Second Thunder Launches Open Combat Skirmish Game
October 16, 2014 by brennon
Recently over on Gav Thorpe's blog he talked about a new game he has been helping a friend produce called Open Combat. The game is a quick and easy way of playing with pretty much any pre-gunpowder miniatures in your collection by Carl Brown of Second Thunder...
The game allows you to build any kind of warband you like from historical, to the mythological, to the fantastical and you can even play around with the statistics of your warriors to bend things to your liking.
A bit more information...
- Use any miniatures & terrain you have
- Only a small area required (24"x24")
- Suitable for pre-gunpowder historical periods and fantasy settings
- Customise the characteristics of your fighters, ‘stat’ them any way you like.
- Fast setup and play time (30-40mins)
...so it seems like this could well be one of the easiest ways to get yourself into some basic wargaming, allowing you to recreate scenarios and interesting moments when you feel like it in a reliable way. The creators are also looking for input from those that play the game through emailing [email protected].
There are already some ideas for expansions in the works that layer on a bit more complexity and it sounds like they have a good modular system in mind where you just bolt on what you need for a given skirmish.
Will you be checking this out?
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
Oooh yes, going to take a look at this. Sounds very interesting.
Been looking for a game like this, hope they do a magic system later on that would be grand.
I heard a bit about this in a podcast. It seems they’ve adopted a Blood bowl style “fumble rule”, where one failed dice roll kills your turn.
I’m sure they had a good reason to do this but it’s one of the most anti-fun rules I’ve come across. I say this as a Dreadball fan where a similar rule’s in place but it’s a specific type of failure that kills your turn, rather than *any* failure, which at least you can plan for.
Which lead to me deciding Blood Bowl was the world’s cruelest game (pushing football off the top spot).
I really like the mechanic though, basically it forced you into an ascending risk order of play and you had to really think about what you were doing. The flipside was when you were desperate you would have to reverse the order, which led to the occasional incredibly lucky sequences of play. To my mind it made it incredibly exciting. It will be interesting to see if this translates into a non-sport based game.
I do see your point. It’s just my memories are of being kicked in the nuts by this rule over and over again. Still the good thing about rules is they’re there to be tinkered with.
Indeed…;)
Sounds interesting. I enjoy “Songs of Blades and Heroes”, which is generic fantasy warband action, and pretty much easily adaptable to any milieu (tonight, as it happens, I am playing “Songs of Drums and Shakos” – a Napoleonic era skin of the game). This sounds similar in intent if even more generic!
Looks interesting, and available as a PDF.