In the little time I have devoted to the hobby, I've been dwelling on mass-battle fantasy rules. I know that skirmish games seem all the rage, but except to play with my son, I just don't really have a whole lot of interest in them. My focus in the area of fantasy is mass combat games.
I've been mulling over a number of fantasy rules sets, and in an earlier post, had a game of HOTT. My conclusion is that I'm an old-school gamer who has no problem rolling lots of dice, prefers units made up of a bunch of bases, and likes the granularity of different weapon and unit types. I cannot get into the abstraction. So many rules state in various ways that a general is not concerned with what type of armor or weapons his troops use...I get that, but it sort of takes away the color and flavor of fantasy gaming. I think the one thing these abstract rules have going for them is time. A game can be played a lot faster when things are more abstract than buckets of dice sorts of games....or will it? It seems there are as many pluses and minuses you have to consider in these rules and huge amount of focus needs to be paid on getting the units to line up perfectly.
To me, most more recent ancient/medieval/fantasy rules have their origins in DBA/HOTT. I can still remember the first game I played with a friend when I got the first edition of DBA (a long time ago when it first came out). We played a number of games and our feeling was..."meh." Since then, I've played either DBA or HOTT, but my feelings where the same. I think the level of abstraction found in DBA and other games like it would work very well in Age of Musket games. I will probably give these other rules a try if I have time, but I have a feeling that my views will stay the same.
If I have time, I will post a list of the ones I like and why.
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