DOG WARS - EVOLUTION

 

From This

And This

There was This 

And This

Before there was the Dog Wars, a fictional Seven Years War era series of games, there was Alternative Armies Slaughterloo, or Sloo for short, a Napoleonic period game. With a mind to getting these veteran figures on the table again I have switched rules from Sloo to Buck Surdu's Wars of Eagles and Empires. These are a quite different style of game from both Sloo and Honours of War/Post of Honor rules used in the Seven Years War games. The two key features are the Double Random Activation and the Army specific Reaction Table. The Activation system gives a limited amount of control as to when your troops can act during a turn. The second is that every combat action causes a reaction from the other involved players troops. By this I mean that if you fire on an opponent they could immediately fire back. That would cause the original unit to react and so on back and forth until one side retires or just stops. This means that in a turn a lot of combat can take place. The initiative system is really a two-turn affair as both sides units will activate twice before a new initiative phase begins. Ultimately this produces a very fluid game turn as you are never sure how much combat will take place, what that combat will be like, such as a long fire fight, or a single volley that brings on a close combat. This system effectively simulates higher command where you send your troops out to accomplish a general goal, but how they respond to that is mostly out of your control. For me this is a great level of command friction, where you can plan an action with a certain level of expectation on how your forces will go about accomplishing it, but not able to micromanage that outcome. 

While my Napoleonic forces are not as large as the Dog Wars, there are still a lot of them. Games will normally see about 2-3 Brigades per side, with a healthy mix of Infantry and cavalry Brigades possible. Unlike Dog Wars there are not just dogs. My forces include rabbits, rats, humans...kind of, but still lots and lots of dogs. 

I will post more details and eye candy as I work up to the first games sometime in April. 

 

A Close Up of the Infantry and Cavalry.

A Rather Aged Lord Barksalot. Best Showing of the True Colors of the Mat.