I think I mentioned Age of Tyrants a while back – a forthcoming 6mm scale battle game set in the Urban War universe and designed by a friend of mine: Mark Brendan. Well Mark popped over this week to run through the game with me in its current beta format, and we did a good bit of tinkering to help it along 🙂

Here’s Mark explaining rules and suchlike, and looking very dapper in the process. His excuse is that the sun was in his eyes…

Personally, I think it’s a great picture of the designer at work 🙂

Anyway, as you might imagine, playing something that doesn’t exist requires a bit more imagination than usual. Our paper battlefield represents a desert world of the Junkers, with the sandy brown shapes being dunes, the light grey blocks being built-up areas, and the black a series of jumbled boulder fields. A bit like Mars, with added porta-kabins.

We’re deployed along the back edge as my table wasn’t quite 4 foot deep. This preserved the correct starting distance between armies.

The game has a relatively low model count for the scale as everything sits on a 5cm base – in our case, card squares with the unit names on. The finished game will have figures or vehicles on each base. In the sort of mixed companies we were using that means 17 bases, so potentially only 17 models (obviously if some bases are foot troops then some of these vehicle models will be replaced by a strip or two of infantry.

I have seen a couple of finished models in person, and they’re pretty chunky for this scale. Nice detail too. But we’ll come to that in a few weeks when we’re closer to the Kickstarter…

The games we played involved much fiddling with rules, so I won’t go into detail there. The battle I can describe briefly though. I’ve taken this from my side of the table, as my Viridians debuss from their transports in the face of Mark’s rapidly advancing Junkers. Junkers are better close in, so he’s looking to shorten the range. I just want my guns on the line ASAP. Don’t know what I was thinking, sticking my men in their carriers.

On my left, the trio behind the dunes at the back are artillery pieces, blatting away merrily with the help of their spotter friend on top of the dunes themselves. He does seem to have taken a bit of a beating though. A third of those blood red suppression counters and he’s a goner.

Later in the game and things are getting messy up close.

Increasing numbers of suppression markers are breaking up formations and messing up the command/control, which is a central part of Age of Tyrants. As you can see from the note pad, we’re generating plenty of tweaks.

AoT is a fun little game, and I rather look forward to seeing the finished toys en masse. I’ve played a lot of Urban War in my time, so the background is very familiar, and it’s nice to see it branching out into a new scale of battle.