Upgrading A Classic: A First Look At The Technology Of Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Eurogamer

Upgrading a classic: a first look at the technology of Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Ween : The Prophecy - WON! (No More Strawberries)

Written by Alfred n the Fettuc

At last, I have vanquished Ween! It took me long enough, not because it's a particularly long game but especially because I have had a few extremely busy months, and very little time to play or write about it. I apologize for my fellow readers (and to the ones who were playing along and have probably finished the game by last October). But we are closing in on KRAAL and the REVUSS! Last time we stopped, we were entering the heart of the Volcano and been greeted by a menacing gargoyle resembling a Ghostbusters demon dog.

Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!

Let's look at this new room. A drawbridge blocking my path with some letters above it, a bowl (that I take) and five alcoves, one lit and four dark. In the lit hideaway, I find a lever. If I pull it, a stone rises from the ground. Pulling it again makes the stone get back in the ground and some of the letters light up. In the statue itself, a greyish spot attracts my attention. Clicking on it brings me a close-up of an ornament stuck into the stone skin of the statue. Not one to use violence to solve my problems, I turn my cauldron into a sword and hit the statue. It works and the ornament is freed from its stone grasp.

Yeah, we'll ask KRAAL to send us the bill.

Picking up the jewel tells me it's missing a piece, so it didn't really solve anything. I realise that I can use the sword again to make the hole in the statue bigger so I hit it three times and the hole reveals a ruby. And we know what to do with rubies, don't we? I turn my sword back into a cauldron and mix a Luciferys potion. I light the ruby up because the place is probably not hot enough already with the lava river. The ruby consumes itself and reveals… another jewel. This one seems intact however. It's shaped as an insect of sorts. Not knowing what to do with my insect jewels, I search the dark hideaways. Three of them don't do anything but the fourth hides a weird looking monster.

Yes. With teeth.

Trying to use the jewel on the monster doesn't work and clicking around doesn't seem to reveal a lot. It's time to ask old man PETROY for some clues. When asked about the letters, PETROY tells me to "never lose sight of your enemy". Asking him about the different hideaways, he tells me numbers, one to five. More interesting, asking him about the jewel tells me that "the sculpture is so good that the animal seems real". Facepalm moment! Of course, a stone sculpture of an animal may as well be a real animal turned to stone. I make some Vitalys potion and use it on the jewel. It works! And now I have… errr… some kind of little firefly thingy flying around. Yay. Considering it's flying around the letters, I try my bow to shoot it and realise I can actually shoot arrows at the letters!

Yes, I'm confident enough about my archery abilities to try and shoot a firefly 50 feet away.

As PETROY has told me not to lose sight of my enemy, I shoot the letters KRAAL in order but nothing happens. I guess I have to light all the letters before trying again, so I have to find a way to light up these hideaways. Pixel-hunting the whole place, I find a hotspot hidden in the lower-left corner of the screen labeled "crack". Clicking on it tells me that I can hear a bubbling noise behind it. I turn the cauldron back into the sword (grr again) and smash the crack. Some lava starts flowing out of it. More interestingly, the firefly stops flapping around and lands near the lava, allowing me to catch it!

No fireflies were harmed in the making of this game.

I try using the firefly in one of the dark hideaways and the little wretch flies away. However, I think I'm on the right track because in the close up it looks remarkably like the light in the lit alcove. I have to find a way to make the little bugger stay. I try to mix another Vitalys potion but it doesn't work in reverse. I spend quite a lot of time trying different things to no avail. After that, I go back to the monster in the fifth alcove and bug it several more times until it vomits something onto me! Turns out it's glue... I get some with the help of the bowl, trying very hard not to think about the way this game looks quite centered about different types of monster vomits.

Yeah because the first thing you want to do when a monster vomits on you is keep a sample. (Maybe it's another Ghostbusters reference?)

Putting the glue on the firefly (because putting the firefly on the glue doesn't work for some reason), I can make it stick! I go to the first hideaway on the right and glue the little bugger into it. It reveals another lever and another piece of broken jewel. I put glue on the part of broken jewel and stick it to the other part. I now have to turn back my sword into a cauldron, make another Vitalys potion and turn the jewel back into a firefly. Then I have to turn the cauldron into a sword in order to hit the crack (because the lava seals it back every time) and catch the firefly. Considering I'll probably have to do it four times, it's gonna be a long screen.

I think I have seen this animation a million times now.

I also try to pull the lever in the alcove that was labelled as "one" by PETROY. This time, the rock lifts and the letters light up simultaneously. I'm guessing that the number is the number of times you have to pull the lever for the letter to light up, but maybe I have to make all the stones rise at the same time? We'll see about that once we have lit all the alcoves.

Too bad the bad guy isn't called LEVATT or VATELT...

Putting my new firefly in the third alcove, I reveal another lever and another jewel falls from the ceiling. Sigh. At least I can verify my theory by pulling the lever three times and lighting up more letters. Now I turn back the sword into the cauldron and bla bla bla until I have another firefly-with-glue-on-it to light up another alcove. In order to break the monotony, I light up the fifth alcove instead of the fourth one (ain't we crazy?), which is the alcove where the vomiting monster was hiding.

The fabulous invisible vomiting monster!

No monster here but another lever (which I pull 4 times to make the letters ORT appear) and a twig. The monster statue is holding a vial of sorts with which I tried several things before but wasn't able to achieve anything with it. But the twig is the perfect item to try again. I use the twig in the vial and I get… another jewel! Oh joy! Oh variety! I do the whole ordeal again to get another glued firefly and light up the fourth and final alcove! But there… no lever!

No! Just when I thought I was on a roll!

Nothing but a hole in it. I try several things on the hole (mainly the sword and the pipe) but nothing works. Considering I only have the NIA letters to light up, maybe I don't need them after all. I may use the letter A for the upper left twice? But no, it doesn't work (as it was somewhat expected, I may have found the empty alcove way earlier if I had chosen another order for my fireflies). But what to do now? I try everything. Pouring the glue in the hole, calling URM (only to hear that without any kind of fruit, I can get lost. Ingrateful flying rodent). I spend a lot of time there. Finally, a bit by accident during an umpteenth transformation of cauldron-sword-pipe, I use the copper ball in the hole and it works!!!

Facepalm moment #237

I admit I had completely forgotten the copper ball at this point despite transforming it every five minutes. This is the first time I actually use it as an item since the very beginning of the game and at no point it occurred to me I could use it as is. Well I did do it eventually but I spent a lot of time on this screen and I kinda stumbled upon the answer. Anyway, pressing the ball in the hole reveals another lever and another jewel (confirming the fact that you could do the alcoves in any order and not that the alcoves would change depending on the order you light them). I pull the lever 5 times and light the remaining letters. We're getting close! I shoot the letters KRAAL and the drawbridge lowers… revealing… KRAAL himself!

I had literally a bow and arrows in my hands… how exactly did he get the upper hand?

KRAAL thanks me for bringing him the three grains of sand and he tells me he will put them himself in the REVUSS, so the prophecy won't be fulfilled and he'll gain more powers. However, he tells me he has designed a mechanism for the grains of sand to be automatically put inside the REVUSS while he is getting married with OPALE. Why he doesn't put them now in the REVUSS is anyone's guess, but I think this is a James Bond villain thing : design an overly-complicated Rube Goldberg device in order to let the hero win in the end. OPALE appears to me and confirms I still have one chance. However, I'm now locked inside KRAAL's jail.

Is that Djel or Azeulisse in the lower left corner?

Graffiti on the wall says "None will leave here without the help of the blazing star". There is also another carving. A D and an A with a heart-shaped hole in the middle, telling that Djel and Azeulisse have also spent some time in KRAAL's cells. The question is whose skeleton is this? Anyway, searching the skeleton in the corner brings me a heart of stone, which I can insert inside the heart-shaped hole but it doesn't do anything. Another carving on the left shows me two suns, with an arrow in the middle and I can reach the lock through the bars.

Miracle or very bad prison design?

Fiddling with the locks, I can make the needle spin around but it doesn't do anything. Pixel-hunting thoroughly the walls, I find a nail stuck between two cinderblocks. I rip it out with several clickings (despite WEEN whining "it's impossible to rip it out" twice which is a fine example of a protagonist trying to lure the player away from the right solution) and can use it to play with the locks. Putting the nail inside any hole on the two clock-like diagrams lift one bar and one bar only. If you remove the nail, the needle goes back into the up position. Whatever you do, even if you wait a few seconds, the bar goes down again and blocks the exit.

The only clue available.

Following the clue, I try to put the needle in the 9 of the second lock, then remove it and put it in the 3 of the first lock but it doesn't work. It's becoming pretty obvious that I need a second nail to make any progress but no amount of pixel-hunting gives me anything. I try lifting several different bars in order to make something happen but nothing works. Everytime a bar lifts, there is a hole in the ground that becomes atteignable. Considering it's not a hotspot of any kind, I dismiss it quite quickly because it's tedious to try every clock position… but after a while I eventually go back there and test every hole under every bar, and what do you know?

It was a hard clue to pin down.

Considering you have to randomly try to look under every bar, this puzzle is quite infuriating, but once the second pin in my possession, the rest was quite easy. Following the clue, I put the nail in the western position of the right clock and the pin in the eastern position of the left clock and tadaaa. The door opens!

Good thing KRAAL didn't think to put the lock three feet further from the door.

Leaving the cell behind me, I go up the stairs and finally discover the REVUSS! And the overly-complicated contraption designed to put three grains of sand inside an hourglass in the most ridiculously complex way possible.

I think this deathtrap lacks a shark or two…

So what do we have here? The REVUSS itself appears to be locked under some kind of glass tube, while the three grains of sand are suspended above it in some kind of container, held in place by a rope that's getting slowly cut by a blade on a pendulum going back and forth (19,95$ at Villains'r'Us). Beneath the hourglass, three levers above an engraving representing three snakes. Finally, two stone slabs, probably hiding some caches. Under the left slab is an engraving with letters I can click on : DEUS, J*LL, Z. In place of the * is a hole where a letter is obviously missing. My first instinct is to spell DJEL on the letters but it doesn't work at first. Turns out you have to exit the close up view of the letters then go back in and spell DJEL for it to work if you've fiddled with the letters before that. Done properly, the word DJEL reveals a cache containing a statue behind it.

I've spent long enough on this caption then decided I couldn't write anything that's family-friendly

The statue is holding a knife and putting the heart into the chest orifice does… well absolutely nothing. I think this will be useful at some point but not right now. Not finding anything else to do, I sweep the place to find what I had missed and I find a bamboo stick behind the REVUSS. This is perfect to make another flute to call URM, even if I can't find any strawberries, I hope he will be useful at something… I use the knife to carve the bamboo but blowing it doesn't work. I have to use the knife a second time to finish the carving.

Good thing I remember my boy scout training.

URM arrives and makes a stone fall from the ceiling while flying around. He tells me KRAAL has put a spell on him and he can't help me because it would make the three grains of sand fall immediately inside the REVUSS (again : why didn't KRAAL simply put the grains of sand inside the REVUSS?). Anyway, I look at the stone URM dropped and it shows the letter A! Now I know what to do. I go back to the carving with the missing letter and put the A inside the hole. Now I can spell Azeulisse! Good thing I paid attention during the game because if you're at that point and don't remember how it's spelled, well it's reload time for you.

Ahzelis? Aseullise?

So I spell correctly AZEULISSE and the second stone slab opens! And… time's up. The rope finally gives way and the grains of sand fall in the REVUSS! What? A real-time puzzle?

You mean "you can still reload a save"

So there is a Game Over screen after all!

No problem at all, I told myself, naively. I spent quite some time looking around, so I just have to be faster and to the point. I reloaded a save, I did everything much faster and… well no idea why but this time, the rope gave way even faster. I first thought that I needed to mess with the internal clock revolutions of my computer or whatever magic mumbo-jumbo (yes I'm very fluent in technical lingo) like in the old Sierra games when suddenly a puzzle was unwinnable because my computer was way faster than it was supposed to be. (I have moving souvenirs from the beginning sequence of Space Quest IV notably) However, I noticed something on my third try. I just clicked a few times on the levers beneath the REVUSS to see if they did anything and it made the blade go notably faster.

Snake centipede?

If the blade could be accelerated by the levers, it could be slowed as well. However, I didn't find any clue whatsoever other than the three snakes drawing under the levers. I thought that if it was the only clue, I should try the first thing that came to mind just looking at the drawing. So I pulled the levers all the way down then all the way up, one by one, from right to left, following the wave pattern of the snakes. It visibly slowed down the blade! Well, to be honest, I had to try it once again from the start because you have to do the lever action immediately when you enter the room or you're doomed from the start.

Oh and when you try this four or five times in a row, the part when you talk with URM is sooooo slow under a strict time limit

So once you've entered AZEULISSE in the carving, the second niche opens and reveals a woman statue. You have to take it and use it on the first statue. The two merge and a fairy appears.

I thought I was the one born of the love between DJEL and AZEULISSE?

The fairy flies to the receptacle and gets back the three grains of sand. She gives them to me, allowing me to put them myself inside the REVUSS and finally fulfill the prophecy and destroy KRAAL!!!

Now THAT's what I call a rushed ending!

Three screens, one of pure text and the exact same screen than the game over screen only with letters of different colors. Earlier in the game, there used to be a cutscene every five minutes or so because a worm had stomach ache or because UKI and ORBI had some little dance moves to show. I can't help but think the whole ending was seriously rushed. That's weird considering the rest of the production values in the game seemed pretty high until now...

But anyway, here it is, we vanquished KRAAL the sinister wizard and fulfilled the prophecy! This was a pretty nice ride, even if an inconsistent one in some ways, but overall, I really enjoyed my time with the game! Join us next time as we explore the alternative paths to see what we missed in this playthrough and then apply a PISSED rating to the game. Hopefully, the stupid twins won't cost too many points to the rating!

Session time : 2 hours
Final Total time : 9 hours
Final Inventory : Flute
Companions : PETROY, URM (after their stunt with the grains of sand, the twins were never seen again)
Number of times the fast travel option was available : Zero

AP 2006, Infiltrate!

In this episode I will be looking at (and also talking about) the Apollo game Infiltrate, which is kind of like a dumbed down Elevator Action for our Atari 2600. I don't have an exact date for the next game yet, but it will be tron Deadly Discs by M Network and will come out in January. If you have any Christmas memories that you would like to submit to the 6th annual Christmas show, please send them to me by the end of the day on December 16th. Also, I will be announcing a date and time for when Sarah and I will do a livestream of all the games I covered this year. If you are feeling charitable, please consider donating to my or my friends' Extra Life campaign. You can donate until the end of the year, every little bit will help kids who are sick. Please check the links below to donate. Thank you all so much for listening!

Please donate to my Extra Life campaign!
Sean's Extra Life page
Andrew's Extra Life page
Rick's Extra Life page
Bryce's Extra Life page
Marc's Extra Life page
Infiltrate on Random Terrain
Ed Salvo interview by Scott Stilphen
Infiltrate (Blue) on Atarimania
No Swear Gamer 492 - Infiltrate 

Grav-StuG Kickstarter 61% Funded... (New 3D Print Images)

A Fresh-faced Warmaster Army

I finished the leather on the dwarves this week, man did that suck. There's just a bunch of tiny leather details everywhere. Anyway, the base-coat for the flesh is down now so it's that and the hair, plus decals and basing.

It's unlikely that I'll get to these before Fall In! but they're playable at least.

AZ Game Fair 2019

Last weekend I attended AZ Game Fair 2019 in Mesa. It's just up the road from Tucson, and as a "special guest" I get a free badge, so it's usually a very inexpensive weekend of gaming. However, this year my wife and baby came with, which meant a full price hotel room for 2 nights, so it wasn't so cheap after all.

I did not arrive at the convention until 10pm on Friday, so I might as well have just come up Saturday morning and saved the cost of the room that first night... oh well.

Saturday and Sunday, however, I did manage to spend a lot of time at the convention, and actually play some games for once!

Old Favorites

Puerto Rico
After hopping into a game or two of The Resistance with Sean Ramirez of The Dukes Of Dice podcast, I taught his friends Puerto Rico, which sat at the top of the "best games" list for a decade (and with good reason). Sean and I had played before, so of course it boiled down to a contest between him and me. I haven't played that game in years, but it's definitely one of my favorites, and I pulled out the victory.

Game Design Panel
After that, I was on a game design panel with another local designer, David Short, as well as Canadian special guest Daryl Andrews, and the guest of honor from Italy, Vital Lacerda. The panel was called The Secret Lives of Board Game Designers, but had no real direction or moderator, so I tried to sort of direct traffic. We mostly took questions from the audience.

Railroad Tycoon
After the panel, my friend Hoss was running a game of Railways of the World (FKA Railroad Tycoon). There were only 3 of us, Hoss, myself, and a new player Hoss had just taught how to play. We used a map of Great Britain, which I'd not seen before. I kinda liked the map. It was a tight game, and in the last round I had to go to the bathroom, so I made my last 3 plays out of turn (they didn't affect anybody else anyway) and ran off. When I got back, they'd just finished counting points, and Hoss had won by 1 point! I don't know if I trust him though, the first thing he said that game was that I should be banker because he was bad at counting, and the first thing he did in the game was grab $10k bills in lieu of $1k bills... :)

New Hotness

Underwater Cities
In addition to those old favorites, I got a chance to try a few of the new, hot games. Saturday night Hoss and I sat down to figure out Underwater Cities. The rulebook took about 45 mins to learn from, mostly because they repeated the "play a card and place a worker, and if your card color matches, you get the bonus" text at least 4 times.

I was enjoying Underwater Cities while we played, but thinking about it afterwards, I am not sure I'd want to play it more than maybe twice. The "play a card and place a worker, and if your card color matches, you get the bonus" thing is cute. I did feel like I never really wanted to play an off-colored card, even though I had something in play that gave me a consolation prize when I did that (though I probably should have done it once or twice).

We had to stop 1 turn before the end because they closed up, so I don't actually know how my strategy turned out, but I got a pretty good feel for it. I saw maybe 2 real paths I'd want to try (the one I did, and 1 other). I'm sure there's more, but it wasn't obvious what else you could really do.
The collect-cards-in-play part was a lot like Terraforming Mars, and I definitely liked this A LOT more than I like Terraforming Mars.

Wingspan
Wingspan was solid. I enjoyed most of it. Probably the only thing that I thought was weird was the random-and-variable resource pool. You need resources (in 5 types) to pay for playing bird cards, and there's an action where you take some resources (you can upgrade that so you take multiples, 1 at a time). The resource pool is 5 dice, rolled into a supply. When you take a resource, you remove the die from the supply, reducing what's available. Caveat, if all remaining dice in the supply match (there's only 1 resource option available to you), then you may choose to re-roll all of the dice, resetting the whole pool to 5 random things before taking one.

I could see wanting a random resource pool, and I could see wanting a competitive resource pool (like dice drafting), but I'm not sure the way they're combined here is the best way to do the job.
One of the types of reasons I don't like it is because there are a bunch of card effects that are like "take a [specific resource] from the supply, if it's there" - which is therefore super variable, based not just on what's rolled, but also based on how many dice happen to remain in the supply. Worse, there's a card type that says "when [X happens and succeeds], take a die from the supply," where the likelihood of X happening depends on what opponents do (which is fine), but the likelihood of X succeeding increases as the number of dice remaining decreases... so while it looks like this card gives you flexibility when it hits (you choose a die rather than get a specific resource), in reality, this card is not likely to hit at all, and if it does, you probably get some random resource, not a real choice. I could argue that's just a lame card effect, but I think it's a symptom of a lame resource system.

But other than that, I thought the game was fun, and solid.

Just One
Not as hyped as the previous two games I mentioned, Just One is a hot new cooperative party game where the goal is to get one of your teammates to guess a word by giving 1-word clues. The catch is that after each player writes down their 1-word clue (but before the guesser sees then), any matching clues cancel out. So it's scary to use the obvious clues, because if someone else does that, you don't get them, but then everybody avoids the obvious clues, and you still don't use them!

It's a fun party game, would play again, even at 2 in the morning :)

My Own Games and Prototypes

Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done
Crusaders came out just a few months ago, and so far it seems to be very well received. The production is very nice, and several people approached me at the convention to tell me how much they were enjoying the game play!

One guy who had backed the Deluxified version of the game was trying to read the rules while his friends played another game, so I offered to teach. In the end it was just 2 of them (the other 2 kept playing that other game), so I sat in and made it a 3 player game.

It's been a while since I've played Crusaders, but I still liked it a lot!

Crusaders: Divine Influence
I had made an expansion to Crusaders about a year ago, and I had thought it was probably done. I sent it to Utah with Michael in October so the TMG team could play it, and I just got it back about a week ago.

Ben and his daughter were looking to play one of my prototypes, and so as the last game of the convention, I taught them Divine Influence. Emma had not played Crusaders before, but she picked the game up just fine, even with the extra expansion rules. It went well, though I think the free movement from the Influence action is too fiddly, hard to visualize, easy to forget, and usually unnecessary. I should either cut it, or make it simpler -- maybe something like "you may freely move between adjacent hexes with your influence marker on them" (a dynamic known as "railroading" in some games). Maybe better would be to simply cut it, and save having to make components for influence.

David's doggo card game
Late Saturday night I played one of David's quick card game prototypes. It's intended to be a sort of follow up to AEG's Cat Lady. Indeed, much of it was super similar to Cat Lady (collecting similar types of sets from a 3x3 grid), however this game was a step up in complexity, as you could buy upgrades to the patterns of cards you're allowed to pick up.

I gave him some feedback, hopefully it was helpful. Mostly it was "once a player replenishes the board, their turn should be over," which I think he agreed with in the end. The rest was about a special card called "fetch," which did something thematic that David liked, but I thought should probably instead just be "get a card from the discard pile," which also seemed thematic to me. The way David wanted to do it, in my mind, subverted the main mechanism in the game, which is something I don't like doing. The recent game Noria does that, and I wish it didn't.

Let's Play Italian Wars - Furioso Style

Regular readers of the blog will be aware of the last large project I embarked on, 28mm Italian Wars. It went remarkably quickly and I managed to plough through a big chunk of figures during the 2018/19 Analogue Hobbies Winter Paint Challenge, producing a pretty large Papal Army in the process. The figures went on to win the Challenge Choice Award, which was nice.

Swiss Pike clash with their fellow country men.

So over the last few weeks the collection has been out on the table getting to grips with some rules and getting a new period up and running here at Yarkshire Gamer. Along with my figures, regulars Harry (with his large French contingent) and Steve with his Landsknechts added to the weight of the table.

Landsknecht Shot

There wasn't much of a plan to the game, on the usual 12 x 6 table I set up a symmetrical layout with a couple of built up areas and some trees and lined the troops up ready to go.

Our troops are based on 60 x 50 bases, 8 Figures on a Pike base, 4 on a shot base and 6 on a "other" base (Sword and Buckler, Polearm etc). Cavalry is on a 50 x 60 base with two figures per base. This isn't for any particular rule set, it looks right to us and any rule set we use will just be adapted to this basing (I don't rebase !).

Papal Pike Block

So our chosen rule set for our playtest is Furioso, they are avaliable from Alternative Armies for £10 as a Pdf. Link below.

https://www.alternative-armies.com/products/furioso-renaissance-wargame-rules

The company also do an additional supplement specifically covering the Italian Wars adding Mercenary Units etc but we didn't use that in our initial game so I won't comment further on that now.

The French

Just to give you an idea of the forces involved they were as follows,

French Right Wing 
3 x French Gendarme (3 bases each), 2 x French Archer (3 bases)
2 x French Skirmish Crossbow (3 bases each) 1 x Old Band French Pike (9 bases)
1 x Light Gun

French Centre
3 x Landsknecht Pike blocks (1 with 9 bases, 2 with 6 bases) each with skirmish screen bases.
2 x Polearm / Zwei hander units (4 bases)
1 x Landsknecht Formed Shot unit (4 bases)
1 Heavy and 1 Medium Gun

French Left Wing 
3 x French Gendarme (3 bases each), 2 x French Archer (3 bases)
1 Light Gun

Papal Centre

Papal Right Wing 
2 x Familia Ducal Cavalry, 3 x Condottiero Cavalry, 1 x Mounted Italian Crossbow, 1 x Italian Light Cavalry, 1 x Stradiots (bow) all 3 bases.
1 x Landsknecht Formed Shot unit and 1 Swiss Polearm unit (both 4 bases)

Papal Centre
1 x Landsknecht Pike block (8 bases, plus two skirmish shot bases)
1 x Swiss Pike Block (6 bases, plus two skirmish shot bases)
2 x Romandiole Pike Blocks (6 based, plus two skirmish shot bases)
1 x Swiss Guard (4 bases)
1 x Sword and Buckler unit (4 bases)
1 x Heavy and 1 Medium Gun
1 x Stradiot (with Lance) and 1 x Italian Mounted Crossbow, both 3 bases.

Papal Left Wing
1 x Familia Duca Cavalry, 4 x Condottiero Cavalry, 1 x Stradiot (Lance), 1 x Stradiot (bow), 1 x Italian Light Cavalry, all 3 bases.
2 x Landsknecht Formed Shot units (4 bases) 1 x Light Gun.

Papal Cavalry

With chucking everything on the table (and why not !) We didnt use the Army Morale System in the rules as we were about 3 times over the sizes mentioned, nothing like a "small" game to start with !

We didn't use the Generals rules (other than plus 1 in Combat Morale if in range).

So let's move onto the rules themselves. I am going to do a seperate post with some video examples of the mechanics of the rules just waiting for Speilberg to come free to finish the edit.

Landsknecht Pike

Firstly some basics, the rules are relatively straight forward and all units are in "bases" - each base having 4 hits before it is removed, units are built up of numbers of bases. Our figures are set up differently to the rules so we just played with the number of bases we had per unit and it worked fine. All die rolls are d6 and all rolls need a 5 or 6 for a success, so very easy to remember.

Run Away !

Each unit has a stat line to define it's character, they are as follows,
Type - e.g. Gendarme, Raiders etc this can give the unit a special ability for example units fighting Gendarme lose 1 d6 in combat if the Gendarme charge.
Tactic - Galloper, Skirmishers etc
Combat Factor - Base number of Dice per base when fighting (2 to 5)
Initiative Modifer - as it sounds
Weapon - defines type
Armour Class - None, Armoured, Heavy, Extra Heavy
Move - basic in inches (for 28s)
Size (suggested number of bases)
There is also a points value but as you know I hate points systems so this was immediately discarded !

Swiss Pike clash with Landsknechts

We (as usual) ignored the set up rules and just got on with it.

At the start of each turn each unit rolls 1 d 6 and adds (or subtracts) their Initiative Modifier from their stat line and that determines when they will move in the turn. We simply left the rolled dice at the rear of the unit as a marker to remind us of an initiative score.

Units such as Gendarme and Swiss gain +2 to their roll, if the net score goes over 6 the unit become Impetuous and charges of at the nearest unit, much as those units did if they thought the Commander was being a touch cautious.

Papal Pike to the rescue

Impetuous units remain so until they get into melee or fail a morale test.

Units with an Initiative of zero don't move or fire but can defend themselves in melee.

Each unit completes it's turn with the highest dice going first. So all Impetuous first, then 6s go then all 5s etc.

If a unit choses to move it's move distance is it's base move from its stat line plus it's Initiative Score, so a Gendarme moves 8 inches normally, if it had a 5 for initiative it would move 13 inches, simple really.

Papal Guard vs The World 

Each side should move one unit and then the next side and so on, I could see how over a club night table this would work fine but over a large table it became restrictive so we just broke the table down into areas of action and moved units in sequence in that area.

Each unit completes it's turn before moving onto the next unit.

It's wouldn't be long before we introduced a house rule (it never is !) We found that there was a problem when you have units in consecutive lines (Cavalry mostly) when the units in the rear end up with higher initiative than those in the rear, because of the move system the unit at the rear was effectively stuck and was therefore at a disadvantage due to it's higher initiative. We solved the problem by allowing units to exchange their Initiative dice front to rear, the payment for doing so was reducing both dice by 1.

Landsknecht pointy end

Shooting is done by base, 2d6 if short range, 1 if long or if moved. Roll the dice, 5 or 6 hits. The target has a save of 1d6 per hit with additional dice for cover and armour, saving a hit on a 5 or 6.

So a stationary unit of Landsknecht Shot with 4 bases firing at a unit of Gendarme with at short range would throw 8 dice, let's say for 3 hits. The Gendarme would throw 3 save rolls for the hits, plus 3 dice for their armour, - 1 for the fact they were fired at by a gunpowder weapon giving 5 dice to save 3 hits. Remember each base has 4 hits before it is removed.

French Pike on the move

Nice and straight forward and picked up in a couple of moves.

We added our second house rule for Mounted Crossbow and Bow, reducing their ranges. It's open to historical debate but I am in the "crossbows were used from horseback" camp, but they used a latch type loading mechanism which would give less draw weight and hence less range. So our house rule fitted that.

The other thing we weren't sure on was the basing for shot troops, skirmish units are in three bases, side by side which is fine, but formed shot is in 4 bases, 2 x 2 which to me doesn't look right, we have left it as is for now but might come back to that.

The Pope in action

Melee combat occurs when units contact each other and multiple rounds of combat can occur in one turn, for example a unit with an Initiative of six contacts and fights a unit with an Initiative of three, they fight once of the turn of the unit with 6 and again on the turn of the unit with 3.

Sword and Buckler unit 

Combat is based around the Combat Factor of each unit, each base in contact generates dice equal to the CF of that unit. So a French Gendarme unit with a C.F. of 4 will generate 12 dice (for 3 bases) as a start, there are additional modifiers (Cavalry charging get plus 1 to their dice, giving a total of 15 for our Gendarme example, these dice are rolled, with 5 or 6 being a hit.

The unit that has taken the hits gets the opportunity to save, 1 d6 for each hit plus a number of Dice to represent the Armour of the unit, with a 5 or 6 saving.

More Landsknechts

The outcome of the melee is determined by a Combat Morale Test after the casualties are calculated. This is based on the CF to start with modifiers to the number of Dice for most casualties, losing a base, size of unit etc. Both players roll their dice with a 5 or 6 (as usual) counting as a success. It is the difference between these results that determine the outcome. 1 difference pushes back the loser 1 base and causes 1 casualties, 2 difference, 2 push backs, 2 casualties. Three difference adds disorganised to the losers woe whilst 4 push backs kills the unit.

Units that have a traditional rivalry (Swiss and Landsknechts) can become "Furioso" when close to each other, this drags the units into combat and intensifies the fighting, which is done twice before any Combat Morale is taken.

We found that the system worked well but because there is no cumulative effect round to round melees went on until a unit ran out of figures. After the first day playing we decided this wasn't working for us and made the push backs add up, turn on turn, so a 1 push back this turn after a 1 push back the previous turn would count as 2.

Morale is done by a simple test when a unit loses a base in shooting or when a general is killed, the rules do have an overarching morale system which is based on the overall losses but this is designed for games a third of the size we were trying, it's something we didn't use during this play test but will be looked at again, next game.

So general impression is very good and we will definitely be using them again. We made a few minor changes but I have to be honest and say that only a couple of sets of rules survive intact after contact with the Yarkshire Gamer ! There are some nice touches in the rules, like hazards (when you throw 4 1's in any roll).

I've done a video run through of the rules which I will put up on the blog early next week.