Buntai for Ronin battles

I had generally bought Japanese miniatures that I liked without a lot of thought for the constraints of the Buntai army lists in the Ronin rulebook.  Fortunately, I've been able to form five different Buntai following the rules for the different types.  They all have roughly 180 points and the same number of Combat Points, but are different sizes and comprise different troop types.

The first is a small, tough Bushi - five armoured Samuari plus a hired Ronin and Ninja.

The next two are nine-strong Bushi with 2 Samurai, 3 Ashigaru with yumi (bow) and 2 with teppo (gun), a banner bearer and a hired Ninja.

They differ in the armour of their leader as well as different Attributes of the key characters.

Next up is a group of 7 Sohei warrior monks.

Lastly, a group of ten rebellious Ikko-Ikki - a Samurai leading 7 Monto plus a hired Ronin and Ninja.

Samurai and Elephants

 Andy and I had a Ronin skirmish game at the beginning of the week.

A simple scenario with two Buntai staging an exhibition fight for the Hatamoto.

James took a Samurai onto the bridge over the koi pond for a dramatic Kurasawa-style duel...

...which Andy declined, instead ganging up on the rest of James' Samurai with the advantage of an extra man.  A short and bloody battle ensued, and James could never recover from the initial loss.

We learned a few things: 

• Andy doesn't care for the code of honour that all Samurai follow ;-) 
• Once you're a man down, you need extraordinary lucky dice rolls to turn it around
• Especially when the figures all have the same stats

So the key thing for next time is to create Buntai with more variety in their Combat Points, adding ranged weapons, and to explore the addition of Ronin skills.  I've recently discovered a Facebook group for the Ronin ruleset so I hope to get a flavour of how others are putting their Buntai together for next time.

We also had a swift game of DBA - James as Alexander vs Andy's Indians.

There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing to start with but the tide turned when I did a sequence of attacks not realising that the drifting apart wing of Andy's mounted troops were supposed to be still aligned.  This resulted in a loss from outflanking, which Andy punched through and turned onto the side of the pikes, with inevitably deathly consequences for Alexander's army.

Monastery attack - 17 September 2019

Six samurai controlled by James attacked a monastery defended by 4 monks and 4 hired fighters, controlled by Andy and David.

The monks' fighters were drawn from the newly painted groups of bowmen and aquebusiers:

These started to inflict some damage on the samurai rushing the front steps, although the heavy armour proved pretty impervious to arrows.

The least bloody samurai then mounted the steps and engaged the monks.

Except one who nipped around the back...

There was a lot of bloodshed on the top of the steps and the lone samurai survived his engagement with three fighters until the end of the battle.

At the end of the ten game turns, all of the monks were dead and so James claimed a victory.  But as a couple of hired fighters were still limping along in defence of the monastery, David & Andy claimed a victory too.  Only the GM and blogger knows the true result...

Love Island - 28 November 2018

At long last, the scenery I bought two years ago at Reading made it to the games table yesterday evening.

Coupled with a shrine on a small island connected by a bridge, the table was set for a clash between two rival buntai factions of six figures each.

Andy and Stuart's samurai arrived by a couple of newly-painted watari bune (river ferries) acquired from Oshiro Model Terrain. 

David and James' samurai prepared for action.

The buntai were quickly engaged.

First blood to David and James.

I introduced a climbing rule for the figures to clamber up and down the terrain - failure was rolling 1 on a D6.  Stuart's comedy character failed this a couple of times, ending up lying stunned and wounded at the bottom of a small cliff.

The Ronin rules and their use of attack and defence combat tokens went down very well.  Inevitably, a lot of the critical wounds were the result of attacker and defender getting extreme rolls, but there were combats that took several rounds where figures were stunned or lightly wounded, and continued the fight.  We thought though that we would modify the climbing rule to slow armoured characters and allow unarmoured figures to continue into combat.

Eventually, just two of David's and one of James' figures were the last men standing - bloodied but victorious.

Shrine Skirmish - 30 May 2018

A couple more games with the Ronin ruleset, this time a large group of Samurai attacking a shrine defended by Sohei monks.

In the first game, Andy was the attacker and James the defender.

The attackers were deployed in waves but Andy had rolled a 6 to determine how many game turns he had to achieve the objective of taking the shrine (D6+6) so realised he had plenty of time to get all his figures on the table, and then swamp the poor monks.

James held back at the top of the steps hoping to funnel the attackers into a smaller group to help balance out the numbers (the attacking faction had twice as many points as the defending one - pretty much twice as many figures, and mostly stronger ones).

We missed something in the rules that allowed Andy to pile in on the monks and defeat them pretty swiftly.  We moved each players figures alternately, but it should be alternate figures on each side, which removes the opportunity to have all the figures pinned straight away.

Andy also sent a few figures around the side and back so that he could desecrate the holy shrine in various locations.

It was a bloodbath.  The Sohei were all slaughtered for no Samurai losses - just a couple of wounds.  Andy got 24 Victory Points (6 x 3VP for killing Sohei plus 6VP for the shrine) to James' zero.

We set up again in the evening when Adrian joined us.  Andy and Adrian took a share each of the attackers and James was again the Sohei.  With the correction to the rule, this time James brought out the monks to fight, but also drawing back out of range in order to prolong the game (the attack was to last only 10 turns this time).

The Sohei were also equipped with a couple of bows this time to try and even up the firepower.  We quickly realised this was a waste of time against armoured Samurai although it did have some effect on the unarmoured figures.

The Sohei fought better this time, killing a couple of Samurai.  Half of the six Sohei were killed in the 10 turns but the shrine remained disputed.  However, the attackers still won on points: 9 VP for Andy and Adrian, 6 VP for James.

This is a good ruleset with an interesting combat mechanism but I think the factions need to be designed carefully to ensure they are balanced.  For each rank of character (1 to 5) they get a corresponding number of tokens to use in each combat - so a rank 3 character can defend against a rank 1 character and then get two free attacks in.  So higher ranked characters seem much more powerful for not an excessive amount of extra points cost.

Anyway, a couple of great games - and fantastic to finally start getting my Japan figures and scenery on to the table!

Ronin Skirmish Scenario - 14 February 2018

At long last, almost three years since I visited Japan and started developing this project, I finally got round to testing the Ronin rules with Andy.

Ronin is a short set of rules produced by Osprey.  The rulebook also contains lots of information for different Buntai (groups) and a set of scenarios.  It has the standard Initiative - Move - Combat sequence but has two important characteristics that make it different from the Warhammer skirmish games we play (Legends of the Old West, and Legends of the High Seas).

The first characteristic is that instead of a player moving all their figures before the other player, the players move one figure each alternately, so you feel more like you are playing with a set of individuals than a group.  The second characteristic is how hand-to-hand combat works.

Ronin uses a (as far as I know) unique system of combat counters.  Each figure has a rank of 1 to 5 with a corresponding number of combat counters (black and white Go counters).  During combat, characters use black counters to attack, white to defend, and further black counters to enhance initiative and attack roles.  Players select a different set of counters for each combat so there is a need to think what your opponent might do and then what risks to take with whether to enhance your rolls or not.  We had a quick one-on-one fight to test this (which pleasingly was won by the first figure I finished painting) and found it was much simpler to play than it is to describe!

Then the first proper game - a standard skirmish on a two feet square board with a bamboo grove and a couple of buildings.

We had three Samurai figures each.  I made up stats cards for each character.

The three Buntai started on opposite corners of the playing area...

...but were quickly facing up to each other...

...and then getting stuck in:

Blood was spilt and James' Buntai was victorious - earning 9 Victory Points for killing Andy's three Rank 3 Samurai.

We then tried another skirmish with a larger Buntai and some additional random minor objectives (e.g. kill the Leader, kill 75% of the enemy).  Each Buntai had a Rank 4 Samurai, two Rank 3 Samurai, two Ikko Ikki and a Ninja as a "sword for hire".

Starting from opposite edges of the playing area, the figures again quickly closed up...

...and then got stuck in:

This time Andy wiped out James' Buntai, losing half his figures the process, and so winning 18 Victory Points to 9.

It was great to finally play with these figures and a relief to find the rules are good to play.  Given the focus on individual figures rather than groups, Ronin will easily work with more players without the need to create complicated multi-Buntai scenarios.