Been a gamer and a hobbyist since I was a wee lad. Can't remember a time in my life when it hasn't been present one way or another.
The Silver Bayonet
November 23, 2021
If you are familiar with Frostgrave, Stargrave, or Rangers of Shadowdeep this game will be familiar territory to you.
The premise is that during the Napoleonic wars undead and other magical creatures have appeared on the fringes of the various battles. You are charged with creating a small band to go and hunt down these things find clues to defeat the harvestmen.
The Harvestmen are alluded to in the flavor text but there really is not a huge amount about them yet. I have a feeling going forward that you will probably be seeing and hearing more about them as a developed this game system.
Of course, Northstar miniatures has a line for this game system. But you can also pick up one of the many different Napoleonic kits. Currently the choices that you have of different forces are Austrians, British, Prussians, French, Spanish, or Russians. Each different force has a few different things that they can do differently than others, so you are not just having everybody be pulling out of the same soldier pool. For instance, the Austrians have access to 1/2 vampire half human hybrid. And if you really want to have that hybrid in your British Army you can do it but you just must pay extra for it.
The book itself is an impressive publication it comes as a hardback at about 160 pages. One thing I thought was odd about this book was the lack of miniatures pictures in there (Although there was a small advertisement with some at the end of the book).
The format of the book is like other Joseph McCulloch books where are you have the introduction, unit creation, rules, campaign rules, scenarios, and bestiary. There are also rules in the book for solo play along with a solo play campaign.
The game is played in phases. For a two-player game you would have the initiative phase, then you have the primary player phase where the primary player activates around half of his units, then the monster phase, then the secondary player takes their turn where they activate all their units, after that the primary player activates the balance of their units. once you have done all that then you start it again.
The actions each of the players take consists generally of two actions for turn most of the time it will have one of the actions being move and the other one being something else Like shooting investigating or reloading. Most of the rolls you are making are against another players stat. For instance, when you are shooting you take your dice roll add any modifiers and you need to beat the targets defense.
Another interesting thing about this game is something they call the fate pool. This consists of dice that are kept aside and each player get their own fate pool a standard fate pool would have something like two power dice, two skill dice and one monster dice. You can use these days to do various things during the game such as rerolls or negate damage. For the most part once you use those fate dice, they are gone for the rest of the game however there are a couple different ways you can get them back but those are few and far between.
According to the rulebook usually the game will end one of two ways either you will meet the objective or if one player has no figures left on the table. From the way the rule book is written, it sounds like the former is more common than the latter.
As I said earlier Northstar miniatures has a line of figures for this game that should be hitting retail anytime now. I believe you can order them from them directly. At this moment I have a set of Spanish figures that I preordered from my FLGS (Game Kastle Santa Clara).
While I am waiting on those, I found some figures that kind of had the same feel. They are from a game called Flintloque. I decided that I would do these up as Austrians additionally there were a few there that would work as Revenants. Here is what they look like right now as I am writing this:
Like a lot of the skirmish games that count recently, I find myself attracted to them and get to the point where I put together a band or two and then stumble at finding players. Hopefully when people get a little bit more confident about going out again will start playing some of this stuff.
Posted by Jeff Hiatt. Posted In : Miniatures
