World War II with Legends

So,

Last weekend Drunkensamurai and I got together over at his place to play some WWII in 28mm. We have both been in the mood to bust out our collections of stuff and play some games, but there is one problem, what rules to use?

Drunken & I have been on a quest for finding a good set of WWII rules for 28mm for years now. We have tried many rules but there was always something that was not just right with them. Heck we even collaborated on writing a set of rules using 40K 5th edition to pitch to Warhammer Historical which they choose not to pursue. (Hmm sound familiar for Flames of War???) Anyhow the rules we worked on (Called Hammer & Anvil) work rather well, but Drunken wanted a rule set that was commercially sold to the public.

Basically we did not want to be "those Old Guys" playing with their own rules, you know who I am talking about, we have all seen them in our local game stores. The have their huge 3 ring binders with poorly hand written rules that only they can explain.

So the search goes on for a good set of WWII rules. Now the other day Drunken calls me and states he has an idea, since we both love playing Lord of the Rings from Games Workshop, why don't we use the Legends (the LotR rule set for Old West and my High Seas game) for WWII? Well it could work I thought as long as we thought out a few things (like vehicles!).

So with us coming up with a few simple conversions and stats for guns, we busted out the collections and some terrain and went for it.

We each took about 45 models, Drunken using his British Commandos and me taking a German force. Here are the basic stats we came up for the troops (using the LotR/Legends stat line).

F3/5+, S 3, D 3, A 3, W 1, C 3, M 0/F 0/W 0

We also came up with some basic weapon stats:
Kar 98 24"range, Strength 3, Half Move Penalty, RoF 1
SLR 24" range, Strength 3, Half Move Penalty, RoF 1, May Reroll Miss's
LMG 30" range, Strength 3, Half Move Penalty, RoF 3, Cause Terror
HMG 36" range, Strength 4, Full Movement Penalty, RoF 6, Cause Terror

The game played rather well and we only had a few issues come up, like how to deal with weapon teams and such (Can you target the gunner of a HMG and stop it from shooting that turn?) but other wise it worked very well.

We set the objective as the Crossroads in the center of the table which was a modified King of the hill scenario from the Legions of Middle earth scenario for LotR. So basically you had to have more troops within a few inches of the crossroads in order to win.

Anyway we called it a Draw since Drunken had more Commandos moving towards the crossroads than I had Germans left. All in all it was a great game. As you may notice there was a large amount of terrain on the table and for the first half of the game we used the standard In the Way rules from LotR. Meaning that if your shot passed over any sort of obstacle that you had to make a separate roll of 4+ to clear the obstacle and your shot would go on to the next obstacle or target. If you rolled 3 or less than your shot hit the obstacle.

The second half of the game (we broke for lunch) we tried the modified In the Way rules from the Legends rules that assign a different value to the obstacle, from a bush being a 3+ to a brick wall being 5+. This seemed to work better than the LotR In the Way rules and we saw more troops being taken out of action and seemed to have a better feel for the game.

All in all it was a good game and we are now both thinking about how to incorporate armoured vehicles into the rules. This can be easy or tough depending on how we approach tanks and we are still kicking some ideas around. So stay tuned for more thoughts and ideas of using the Legend rules for WWII.



One last thing I will leave you with today, while scrolling through my usual Blogs and websites, I found a new Blog dealing with some awesome Flames of War Terrain, called TheTerrainguys I was totally blown away by this site and this guys You Tube channel, finally someone doing awesome terrain for war gaming that reviles model railroad terrain. Here is a shot of his terrain from his blog.
This is the sort of stuff that really makes a game come alive! Needless to say I wasted about 2 hours this morning watching his videos and going through his blog. If you have a weakness for nice looking games, than don't look at this stuff, it will blow your mind away! Like a bad train wreck, I keep going back for inspiration, so be warned!

TK