You could even use very basic card counting to keep track of how many blacks and reds remain in your deck as you play (this is important when drawing “red is dead” for injury results).

So we came up with a house rule. Normally I’m not a fan – but this actually *enhanced* the game:

At the start of any turn, the player who has initiative can voluntarily give it to the opponent, in return for (their opponent) shuffling their deck. This means either player can give up their tactical advantage in the game, to try to improve their statistical odds, once the deck has “turned against them”.

Knowing just when to employ this made the game really fun: no longer were we playing against the mechanics of the rules (as might happen with a continous deck) – we were playing a wargame where the commanding character had to weigh up not just how, but when, to give their troops the best chance of success.

Has anyone else played these rules? Any other ideas for combatting us number-nerds who (whether deliberately or not) could otherwise reduce a game into little more than statistical analysis?