The Silver Bayonet Redux

In the last several weeks I’ve had the opportunity to play several more games of the Silver Bayonet. Two were teaching how to play the game using the solo mode that I wrote about here. The third was PvP.

Both ways of playing were fun, but the PvP is very different! And I think that’s the attraction of this system. Much like Mantic’s Walking Dead All Out War is, in a PvP game, the monsters function like the zombies, where you can control them to “spoil” the other player’s plans and they can do the same to yours.

The solo teaching games went as expected, with the Wolf Pack scenario. The first game went almost down to the wire, getting the missing documents on the 2nd last clue.

The other game was kind of an anti climax with the documents being found on the 2nd try!

Still that was enough for my friend to request for a PvP game and he used his Zombicide Dead or Alive minis to proxy the US faction for the Silver Bayonet. Which is why his minis are a brown plastic.

The game was of course the first scenario in the core Silver Bayonet book: The Investigation.

There are 3 clues on the table: two closer to each faction’s starting positions and the 3rd in the middle.

Having to think about other people shooting back at you made me more cautious.

TOO cautious.

I kept too many of my minis behind cover and so lost the chance to grab the 3rd clue. 

Then atrocious dice rolls on my part ensured that I could NOT grab the winning point for the scenario, even AFTER using my carefully hoarded Fate Dice. 

So the game ended on points: 5 vs 4.

Still, it was fun and my friend has now ordered the official Russian faction off North Star. When the models come in we will of course play a whole campaign from the core rule book before moving on to the campaign set in Egypt. (I don’t have the other campaign books).

THOUGHTS:

1. Familiarity: I do like the game system. It offers enough familiarity with Joe McCullough’s other games to be familiar: Stargrave and Rangers of Shadowdeep which I’ve already played and written about here and here. I didn’t progress further with them because of the specific terrain requirements (even though he did say to wing it and just use whatever you have). But the real killer was combat resolution uses a d20. For me, d20’s are simply TOO swingy even though I play(ed) Infinity.
2. Swinginess: Silver Bayonet fixes the swinginess issue by using 2d10s. Since there's a measurable bell curve, it's much better! When you do fail a roll, you can’t blame it 100% on the dice as you have a fairly decent chance (40%-50%) of getting what you want vs the much lower percentage (5%!!!) using a d20.
3. “Luck” mitigation: You have the Fate Dice pool to help you mitigate bad rolls by allowing you limited opportunities to re-roll your dice. Since this is a limited resource, you tend to use it only for the important rolls. And there MIGHT be chances to increase them during the game. Still, when you do roll the dice and you ALSO fail the re-roll… you just shrug and curse the fickle RNG deities. You don’t feel so bad as with the roll of a single d20 deciding the issue for you.
4. Historical: I cut my wargaming teeth on historical wargaming: to be specific, Napoleonic wargaming using the old 1/72 scale Airfix Napoleonic range and the rule book that Airfix put out way back in the 70’s. It need an actual referee and a grand commander to play, and the rest of us just commanded our respective divisions (New for infantry, Grouchy for cavalry, etc.). So seeing these minis but in more characterful and flavourful poses rather than the more common marching, shooting and kneeling positions was a treat. And painting them was really simple (GW I'm looking at you!!!).
5. Gothic Horror. So yeah. Vampires. Shape-changers. Weird (historically accurate?) monsters. Why not. Otherwise you’d just be playing a skirmish version of Black Powder, or Sharpe.
6. The Campaign: Unlike Rangers and Stargrave (and presumably Frostgrave) each member of your unit can level up. And the best part is, there’s a hard limit on the number of models in your unit. Eight is Enough (for those who get that reference). It also provides a known limit on how long you need to play. The game is quick enough that you could get 2-3 scenarios done in an evening, and the campaign in around a month or less.
7. Terrain: With my Bambu A1 Mini I cannot also print whatever scenario specific terrain required. To be fair, now we are playing in the FLGS, there’s already terrain available so I shouldn’t have to print TOO much (if any).
8. Monsters: There are now also 3D STLs available for some of the more esoteric monsters: Napoleonic zombies. Serpopards. Uraeus. Zombie Camels. It’s a bit tougher to get a Napoleonic-era troll or goblin though so we shall have to see what we can do about it. Just proxy and wing it is probably the standard go-to. 

And there you have it. My thoughts on The Silver Bayonet. I’m really trying to limit myself and not go hog wild by getting many of the units already available for the game. However, 3D printing can help alleviate some of this, and there’s even a set of Napoleonic Gothic Horror specific clue markers that I’m getting 3D printed for the campaign.

The campaign will probably commence in about 2-3 months time when the minis come in and my friend gets them painted up. I’m trying to rush this campaign because once his wife gives birth to their first child, that’s it for any gaming for at least 12 months! 😁