Slitherine

Hi all,

we are enthusiast fog players and want to test quicker formats that allows for arranging one-day tournaments. This with other rule set (like Flames Of War) has given a great impulse to the promotion of the hobby (at least here in italy were wargames is a rather marginal hobby) so we expect to attract some more people to the ancients (eg students or dads that cannot "sustain" a two day torunament for economic reasons or lack of time).

looking around in the forum (which imho is rather fdifficult to search) we see that the most popular format (beyond the "classical" 800pts/6"x4"/3-3.5 hours game) is 600-650 pts + smaller table + 2.5 hours game -1 terrain choice. Could you please report about your experience ?

thanks a lot
Daniele and others from Bologna (Bononia, Italiae)

I have now run three tournaments using the 650 points on a 5 foot by 3 foot (1.5m by 0.9m) table with reduced terrain and they have I feel all worked very well.

The majority of games have completed with one army broken, foot and mounted seem to have a fair chance and the players seem to have enjoyed themselves.

Getting 3 games in a day is IMO much better than just a 2 game tournament.

The results are in the hall of honour on the FoG website under UK Games Expo and Game 08

You could simply use 600 points which would allow starter armies to be used as in the book and they would work just as well.

Hammy, post any special rules you used as well. Didn't you restrict terrain size and choices??

philqw78 wrote:Hammy, post any special rules you used as well. Didn't you restrict terrain size and choices??

The only rule change I used was to reduce the terrain choices to 2 or 3 per player rather than 2 to 4.

There is no need to restrict terrain sizes as the first time someone trys to place a huge piece of terrain and rolls a 5 or 6 will discover

thanks hammy,

i think that 600-650 pts and 1 less terrain choice makes really sense. The same for reducing table width by 1". What i do not understand is reducing table depth to 3". This makes armies to deploy 12 MU closer each other and changes quite radically the use of certain troops. For example i think LH reduces very much its usability due to the reduced possibility of evading.
Why not keeping table depth normal i.e playing on a 5"x4" (or even in a 4"x4") table ? In this way game mechanics is not altered: simply having less troops you have to cover a less wide front...

The reason for reducing the table depth is to make things get started more quickly and give a better chance of a result in 2 and a 1/2 hours. I tried a few games on 4 foot deep tables with 600 and 650 point armies and the extra depth just makes the game take longer and I really wanted a format where 3 games in a day was not to stressfull.

You don't have to deploy the full distance in, deployment is upto 10 and upto 15 MU.