the Miniature World of Mike Peters: Ruckus Attack!

This weekend I took Ruckus to Attack at Devizes. The organisers had asked for games of a short duration of no more than an hour with a fast turnaround to engage as many players as possible and so my original idea was to set up a system whereby each player had a smaller than usual Retinue, a Spear really, of one Squire and four Retainers. Rob Squires has used Ruckus to run RPG using exactly this idea of one player one spear.

The plan then, was that there would be two sides York and Lancaster and as each Player was taken out of the game another would step in with a different Hero and play would continue uninterrupted. I envisaged a sort of “Shirts and Skins” style kind of thing, where play never stops. One player on each team would have a Captain as their Hero. I reckoned Ruckus could handle 8 Heroes activating each turn without slowing down too much

Get Orf Moi Laaaand was to be the scenario and I packed enough terrain to lay out a nice rural farmscape. I created and printed six pre-rolled Captain Profiles and twelve Squires, not only would this save time, it allowed me to flesh out the Characters with a bit of back history

I thought I could round up and prep prospective players while my lovely assistants ran the game. However…

Both of my comrades suffered from RL issues and could not make it, which was entirely right, it is family first ... always! And after all this is just a game. However, it meant I had to use plan B which was fine except I didn’t have a plan B…

Attack is a much bigger show than I expected. It is held at Devizes school, which considering the size of Devizes is HUGE! Apparently over a thousand people attended last year. There were traders everywhere…all the usual suspects…

I spent a happy half an hour chatting to Athens Miniatures John Caboshe and bought some of his exquisite figures. These are beautiful, detailed, well-proportioned, characterful sculpts that are ideal for Ruckus and as they come in bags of twelve would be perfect for Billhooks too!

Overall, I was very restrained. I spent about seventy quid for a haul of three Ospreys, four boxes of grass tufts and a few bags of various scatter and the Athenas

Anyway, I had no idea of how many folk would turn up to play or how to run the game so in the end I kind of made it up as I went along

Toby, Chris, and Steve played the first game. I sat in on Steve’s side. I gave up on the idea of a continuous game and settled for a compromise somewhere between a standard game and a smaller faster version, in fact I created a slower, longer version!

We each had a mini-Retinue of two Spears, one led by a Captain and one led by a Squire, with two bill men and four archers. Each Retinue also had a standard bearer- just for colour.

The game went well, it was a hard-fought affair that could have gone either way-a typical Ruckus! Everyone enjoyed themselves, which is always the objective and I received some positive comments, lots of praise and a well thought out positive criticism, that I am still ruminating on.

I made some new friends and I will definitely be taking Ruckus to Frome one Saturday, thanks Toby for the invite!

Pics from the first game

The second game was fun too and involved an extraordinary encounter! I have a good friend, Nick, who I have gamed with on line for about fifteen years, we share a very similar brand of humour and have always got on very well…to my surprise and great joy, he turned up and played Ruckus!

Nick and me! Wherever Nick goes he wears a small basketball net on his head....

We never mention it...

The first game went very well but with eight Hero cards was a bit drawn out and slower than the usual game of Ruckus so for the second game with six people playing each had a Captain and six Retainers. This worked well and the game moved along at its usual slick pace.

This game was also a nail biter with a Peasant Ambush to spice things up. I didn’t help my side at all by consistently rolling ones and twos!