Test of Honour (some deeper thoughts)

This is a reaction to the package that had my Cavalry bases for my Test of Honour mounted troops, and the bonus i was sent by the fine people at Warlord Games.  I received the Geisha Spy, and the Unarmoured Samurai clampacks (along with my 12 cavalry bases, thanks Andy). I’ve looked at the stat cards for both figures (and i am really impressed with the idea of the Unarmoured Samurai being an upgrade card, with a figure) and this started my mind working along two parallel ideas that i thought were interesting.  If you’ll put up with the rambling path this is going to take, see if you can follow my logic tree

Upgrades/lateral shifts/Downgrades

The Unarmoured upgrade is a truly interesting piece of equipment for the game for three reasons.  First, it comes with its own model (which looks cool, even if i had to fix the sword blade).  Second, it’s a 0 cost upgrade which means it doesn’t take anything away from the rest of your warband.  Third, and i think the most interesting from a design standpoint, it gives an agility boost, with the downside of potentially taking more damage if you get hit.  

Imagine if you had an upgrade card named Heavily Armored, which reduced your agility by 1, but reduced the damage you take by 1 die?  How about an upgrade card for your Ashigaru that allowed them to use swords instead of spears?  There are a TON of options you can tinker with from a design standpoint with upgrade cards.

The idea that you can improve your people with upgrade cards (like the bow, or the unarmoured option) is established but how about a sprue of specific weapon options that came with 0 cost upgrade cards for each weapon that had the special effects printed on the card?  How about a 2 point upgrade that allowed your Samurai to carry a musket? The base recruitment cards give you a wonderful assortment of troops and basic stat lines, but how about a series of upgrades that modified the stat line.   

I could see a set of these to modify your base recruitment cards for both Samurai and Ashigaru that modify your stats up and down as determined by the cards you wanted to play.  With upgrade cards that modified the base abilities (+1 to 1, -1 to the other), you can tinker and customize your warband to do what you want, with the trade off that you are giving up something in one area of the game for a benefit to another.  

For an even more interesting idea, how about an upgrade that reduced one of your abilities for a recruitment cost reduction?  There are spaces in the mechanics of the game for you to take downgrades to your Samurai (and Ashigaru) for a reduction to their recruitment cost.  Now there are naturally some limits to this, and what makes sense to me is something like this:  A single recruitment card can have any number of upgrades so long as they don’t share the same keyword.  Keywords are Armor, Weapon, and Quality.  These upgrades can’t reduce a card’s recruitment value below 1, or less than half of its base value (rounding down.)  

In that design space, you can kit up your Samurai (and Ashigaru) with specific weapons, armor and qualities that keep the game’s design principle (modifiers apply to the number of dice rolled) first and foremost, without sacrificing the speed of the game or detracting from the historical setting the game is tied to.  

Other historical periods and areas

Graham Davey and Andy Hobday have put together a very neat skirmish rules set that feels very thematic for Feudal Japan.  With a very small amount of tinkering, this rules set could be extrapolated to other historical periods and regions.  These feel like easy changes, and the primary one is simply changing the name of the Honour Ability to Nerve.  Add in a few decorative changes to the symbols (keep the colors), and you have a rules set that covers historical skirmishes across the Pike and Shotte (and to an extent, the Hail Ceasar) periods that Warlord already makes minis for. You’d need to redo the recruitment cards for the region you’re working on, and reskin most of the skill and quest cards.  Other than that, you can use this rules set as it sits for things like:

• Knights and their bands of retainers duking it over honor and glory (and treasure)
• Vikings raiding along the coasts looking for glory (and treasure)
• Gauls defending their territories from Roman Incursions (and Treasure..wait that doesn’t work here)
• And a host of other historical eras and armies.

 

This also let’s you create interesting matchups between warbands that probably never encountered each other, but people are curious about the outcomes.  I would probably keep the Pike and Shotte era groups away from the Hail Ceasar era groups, but that’s more of a discussion for other, much smarter folks.  

Conclusions and other thoughts

Test of Honour is my favorite miniatures game of 2017, and i love everything about it.  The models are fun to put together, and i have a huge painting backlog to finish up before i get more games in.  The rules are so simple and straightforward that i learned to play the game in a half an hour at a Convention, and was so enraptured by the game i bought the starter set and a Samurai Warband on the spot.  One of my regular (ish) contributors was so happy with the game he wanted to play it again immediately.  I haven’t had that reaction to a game in a long time and that was the core of the selling point to me.

I know from the Facebook group that the designers are looking for some fan feedback about what we’d like to see for the game in the coming year, and these are some of the thoughts i’ve heard others express along the way.  Fast, Easy to learn and Fun to Play are the words that come to mind about Test of Honour and i greatly enjoy it for those reasons.  That’s our quick thoughts on these ideas, and we’ll likely have two more unboxing articles on the Geisha Spy and the Unarmoured Samurai for Friday.  Game On, Game Fans.