Rules Review - Mark's Game Room's CANDID Take on Osprey's Men of Bronze

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Күн бұрын

Mark, Matt and Austin give you their Pros and Cons about Osprey's wargame rules for ancient Greek hoplite warfare titled Men of Bronze! The rules include historical scenarios for large battles and claim to be scale agnostic...so we used them for both the Battle of Thermopylae on Little Wars TV and for the Battle of Marathon on our channel. We played them for several other historical battles and ran into some issues making them work. This review is based on those experiences.
If you use them for large skirmish games with single based figures you might have a better experience that we did.
You can find an FAQ for the rules here:
bloodandspectacles.blogspot.c...
00:00 Intro
00:34 Scale Agnostic?
02:25 Sequence of Play
06:34 Combat Resolution
09:50 Presentation
11:58 Movement
15:44 Fun Factor
17:20 Bonus Round
18:33 Recommend or not?

Пікірлер: 23

@AS-gn7mb 8 ай бұрын

I have played ‘Wars of the Republic’ which is Eric’s ‘follow on’ set of rules about a dozen times. They feel like a version 2 set with a number of improvements and refinements over ‘Men of Bronze’. My friend and I are working through many of the battles from the Punic Wars with 28mm figures in multi figure bases and we feel it delivers a fun game with enough depth for players to work through strategy without being too bogged down by complex movement and combat mechanisms. Good video btw.

@AndrewSmith-fd3fi 8 ай бұрын

Your comments are similar to other reviews of the two games I've read, MoB nice ideas but..., WoR is more doing what the rules are supposed to do.

@ericfarrington366 8 ай бұрын

Ouch! 😭 Well, I would be happy to chat about my thinking behind the game. It sounds like you guys know where you can find me if you are interested.

@MarksGameRoom 8 ай бұрын

Hi Eric! We would welcome a chance to chat with you about your development of Men of Bronze in a response video. If you are not local to us we can do it via Zoom. Send us an email and we can set something up. markwargameroom@gmail.com

@ericfarrington366 8 ай бұрын

@@MarksGameRoom Comms sent. Thanks for the opportunity!

@MarksGameRoom 8 ай бұрын

@@ericfarrington366 Nothing came through! I sent you an email directly.

@M_Holien 8 ай бұрын

A pretty fair and balanced review, nothing in this video that I would be worried about. Perhaps take up the author on his offer of a chat if you have time?

@davidschneider5462 8 ай бұрын

Thanks for the video. I generally like Rules Reviews, even as in this case it's not for a period I play. After watching your reviews and Little Wars reviews, the one thing I would like to see if you recommend a rules set is what things would you change to make it a better game. What are your "house rules".

@MarksGameRoom 8 ай бұрын

Great idea Dave! We can do that in future reviews. For Men of Bronze we simply stopped using the support rules.

@davidschneider5462 8 ай бұрын

@@MarksGameRoom Thanks for the response. I'm looking forward to more of your videos.

@andyshaw5378 8 ай бұрын

Great review, what ancients rule set do you like for unit sized battles

@MarksGameRoom 8 ай бұрын

We tend to use Age of Hannibal. We're aiming to do an Ancients Rules Round Up video soon.

@kevinweadick698 8 ай бұрын

A ancient skirmish game I could recommend is Mortal Gods by footsore miniatures. Would love to hear your thoughts on that if you ever got round to reviewing it

@MourningConstitution 7 ай бұрын

Thanks!

@Stumptonian1 8 ай бұрын

15:56 "Apposed" ?? 😉 I appreciate your honest evaluations. I see the author has commented so it would be interesting to hear a followup.

@zachjones2443 8 ай бұрын

What minis did you guys use at the start for the filming

@Carl-MGR 8 ай бұрын

6mm Baccus figures, and 28mm foundry figures!

@tablesaltgames 4 ай бұрын

Scale agnostic doesn’t mean based individually or movement trays. It means use any scale. The game seems to be designed to be played with models individually based at any model scale you want.

@andrewshaw3703 8 ай бұрын

Has any kind individual taken up the task of re-writing the rules so that they are easy to follow? What ruleset would you recommend?

@oblomovbruce9979 8 ай бұрын

Anything that tries to model pike, or units that rely on mass and shock, are difficult to impossible to model well in Skirmish scale. The Renaissance is particularly challenging for this type of ruleset too. Long stabby things in a group of 5 -10 people are not that effective, or more importantly for a game, evocative. "Jason and the Argonauts" or "The Adventures of Sinbad" (stop motion films) even Troy themes may have been a better title and work-around for these rules. Alexander lightened up his hypaspists and ditched the pike on raids/expeditions and armed the soldiers more like peltasts/hill infantry, this would work for this ruleset -Chaeronea or Cannae not so much.

@kingscarbine 8 ай бұрын

Best rules are HOPLOMACHIA by The Perfect Captain.

@PMMagro 8 ай бұрын

Sounds like Greek heroic style a few men/units of few men whould work fine. Espcially with the "action points".

@panthros7395 8 ай бұрын

This is a problem with much of Ospreys rules. It is clear they have not been play tested enough. I need more than the developer to play test their game. Of course there were gems, Lion Rampant and others but you would think Osprey would care more about their brand.