(Gnome Wars) Battle of Yellowstone Playtest

Sunday afternoon, Nichols came up and we playtested my "Battle of Yellowstone" game for Fall-in! I've realized that the scenario could easily be an all day event, like a mega board game that could go on and on. However, with simple reference sheets for each unit and a ref to keep things going, three hours will be a nice change of pace for the average HMGS con game.

Given the dense terrain, the limited units versus a normal Gnome Wars game, and the vast quantity of animals (yes, animals) we may have oversimplified firing, movement, and morale, but this will allow players with failed units to quickly jump back in and players can even play "solo" if they're not in the thick of things.

I do need to buy more sheep.

After two hours, we decided to wrap up the playtest and move from the garage to the dining room table to relearn Legions of Steel. As I've mentioned before,the guy who sold me the boxed set on eBay threw in Space Marines and SW Robots to make up for the missing UNE and Machine minis. Today's game reaffirms my belief that anything space marine related sucks. Since I had experience with the leadership Nichols system, albeit 12 years removed, I took over the UNE forces and let Nichols get comfortable with the Machines. He opened up with an aggressive defense of their facility that bordered on suicidal, but poor deployment, mediocre tactics, lousy die rolls, and criminal misuse of leadership created a slaughter of my forces.

Deploying the figures wrong cause bottlenecks and misue of Forcewall grenades, throwing off my tactics. I did manage to destroy half of my objective, but I panicked when I should have secured the area, regrouped, and systematically worked my way up the board.

So, at least I can cross off one thing on my yearly bucket list. LOS has been played, huzzah!