Here's the Ruckus in Osgiliath

For the March session we played a game of Here's the Ruckus. I bought a copy of the rules last year, read through them, and decided that they were a little bit too finicky for me, and set it aside. Fast forward to this year, when I bought and played Midgard, and then decided that I wanted to play with my other LOTR figures, but I didn't have quite enough for a game of Midgard... So I picked up Ruckus again, and re-read them. This time round, I manage to get the game, and very soon I wrote a scenario for our first game.

The scenario is set in Middle Earth, and based on the movie version of the story, when Faramir brought Frodo, Sam, and Gollum to Osgiliath. In our scenario, the party was attacked by orcs, and while the men of Gondor were able to drive the orcs off, the three hobbits manage to slip away in the chaos of battle, and hid themselves in the ruins. Rallying his men, Faramir set after them, even as another party of orcs closed in on the same quarries.

The hobbits start off as hidden counters on the middle of the table, while the two sides come on from the edges and must move a character onto the counter to reveal who was found there. The side that finds Frodo and leaves the table with him wins the game. I placed the four counters on the second level of the ruined buildings, thus forcing both sides to have to make Climb moves to reach them.

Both sides made a cautious move towards the centre of the board, moving from cover to cover, until at last the leaders of both sides met in the centre in a mighty fight.

It was the orcs who found Frodo, and immediately they started moving him towards their exit edge. Having sent a section of their troops to secure their own exit edge, the men of Gondor found themselves in the wrong place to stop this.

Boromir would not have failed...

As usual I didn't get all the rules right, but we had a lot of fun. The rules themselves are pretty standard for skirmish games, but the rules for Gambit Movement: Sprinting, Leaping, Climbing, Crossing River, etc. add an element of unpredictability that skirmish games at this scale require. That also means that scenario design is important.

I am excited enough about the rules to want to build a custom terrain piece for a game featuring my Rohirrim force. Stay tuned.