As you surely know I got my hands on a previw copy of the new Osprey wargame Dux Bellorum by Daniel (Dan) Mersey.
The rules are up for official release at Monday the 20th of august and I thought I would share my first impressions of the game with you, especially as I now had the opportunety to try them out properly for the first time. AAR in a day or so:)
The Basics, Dux bellorum are a set of wargaming rules focusing on Arthurian Wargaming 367-793 AD.
The book in it self are 64 pages, full colour and sprinkled with greate pictures in the Clasical Osprey format. I must admit that I like the format very much, you get a full game that is easy to carry around and you don´t have to await for THAT army list to be released. It´s all in one book, splendid.
The text in the book have a clearly layout, are well writen(at least for me that not have english as my first language), and with several diagram that shows different gaming situations and rules explanations.
The rules was easy writen and easy to learn, but as with all new rules it will take some games to get all the detail right. Dan have been quite inovative in he´s rule writing and come up with some greate mechanism, like the leadership points and a twist to the turn sequence, that will take some time to get use to.
So far my only concern have been that there are quite much markes on the gaming table, one sort for the Leadership Points and one to keep track of the units lost Cohesion.
As the focus are on the Arthurian era there are a limited selection of army list, Late Roman, Romano-British, Welsh, Saxon, Irish, Pictish and two different Raider lists, that actually are variations of the other six lists.
Even though a limited number of lists I feel that there are plenty of room to customise the different armies, to try different tactics and options of how to game them. Dan have included about 20 different "Strategies and tactics" to add extra flavour to the army lists, some of them more or less historical.
So to the big question are Dux Bellorum worth the money?
Ofcourse yes! especialy if you are in to Arthurian wargaming, but they will work fine for the "Viking" era to as they are realy generic in troop clasification. So for less than £12 you will get a stunning book with easy and still inovative rules for dark age wargaming. I think these rules will be perfect for pick-up games at the gaming club.
6 hours ago
Hi, and thanks for the review!
ReplyDeletei got my copy yesterday, that i pre-ordered in April. I read the entire book in an hour or so, and the game looks like it will be pretty straight forward to play, but with enough depth to be quite challenging.
I for one am very impressed with the book, everything you need is in it, if i had the armies, id be able to just set up and play i think.
Michael, im looking forward to your AAR, and im searching the web for Arthurian era 15mm figures :)
Cheers
Steve
Might the http://www.splinteredlightminis.com/15daagehi.html be of interest?
DeleteBest regards Michael
How do you compare the two "Dux" recently published?
ReplyDeleteHard one...I´ll get back to that in a week or so...
DeleteBest regards Michael
Thanks for this - very interesting indeed. I am tossing up between these rules and SAGA for my later Dark Ages gaming - how would you compare the two?
ReplyDeleteHard one to Paul. I will try to make some sort of comparisson between SAGA and the two ducks in a week or so.
DeleteBest regards Michael
Thanks for the write up! I'll add a link from my blog.
ReplyDeleteFor those people asking how the game compares to other recent releases, I'd say they're all pretty different really, and a like for like comparison is hard. But I'll let other (less biased) gamers comment on the relative merits.
Dux Bellorum doesn't cost a huge amount of money (currently around £9 on Amazon in the UK), so I think everyone should give it a go :-)
My pleasure:) I think you done a greate job.
DeleteBest regards Michael
Thank you a lot for the rewiev. I am very interested in this rulebook, this is one of my favourite periods (Cornwell´s books are a great culprit!!!) and I am expecting your AAR.
ReplyDeleteCheers.
Thanks Juan !
DeleteBest regards Michael