I had my first game of A Clash of Rhyfles–I lost miserably and I’m very happy I did. Let’s jump in.

We chose a scenario with actual objectives–this doesn’t feel like a ruleset you should play by just killing each other. The scenario was Take and Hold, where we deployed on opposite corners and fought over two objective markers. We both tried to approach cautiously while taking shots where we could. This worked well for my opponent, who was playing Coftyrans: a proper military force with trained soldiers in its employ.

It didn’t work as well for my stupid butt playing Tollyn Maeryn: a bunch of militia heavily dependent on leaders to make them work well. In short, I should have… uh… used my leaders at all.

The game itself flowed well and aside from a few lookups we ran pretty smoothly. I have not reviewed the rules in nearly a month and only skimmed them beforehand, so we likely got a few things wrong and found ourselves having to check things like “Does Overwatch end?” and “Do you generate more pluck if you used pluck to reroll a roll that resulted in an Out of Action?” All reasonable questions to be looking up, given neither of us had recently read the rules.

The charts proved fine–by the mid point of the second turn we were flowing quite well without needing to reference them very often. I produced a rough QRS and need to make a nicer one, but you can reliably fit all of the necessary information for an infantry game on a single front and back sheet.

Overall, I think I could readily teach this to my son–but I’m not convinced he’d play it very well. We should have used more smoke. We should have both used our leaders better–for me that was utterly vital and definitely lost me the match. You roll 3D6 to shoot. His soldiers succeed on a 12 with modifiers whereas mine succeed on a 10 with modifiers. That’s a huge difference on a 3D6 curve and it showed. If in range of a leader, however, my militia go up to skill 11 and while that doesn’t sound like much, I can count at least two more Out of Actions I would have inflicted, which could have made a huge difference in the match.

The other thing I noticed was that the game is not very lethal. A hit knocks a unit Out of Action, but you can check on them with anyone to see if they’re okay. We had most of our Out of Action Quar get right back up and back into the fray! It actually became an interesting point of tension: do I spend an action to get that man back up, or do I reposition and fire back at the enemy?

We managed to exercise all of the base rules in this match and nothing was truly confusing. I walk away quite reasonably impressed and eager to play two more matches this very week. I have had a positive impression of these rules since I read them and this game has not changed that. I’m as-yet unsure of how much I want to add tractors but I feel that after a few games I wouldn’t find it too burdensome.

Color me impressed, at least at the outset. I’ll report back after the additional games and see if that opinion holds through.