Cabinette Wars

Lost in the Woods...

                     ...The Breaking of the Fellowship

[Pre-Cabinette Archives c.2018]

I couldn’t resist the Games Workshop figures based on the Lord of the Rings films but not wanting to buy, or paint, large armies I needed a smaller game that would only need a few figures.  I also wanted everyone to be a ‘goodie’ as the ‘baddies’ are harder to identify with and tend to rely on numbers rather than heroics to win.  

Ideally, something like Pony Wars (by Ian Beck) but with players controlling a couple of characters rather troops of cavalry and a structure that forced players to split up to make them more vulnerable to roving bands of orcs, etc.  I settled on a game set around the breaking of the Fellowship where the remaining eight characters (no Gandalf) are scattered in the woods trying to find Frodo after he has fled Boromir’s attempt to seize the Ring.  

The next problem was how to handle ‘hidden movement’ in the woods to stop players knowing the whereabouts of each other and the enemy.  Somewhere, and I can’t recall where, I read about a hidden movement system where the terrain is gridded but laid out on the table in a random fashion, i.e. the grid on the wargame table is not contiguous and when leaving one square the unit appears in another elsewhere on the table.  The umpire uses a master map of the grid, as it is really laid out, to tell players leaving one square which square they enter next.  

Explaining is easier with pictures.  The following figure shows the grid as seen by the players, numbered consecutively and with the points of the compass all aligned the same way.  The second view shows the grid as it appears on the umpire’s map of 'reality' (I’ve shown a 3x3 grid for simplicity but I use a 5x5 grid in the game).

Thus, when a player moves off a tile (or square), he tells the umpire “Leaving the east side of tile two” to which the umpire replies, “You enter the south side of tile six” and the player’s figures are placed at that location.  A player trying to leave the edge of the map (highlighted in red), e.g. “Leaving the south side of tile one” would be told “That way is impassable”.   

The position of the tiles on the umpire’s map is randomised for each game and I made a series of cardboard tiles that slot snugly into a cardboard frame to do this.  Nowadays I’d use magnetic tiles and steel paper.  Assembling the map like this is quicker and easier than drawing it out each time and avoids accidental duplication of numbered tiles (yes, I did do it once!). 

Now with the players having to cope with so much geo-spatial uncertainty I wanted a REALLY SIMPLE movement and combat system to keep the game moving.  For this I use playing cards, each player having a number of cards each turn they can use for movement or combat (unused cards are retained with players being dealt cards each turn to bring them back up to a total of 6 cards).  If a player is dealt a Joker at this stage a random event is diced for.  

To move, costs one card to advance a player’s figure(s) one spot on a tile – there is no measurement required.  Figures can be either at the centre or the centre of the edge of a tile as per the figure below (arrows represent a single card’s worth of movement).   

The above diagram is a single tile, the broken lines just delineate the 5 spaces that figures can occupy and move between.  Precise position on the tile is not important so long as it is clear which of the five spaces they are in i.e., the centre or one of the sides.  A player can spend up to three cards on movement (or two if moving Hobbits).  This means players cannot move far enough to both enter and leave a tile in the same turn (other than by doubling back).  I put trees in the unused corners of the tiles as all this is supposed to be happening in a forest.  Players attempting to cross an impassable tile edge still expend a card but stay where they are.   

Hobbits, until ‘convinced’ by other members of the Fellowship, and the enemy move 2 spaces at random.  Such figures will however move faster directly towards/away from others they are seeking to avoid or attack if they are on the same tile.  The roving Uruk Hai and Orcs will leave the table if they capture any Hobbits being moved towards their designated exit points by the umpire.

Combat, when it occurs, also uses cards, red suits to attack and black to defend.  For combat the score matters so players will expend low ranking cards for movement retaining higher ones for combat.  Player characters can make as many attacks as the player has red cards or at least one per figure.  If the attack card beats the enemy’s defence card, then a wound is inflicted; one wound is enough to kill most baddies but the Fellowship are made of sterner stuff.  The enemy figures which don’t have any cards in hand draw at random from a deck (ignoring the colour). Player characters can decide which card to play from their hand after seeing the enemy’s draw.  Player characters draw from the same deck as the enemy if the player has no cards of the appropriate colour in his hand.  Shooting is treated the same, with different modifiers, except figures only have to be on the same tiles as opposed to on the same spot for close combat.  Enemy figures will all make one attack if in position to do so.

The game sequence followed for all this is:
1. Deal cards to bring players up to 6 each (test for random event on Jokers).
2. Random movement (Hobbits, Uruks, Goblins, Gollum and Nazgûl).
3. Enemy movement if not random.
4. Fellowship movement.
5. Fellowship attacks (& Boromir’s horn).
6. Enemy Attacks.

So, putting all this together with some extra rules to drive the scenario along and a few special abilities for some characters I ran a game with my friends and surprisingly it worked a treat first time.  By sheer chance I seem to have got the balance just about right and unlike so many of my rule sets this one has hardly been tweaked at all.