Another nasty Saxon! After trying many sets of Ancient skirmish rules over the past twenty years, I am currently developing my own set, in which I have hijacked all those bits from other people’s rules that I like. We call the rules ‘Hoc et Bellum’, which sounds terribly pretentious, but is a lot better than ‘Skirmish Rules March 2009’ which is the file name for the rules on my laptop. My boys particularly like the ‘Spectacular Death Table’, which I adapted from a rule set written by the Wrexham Wargames chaps. Wounded characters are removed from the table top to a ‘Wounded Warrior Tracker’, where they get a percentage chance to return to the game in a later turn. This was designed to remove the need for record keeping and in our early trial games seemed to work quite well. Obviously, the idea is an abstraction, but is justified by the warrior crawling away to lick his wounds to possibly return to the fray later on: unless, of course, the warrior’s opponent decides to move in for the kill!
