AAR- Bushido- Silvermoon Syndicate v. The Shadow Wind Clan
Last night I GM'd a game of Bushido for Tim and Christopher at GreenfireGames. Both players had read over the rules, but had not played a game before. We decided to play a straight match to the death to focus on learning the basic mechanics.
The field of battle was the new Bushido board I recently finished. I am really happy with the way it turned out.
Tim fielded 3 ninja warriors from the Shadow Wind Clan.
Christopher led this ragtag band of thugs and hookers from the Silvermoon Syndicate.
We also had some other factions observing the battle:
The Prefecture Of Ryu
The Ito Clan
The (mostly painted) Temple of Ro-Kan
What follows is not a blow by blow account of the battle, but a highlight reel:
Both groups proceeded slowly forward towards each other. Kerasu, the ninja, managed to get into base contact with Saki, the jade rose. He terrified her, then hit her with a very powerful combo attack that left her close to death. He finished the job during the next turn.
Senpu charged towards a ninja... he died.
The kitty contemplated life before also charging to his death.
Rin crept behind a giant bucket, hoping to catch Honoko off guard as she mourned the loss of her pet kitty.
Oda and Tautolu lumbered forward, hoping to show the ninjas who runs bartertown...
Honoko was too overcome with grief to survive Rin's assault.
Oda and Tautolu succumbed to a vicious combo attack by Kerasu. Perhaps they should have bartered for some more defense dice?
Clearly, the ninja's won the game. They felt very overpowered. I suspect they would feel a little more balanced in a scenario based game, but they are quite powerful. This game went very smoothly, and took around 90 minutes including breaks and an awful lot of rules discussion and chit-chat.
Tim's thoughts:
Bushido is a little more complicated than some other games we usually play. This might be a result of the ninja I was using. Each of them has almost double the special abilities as an average figure. They are also very strong in combat, making them somewhat difficult to play or play against, especially in a learning game. Despite that, I think we did pick up the basics of the game and were able to get a grasp of the special rules. The alternating activation mechanism also slows the game down a bit. Especially as we were figuring things out and chatting, the pause in action between each figure's move gave a lot of time where we were not playing the game. On the other hand, I enjoy the opposed rolls and dice pool mechanics. It is a really efficient way to give a lot of fluid action to a game and gives some really interesting places to come up with a tactic for the situation. The results of combat feed into the damage table, which is a little clunky. It would be difficult to have the individual characterization of each figure without some areas that slow the game down. I don't mind them, but when trying out a new game it is good to find where it slows down or works smoothly.
timlillig says:
Thanks for running the game, Josh. I’m painting some tengu for next time.
Eilif says:
I was sitting on the sidelines painting and watching the game. There’s alot of interesting things going on in the mechanics. Though it’s a bit more involved rules-wise that I prefer and not a genre that I’m interested in, it does seem like a game that would play reasonably smoothy and quickly once you had a few games under your belt. Certainly as easy or easier than most other popular games.
One interesting thing that was pointed out to me is that the buy-in for this game is rather low. The minis game rules and cards are free downloads so if someone bought the board-game and expansion they’d already have over 3 factions to play in the miniature wargame version. They would be plastic (possibly PVC?) minis rather than metal, but the boardgame versions I’ve seen have been quite good looking.