Battles of Medieval Britain: Gnome Wars

     This week I have been helping the wife do some gardening. Spread throughout her gardens are garden gnomes. I like teasing her about them, as no one else in the surrounding neighborhoods have gnomes.  I jokingly call her "the neighborhood crazy gnome lady".  While working under the gaze of the gnomes, I was daydreaming of using different time periods or figures for Mike Lambos' different solitaire games. While trying to ignore the gnomes staring at me, I thought it might be fun to play a game using the Peter Pig gnomes.

The Garden Gnomes prepare to defend their garden against invading Wood Gnomes.

After some initial success, the Garden Gnomes was flanked on both sides and were wiped out.  Somehow I can't see gnomes actually killing each other; instead when they take a hit they run home to their gardens.

The inspiration for this wargame.

Battles of Medieval Britain: A Solitaire Wargame Dice Roll

      In my last post about these rules, I mentioned that each unit gets to roll a certain number of dice and can use as many of the dice rolls to activate that unit.  I have never used this in a game before. I really liked this system, although it can prove frustrating in a game. 

    In my first game there was a particular roll that showed how this system can be used. For dice rolls in this scenario if you roll a 1 the unit can form a Shieldwall. Roll a 2,3, or 4 and the unit can move. Roll a 5 or 6 and you can attack.  I will show one units' move below just to show how clever this system can be.

If one looks at the dice, reading from the top the unit can move, attack, then form Shieldwall. You can arrange the dice in any order you like. The swordsman to the left of the 2 is the unit moving. He has already used his movement dice to move next to the spearman in front of him ( I realized at this point that this would make a good example of how the dice system works).

At this point the unit used its' "attack" dice (the 6 dice), in which the attack failed.  As the enemy unit could attack at the end of the turn, the unit uses its' last dice (the 1dice) to form "Shieldwall". 

      In this particular game all units are "Warrior" units. To kill a unit, the base roll on two dice  is 8+ without any modifiers. However, by forming a shieldwall,  the unit adds +2 to its' defense.  The enemy  now must roll 10+ to eliminate my unit. The roll failed so he survived to continue the battle. It's a simple system that adds additional challenges to fighting solo wargames. I am looking forward to trying more of these games.