I've added new content on my "The Craft" page. This time a picture tutorial on how I made two of the buildings used in our recent game of Ronin.

AMAKAZU RAIDERS APPROACH, SENSEI!

Since my childhood I have been fascinated by Japanese culture and history, so it was natural once I got into miniature wargaming that I would build forces and acquire rules to play out various eras from that country’s history. After trying out a number of different rule-sets I (and the club) have settled on Peter Pig’s Battles in the Age of War rules for our big feudal-era Japan battles, but we had yet to find a set of rules we liked for smaller skirmish encounters. And let me say, we tried a lot (and I read through a lot that I didn’t even deem worth trying on the table). It got to the point where I started drafting my own set. I wanted my rules to reflect the strategy of individual sword combat, so assigned each combatant a number of dice to roll based on skill level and allowed their controlling players to divide them between offensive dice and defensive dice. The early bones of the system worked well but I just didn’t have time to polish all the other stuff to go with it.

So last month, there I was at Historicon and, lo and behold, the Osprey folks had a short stack of the yet-to-be released (at the time) Ronin rules for sale. I thumbed through a copy and what did I find? A combat system where each player had a combat pool of chits or counters they could assign defensively or offensively in each combat, and how many chits they received depended on skill ranking. Needless to say, I bought a copy and couldn’t wait to try them out. On a recent club night some of the guys and I put Ronin through its paces, so after I tell you about the rules themselves, I’ll tell you about how they actually worked. Finally, I’ll give you my thoughts.

(Note: This is an unsolicited review and I received nothing in return for posting it from anyone)