Quar-Tastic

This past weekend the most excellent Stew of the blog A Terrible Loss of Lead and Wealth had me round for a game of This Quar's War: Clash of Ryfles with the Quar he has been painting. 

Quar, for those of you who do not know, are belligerent little round anteaters with pseudo-Welsh names, and sort of diesel punk/Interwar level technology, who have been warring amongst themselves for hundreds of years. They are the new hotness in some circles, despite being out for years in metal, because there is a new boxed set of plastic figures, dice, rules, etc. all in one ready to go package. 

Ok, so on to the game. Clash of Ryfles (hence forth CoR in this post)is a skirmish level game, where roughly a platoon of figures fight on a small board to accomplish various scenario goals. Play alternates between sides, with some friction entering into it because you have a mystery number of activations 3-5 determined by a secret card draw.  Some actions take more than one activation, so no grand charges, and reacting to what your opponent does can be tricky.  Each figure activates individually, but officers can spend two activation to drag others around with them. 

For far more information about the game rules, here is Stew's post.

Stew had the board laid when I arrived, and was using his AWI/Civil war terrain for this skirmish.  Clearly this is a previously untouched battle field! I chose to play the Croftyran royalists, rather than the perfidious Crusaders. The objective was to have fewer of your Quar die, and to have more units across the midline.  Looking at the board as set, I decided to take the side with the barn and move to the side with the stone walls.  In retrospect, this was a mistake, as the paucity of activations means that moving in groups is difficult, and the barn blocked a number of my figures from supporting the rest on the other side.  Hopping all those fences cost me precious movement inches too.  It did look pretty though. 

My idea was to split my 15 guys into roughly three groups and advance two of them, while the LMG and the sniper formed a firebase. However, the inability to move as a group (I had misread the officer's ability to mean 5 quar at 2 inches, and not 2 quar at 5 inches) and a few bad reactions at the outset meant that only one group was very successful in their advance, and the LMG got wiped out early. 

Near the start of the game with my sergeant dragging a few ryflers with him over the fence. To the left are a light machine gun and sniper with a few ordinary ryflers.  On the other side of the barn are my officer and a few more ordinary ryflers. 

Later in the game, where my lieutenant guards a rail fence, and two ryflers take cover by a stone well.  When a light machine gun shoots at you, supported by more rifles, a fence is hardly enough cover. 

The only close combat we got up to had my poor officer bayoneted to death while he crouched by a fence, and then the ryfler to the bottom left of the picture avenged his officer by shooting the crusader in the head.  Again, this was a mistake on my part, as the officer was much better suited to charging into combat than waiting to get killed. He should have gathered up some supporters and gotten stuck in.

As always, I got rather more occupied playing the game than with taking pictures.  Stew has a ton more to explain the rules, and show in a very patient manner how he won, which he did (although not by as much as it appeared near the end as I had a run of luck shooting his quar)

So would I play CoR again?  Yes!  While it was not the most intuitive, it did produce a good game, and I suspect the full rule set smooths out some of the issues that we had in play.  The main factor of course was lovely miniatures, on great terrain, and with Stew as the host pretty much anything would be fun.  Would I buy quar figures?  Probably also yes, as they are fun without all the baggage of "real" 20th century conflicts.  And there are two more plastic armies and tanks coming out this year...