As I write games for a living, you may imagine that I play all the time. Well I do some weeks, but aside from work games I seldom play as much as I’d like. This week, however, I’m doing pretty well with 3 (non-work) games in as many days. Tuesday was supposed to be Infinity, but ended up with me taking the Japanese navy out against the Antarctican fleet in Dystopian Wars instead. Wednesday I’ll tell you about tomorrow (it’s the subject of a long review), and this morning I played a game of 2mm Napoleonic. And no, that’s not a typo, I really do mean 2mm 🙂
Tiny scales like 2mm are great for the grand sweep of a battlefield, and can look far more credible as a pair of armies clashing than larger scales as you can have dozens of blocks of troops fighting. Naturally, they rather suffer in the detail front, and you will have trouble counting the buttons or checking to see if the medal ribbons and cuff turnbacks are correctly painted. Incidentally, that’s why they’re also very quick to paint. I used to play a lot of 6mm games, but haven’t for some time. These days my eyesight is so poor that I’ve sort of graduated to 10mm instead. However, when Bob offered to bring along his 2mm armies for a bash I thought it would be fun to try. We used a free set of rules he found on the net, and while we agreed they’d need some changes to play lots, they were a fun enough game, and a grand spectacle. All on a 2×2 foot space too.
The Dystopian Wars battle was interesting because it was the first time the Antarctic fleet had been on the table at the club (and only my second game too). Broken? Rubbish? Well it’s early days to comment, and I’m not sufficiently versed in the fine points of the system to really analyse it properly, but the initial assessment was that they were very good. We couldn’t see what their major weak points were, though their strong points were clear enough. There’s always an issue with new armies as people haven’t fought against them and don’t know how to take them apart. Usually this wears off after a month or two, and things return to normal. The slightly concerning thing about this lot of new kids on the block is that a look at their stats seems to show them being around the same as other fleets, but with extra wibbly rules on top to help them out. For the same points. Flexible too, which is another benefit that should be pointed in (though this is admittedly very hard to do). Note that I am not saying that they’re broken, merely that I’d love for someone to tell me how all the shiny toys they get balance out so they’re worth about the same as my fleet. And no, I didn’t lose either. Paul had to get back, so we called it a draw with less than half of each fleet left afloat and honours roughly even.
