Rogue Planet, Mayhem and Havoc

Rotters!

I painted up these portly gents for a spot of Rogue Planet this week. A friend and I managed a couple of games on Tuesday night, first pitting his space marines and inquisitor against my motley alien pirates and then deploying my freshly painted rotters and some demons and beasts against the marines.

Not having played the game for at least a year, I was a little rusty on the Rogue Planet rules. We missed out a few things, including the option to take default action points and the penalties from multiple opponents in melee. And we were probably both a little hesitant in using counter-actions in the acting player's turn: interceptions, opportunity fire and so on. We did master the counter-charge, though, which resulted in plenty of collisions between monsters and machines.

Anyway, the evening whetted my appetite for more Rogue Planet. There's a great deal about the game that's fresh and liberating: unmeasured movement (as in Ganesha's terrific Battlesworn, another ruleset to which we periodically return); the freedom to build whatever units you wish to deploy; and the innovative use of miniatures, whether as "pawns" that represent a hero's abilities and endurance, or "groups" that allow the same stat line to be presented in radically different ways.

I can't think of any ruleset that matches Rogue Planet's ability to make you look at a collection of miniatures and dream up imaginative ways of deploying them on the table. The simplest way to do this is by designating them as pawns - hit points for a leader that also provide special abilities while they remain on the table. So, that huge alien beast could be an intimidator (reducing the opponent's command-and-control ability), that ferocious-looking mercenary could be a brute (enhancing the leader's combat ability) and that odd, striped vaguely dog-like thing could be a pet (allowing the leader to make instantaneous attacks on enemy forces anywhere on the table).

The game's also fast. This week's Rogue Planet session was a re-match after my first game of 40K since at least the early 90s. But we managed to get a couple of games in in far less time than the 40K game took, despite our lack of familiarity with the rules.

My son remembers the rules fondly - as a frenzy of charging lizardmen and dinosaurs, chiefly - so we'll aim to get in a game or two this weekend, if the good weather allows.

Other Bombshell games
Rogue Planet is one of several excellent wargames written by Brent Spivey of Bombshell games. The other two that we have are Mayhem (fantasy massed battles) and Havoc (fantasy skirmishes).

Mayhem is the one we've played the most. I have a couple of 10mm armies in progress for it, but we've generally played it with 28mm Hordes of the Things units doubled up. Mayhem units are squares, so two 60 x 30 HotT bases do the trick nicely. Like Rogue Planet, the game is innovative and quick to play.

The Achilles heel of both rulesets, however, is the build-your-own-unit aspect. I'm all for this in principle, as I dislike prescriptive rulesets that allow you to field only highly specific troop types (usually tied to a certain range of miniatures). My rule of thumb for any fantasy game is that it should allow you to field a goblin mounted on a giant lizard (or a dwarf on a giant bird, or a beastman on a giant beetle, or whatever ...). If not, then it's probably not for me. Both Mayhem and Rogue Planet certainly cater for goblin lizard riders.

The problem, though, is that it requires a little bit of work to stat up such units - and that there's little in the way of baselines to work with. That doesn't make the game itself any less satisfying - but it does require an hour or two's work to draw up two sets of rival forces.

This is a minor complaint, of course. And there are plenty of statted-up forces floating around on the net, as well as an app with Warmaster/Warhammer troop types rendered in Mayhem terms. But the absence of a sample lists does mean that we tend to play both Mayhem and Rogue Planet less often than they merit.

Here, I'd make a comparison with another excellent wargame, Ganesha Games' Song of Blades and Heroes. This is the skirmish game that got me back into all this malarkey when I bought it for my son's sixth birthday almost four years ago. We haven't looked back, and the RPG fires were swiftly rekindled. Song of Blades also allows you to stat up any model as you see fit, which is great. So goblins on lizards are no problem at all. But it does contain a handy list of non-prescriptive profiles. So you can look at the orc profile of Quality 4, Combat 3 and then make your particularly vicious and cunning-looking orc Quality 3 (lower is better) and Combat 4 (higher is better). And then you can layer on special rules as you see fit: Savage, Heavy Armour, etc. There's a handy warband generator on the Ganesha site, so you can have a printable roster sheet ready in a couple of minutes.

This "time to table" aspect is crucial in how often we play a given game. So I'm going to make an effort to preserve our Rogue Planet profiles so that they can be reused quickly - perhaps going to far as to print cards for each model or unit that we use. With the "time to table" problem solved, I think the game will get the playing time it deserves.

Havoc is the earliest Bombshell ruleset, I think, and the one we've played least. This isn't because it's a bad game; the one or two times we played it, we thought it very good. But the rulebook is thick and impenetrable. It could also do with a good proofread and edit. This isn't a problem with Mayhem or Rogue Planet; judging by the acknowledgements, Mrs Spivey deserves the credit here.

But Havoc does get round the "time to table" problem by having a list of preset profiles. You can still field a lizard with a goblin rider, but you'll use the profile for "rider" or whatever. And an orc with spear and shield will be identical, rules-wise, to a dwarf thus armed.

I don't mind that at all. It's a system that works very well in massed-battle games like Hordes of the Things, where a "warband" element might be large goblins or burly barbarians or excitable elves; the flavour of the army comes from the combination of the unit types rather than their individual powers. From memory, Havoc caters better slightly better to ancient and Renaissance-type profiles rather than high medieval; I don't think you can easily fit in a poleaxe-armed, plate-armoured man-at-arms of the Wars of the Roses sort, for example, as users of two-handed weapons are deemed to be lightly armoured like landsknechts or Dacian falx-wielders.

In essence, Havoc has what Mayhem and Rogue Planet need in its standard profiles. Mayhem and Rogue Planet have what Havoc needs, both in their brevity and clarity and (to a lesser extent) their ability to cater for any sort of profile.

Anyway, my experiences of playing both Mayhem and Rogue Planet have been sufficiently good to make the effort of force creation well worth it. If Bombshell were to produce a cleaned-up and stripped-down Havoc, I'd pounce on it like a half-starved polecat.