As many of you know, we've been looking for a good system to base our Clan Strife mod upon. We have been working for about two years and have several working systems, but we never actually carried out the plan to fruition. Something about the published rulesets hindered the design process as we cleaved to various conventions that made those rulesets unique. For most of that development time, there were no games based in the Sengoku-Jidai that had enough production value for us to consider. By the end of 2013, several games were released into the game-o-sphere that were the answer to our prayers.
In the end, we chose Ronin, by Craig Woodfield and published by Osprey Publishing. This is a small skirmish game that focuses on about a dozen models or so. This ruleset not only addresses most of the basic Japanese-flavored rules you'l need, but also has a unique and interesting mechanic to set it apart from other games. We have had the basic book for a while now and have been making modifications for Clan Strife, so today we'll talk about the rules themselves.
First of all, this book is small. Weighing in at 64 pages, it's smaller than most publications you'll pick up unless they are small dungeon modules. However, it packs a lot of bang for it's small size.
The production level is high, with awesome paintings by Wayne Reynolds, courtesy of Osprey's sizable library of historical military books. There aren't a lot of glaring errors, and the text is easy to read and not muddled with a lot of background (the paintings do that well enough). Besides, there's always plenty of stuff to read about medieval Japan.
The rules themselves are very easy to grasp. Functionally, it's very similar in many ways to The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game, which was one of the rulesets we had intended to modify for Clan Strife. There's a priority step, followed by Move, Combat, Action and End phases. All that's pretty self explanatory, as they are pretty standard wargames fare. The Action phase is used for stuff like cutting off heads, and you can shoot in both the Move and Action phases. However, the real gem of the system is the combat system.
The game uses counters, drawn in secret, to form Attack and Defense pools. Each model gets a certain Combat Pool, and must decide how many points from his pool he will allocate to attack or defense. Each player reveals their counters at the same time, and then the counters are spent during the ensuing combat. For instance, for each Attack Counter, you can make an attack. Defense counters help your warrior avoid damage. It's an interesting mechanic that adds a certain flavor to the proceedings that really puts you into the cut and thrust of swinging katanas and chopping off necks.
Also included are various lists for factions. Almost everything conceivable has been covered, and it has drastically reduced the amount of overhead material needed for Clan Strife. Rules for ashigaru, samurai, ninja, sohei and even Koreans and Ming Chinese have been covered, including many weapons and special abilities your soldiers can select. All in all, the tome is small but very complete.
Osprey has been offering some very interesting alternatives for wargamers. Ronin is the first one we've picked up, largely because it was relevant for our ongoing project. It retails for $17.95 USD, and even if samurai hack and slash isn't your thing, they probably have something that is. Check out their webstore for more cool stuff, and get your Clan Strife buntai ready!