On Thursday night Will and I tried our first Boxer game using the figures I already had together with Terrain we had lying around. I had written a set of simple rules and had a few ideas I wanted to try out.
The table was set up with several legations:
The rules for the Colonials was using a D6 to hit. Range of 12" hitting on a 5. During the game we amended this to 0-6" hit on 4, 6-12" hit on 5,6 and 12-18" hit on a 6. Boxers who were poor shots only hit on a 6. Troops in the open get no saving roll. Behind sandbags and boxes save on a 4+ and behind a hard wall save on a 3+
Melee was by rolling a D6 for each figure in contact and adding all dice together. For each multiple of 6 a figure in the open is killed. Behind sand bags each multiple of 9 kills a figure and behind a wall each multiple of 12 killed a figure.
The basic combat rules worked very well.
D3 groups of boxers arrived per turn. At first we used a clock dial (on a D12) for arrivals. We tweaked this through the game so that boxers arrived in the Foo:
We settled on the numbers of boxers in a group as 8 + D6. There was certainly pressures on the legation.
Morale for the boxers was 2D6. when they took a casualty they had to score equal or less than the number of boxers left. Its surprising how a small group of 4 or 5 boxers can keep coming!!! If they failed a morale test and the group was very small it was removed from the table. larger groups that retreated stopped out of range (or joined another group). Each turn the group grew by 1D3 figures. Once they reached 12 they could advance again.
We tried a couple of method of ammunition limitations and we settled on a system I designed some time ago. At the start of the game each legation has 3 ammo chips (we used counters but for the final game we will use wooden cubes from german board games). Each turn a legation could fire as many times as they wished (up to 3). Now here's the kicker. At the end of each turn you have to draw new ammo chips from a bag, however, there are a number of dummy chips in there of a different colour. So you may get no ammo for next turn!!
Next turn you can throw all the dummy chips in and draw back up to 3. It gave a real dilemma for legations do they fire at long range or at medium range how many times do you fire. The British legation did run out of ammo at a critical time, yikes and the Italian legation was abandoned:
We also had random event by putting 2 or 3 different coloured chips in the bag too, fires to legations, the finding of the international gun etc.
The other thing we did was recovery of casualties. For each casualty you threw a D6 if a 6 is rolled you got one of your wounded back. If your legation was on fire you could not get them back so in encouraged the colonial players to put out the fires. Likewise if you abandoned the legation you could not get casualties back.
The game went really well and legations were under pressure and had difficult decisions to make.
The final photo shows Wills wall which we agreed he could extend and we'll use it as the city wall for 1 length of the table
