Ravenfeast: Back to the Boats!

 

Although we recently hosted a game of Ravenfeast to bid farewell to our friend Zeb Cook, a mere week later we were staging another Viking and Saxon battle to welcome a newcomer to Scrum Hall, Joey McGuire.

Like Zeb, Joey is also a veteran GM at Scrum Con where he has run the game he created, This Is Not a Test. His convention games rank near or at the top in terms of the level of crafting on display, and his players at Scrum Con have always let us organizers know what a grand time they had playing at his table.  

And also like Zeb, we bumped into Joey at last November's Historicon, and realized that we had never gotten a game in together despite living in fairly close vicinity to each other. When he overheard Steve Braun and I mention we were going to get a game of Ravenfeast on the table soon, Joey expressed interest in joining in the fun. 

I had a strong intuition that Joey would fit right in with the Scrum Club gang, and I was glad my instincts proved reliable. Joey is easy going, smart, and fun to game with, and not surprisingly, he brought some beautifully painted miniatures to put on the table for his warband of Saxons. He even hung around for our usual lengthy post mortem in which we typically discuss what works and doesn't in a rule set and what sort of house rules we'd adopt next time to get the kind of game out of the experience we desire. Being a designer, all of this sort of discussion was right in Joey's wheelhouse.

I'm looking forward to having Joey back over to play some more games with us, and hopefully do some playtesting of his next set of miniatures rules he's working on. We have even already discussed playing a Gaslands game together in which he'd lead us through his crafting seminar for kit bashing together some post-apocalyptic vehicles from old Hot Wheels cars.

RAVENFEAST

This week we opted for our own variation on a "Get Back to the Long Ship" style scenario. It was good fun, though more of the rules' shortcomings and ambiguities started to show through, particularly around the shield wall maneuver. Simply put, once two groups lock into combat with facing shield walls, combat can turn into a slow, tedious grind after a couple of rounds. We're going to look at ways to mitigate that, perhaps by increasing the number of figures required to form a shield wall from just three up to four or five. Or we might reduce the benefits of the shield wall from a +2 armor bonus to just +1. In the end we called the game early because so many figures were stuck grinding out shield wall combats that a lot of the energy drained out of the game.

I think we also need to play around with building our own troop profiles just to give more variety to the units, especially when it comes to movement rates. This would open up some more tactical options that the pre-built units lack as it stands. We also can easily think of about a half dozen additional  unit Traits to add to the game; the trick is to make refinements and adjustments to the base game while preserving its chief virtue--simplicity.

Six of us attended this game: Steve B., Rich M., Peter M., Walt O., Joey McGuire, and your humble chronicler. Half of us played Vikings racing to get back to their two long ships waiting near the shore, while the other three of us (including me) played Saxon warbands trying to intercept and block their escape. To save on prep time, we each claimed one of the warbands we had used in last week's eight-player game.

Note on photos: The below photos are not a recreation of the unfolding action in the game but rather a smattering of shots at various points to provide a flavor of the proceedings. Most of these photos were taken by my wife, Ellen, but a few were taken by others in attendance. Always assume I shot the worst photos below. (Click any photos to enlarge.)

The battlegroup before figures were placed. It was fun getting this custom battle mat back on the table.

I had recently painted a number of farm animals for our games, and this was the first time we put them on the table. They provided some additional visual interest and opportunities for humor (a couple of the cows followed after Steve's Vikings for about half the game).

(left-right): Peter in helmet and Rich

Pretty sure I don't want to paint 1/57th scale chickens again any time soon.

Your host and Saxon overlord, Joe

Peter and Joey McGuire

Walt (right) and Joey (left) in a face off.

This Bondi failed his morale check and is trying to flee the battle.

Steve about to roll the dice.

The ol' horny bastard himself.

Closing Thoughts and Parting Shots

I think Steve and I will need to type up an addendum of new and modified rules before we get this on the table again. We've definitely generated enough ideas to warrant it.

Nonetheless, I think there were two flaws the we have to own ourselves in this particular session: one was table set up, and the other just poor strategy. I'll take the blame for the former. I wanted to put a lot of terrain on the table. I was over-enthusiastic in this regard because we had a lot of cool terrain at our disposal from three different collections. And because the Saxons had the more powerful archers, I thought more terrain would give the Vikings more cover. It turns out that the Vikings felt like the terrain, particularly the big clump of woods, forced them into a couple of paths that "funneled" them on the way to the beach and boats. 

That's certainly how it worked out in this particular game, but I would argue that that was as much a tactical mistake on the part of the Viking players. The forces were too evenly matched for the Vikings to have much hope of simply punching through the Saxons, but the Vikings still insisted on forming up in shield walls and marching right into the Saxon's own shield walls. If I had been a Viking player, I would have run my warband in a loose group to suggest I planned to form a shield wall, inviting the Saxons to be ready to engage us in the same formation. At the last moment, however, I would have scattered my Vikings in as many different directions as possible, including through that big clump of woods. That would have provided some cover from the Saxon archers, but better yet, it would have forced the Saxons to break formation and either try to rush back around the woods to intercept us on the other side (not easy) or enter the woods to try to catch up and engage us one on one. This strategy would have almost certainly ensured some Vikings would make it through to the beach and awaiting boats (which would then have been a good time to form a defensive shield wall). Frankly, I was a bit surprised the Vikings insisted on pushing along the "obvious" paths where we Saxons clearly had them blocked.

That said, it's not as if the Saxon players didn't make some mistakes. We had a couple of mounted troops that should have been ranging all over the back field harassing the Vikings, picking off stragglers, and breaking up their shield wall formations with fast attacks from the rear. But overall the Saxons played a successful defense because the Vikings played such a traditional, straight-ahead offense.

In the end, I don't care too much about these things, but this was one of those rare games where I could actually see and execute some strategic choices in a game, and recognize where and when the other team was making choices that weren't helping them achieve their objectives. 

Maybe I'm finally getting the hang of this wargaming thing after all.

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