Hey Guys, Francisco here, ( one of the authors of CLASH of Spears ),

I thought it made sense to stop by and talk a bit about the game because since the day on which BoW, now OTT posted a little article about CLASH we’ve had a constant stream of visitors to the blog ( http://www.thewargamespot.com/category/clashofspears/ ) coming from OTT

Over the next days I’ll spend some time explaining general concepts of the game and answering any questions that you might have.

First things first, the need for patience. The rules won’t be out until Nov-Dec this years. We are a new outfit and there is tough competition out there, we need to come out with a quality product and we cannot rush it, no room for second chances in this field. We have been playtesting the rules since September 2018 not only with our local groups in Austin and Atlanta but we also have playtest groups as far as Spain, Poland, Australia… Given some new concepts we are including in the game we needed to see what works and what is a struggle for players and that is why the rules have gone through more than 20 versions as elements are streamlined and adjusted to get the right balance.

Next let’s talk abut the game concept.

CLASH of Spears aims to provide rules for raids and small raids in ancient and medieval times. The idea is to have kind of a platoon level game for ancients, and the rules try to reflect those mechanics so the scale could be one figure one man or one figure 5 or 6 men as long as a unit is never a phalanx syntagma, a maniple or any such formation since we will not have rules to reflect such formations. Of course we do observe training and we assume that hoplites on a skirmish action could close ranks to overlap their shields as they are use to do in combat, but many other times they’ll just go into open order if it is the best path to victory. A good example of this is Macedonian pike phalanx, we do have rules for foot companions with pikes, but normally on raiding actions foot companions would change armament to javelins or similar, so we give those options and although the points reflect the troops performance under optimal conditions it will be often the case that your small band of pikemen will be in suboptimal conditions in a skirmish and so except for modelling reasons you will select them with the alternative equipment.

The balance between “simulation” and game play is tough, and we have worked hard to achieve an interesting game that really feels like a historical game ( even if no game is perfect ) yet it is fun to play and intuitive to understand. If you think about bolt action, everyone would agree that bolt action has interesting mechanic and that it can provide for a challenging game, even if you are a chain of command  fan you’ll accept that bolt action is a well thought out system. Well we want something similar, not a beer a pretzels game, nothing wrong with that, but we want a game where players are constantly engaged in decision making and where these decisions have great impact on the results.

The key element in our game is fatigue management and command and control.

Command and control is based on the command points of your characters that are required to keep your troops executing the plan.

Units gain fatigue every time they perform actions depending on the amount or armor they carry and the terrain they cross. Because of this medium and light troops tend to be the rulers of the battlefield. It is not uncommon to have your one unit of veteran heavily armored hoplites as anchor for your force but without the support of your lights and mediums they will get tired and once they are exhausted troops like peltasts will take them apart, they will even engage them in hand to hand combat if they see that they are so tired that they cannot respond.

Because of this it is important not only to choose what unit to activate when it is your time to do so but also to decide if rather than activating a unit maybe it is better to rest one of them and help them recover.

We also wanted to provide a game in the scale of SAGA but we wanted to get back to wargaming basics, the battleboards are fun but not everyone’s cup of tea. For that reason CLASH goes back to basics, dice, tokens, command points.. no special decks of cards, no named characters, you can use any figures, individual basing is best but any base works and the rules are carefully thought so that basing will not impact the game.

A standard game of CLASH is 600 pts, it usually involves 30-40 figures per side and lasts about 2 hours. The army usually has about 5 to 6 units each of 6 to 8 models, and about 2 or 3 characters. Smaller games can be played and we have tried larger games going all the way to 80-90 figures per side.

The idea is that you should be able to come to a club with your army, select one of the pick up game scenarios and play a battle, just like you do with Bolt Action or SAGA. Of course if you’d rather do thematic scenarios based on stories or books and similar the rules will work quite well for that given how flexible the army design system is.

In the book we will have “army lists” for the western Mediterranean theater of war between 4th-1st century BC, so Italian Wars, Punic Wars, Greco Punic Wars, etc.  We will have lists for Iberian tribes, Gallic tribes, Italian tribes, Republican Romans, Carthaginians, Greek Colonies, Macedonian expeditions to the west. Together with the release of the book we will make available the full point and design system including traits for some other periods, so you will be able to use the rules with other troops you might have not covered in our lists. We will also release a compendium with playtest lists for armies going from biblicals to dark ages. All those rules are not final, they could change when an eventual expansion gets released but they will be available to download online as soon as the books is out.

I think that is a good initial overview, hopefully soon I can post battle reports, examples of game play sample armies etc.. and of course answer any questions.

I’ll try to keep it all in this thread so as not to spam the board.

OTT is such a gift to the wargaming community that we were very excited when they decided to pay some attention to our humble venture and we want to keep all of you guys informed of the progress we make.

Cheers

Francisco