State of Play: With The Hammer – building a playtest set

 

 

 

I read once that Jad Fair from the band Half-Japanese never tunes his guitar before
going on stage, saying it's more rock-n-roll that way. I guess this is an analogue to my
approach to this kind of stuff. The map is a print out from an Officeworks photocopy/
printer (on an 80gsm A3 sheet), the Peasent Band tiles are knock-off Scrabble
pieces, the counters are hand laminated and the meeple are refugees from a
game I literally stripped down for parts (Romolo o Remo (Giochix.it, 2013). 

It’s a failing on my part that I struggle with some technologies, sometimes. I’ve tinkered with VASSAL at different times in the past (maybe I need to go back to Ardwulf’s primer video for a refresher), and while I’ve downloaded Tabletop Simulator (TTS), I’m pretty sure I’ve never been able to get anything to work on the damn thing. I have, this year, finally tried out Rally the Troops (this is a boon for anyone who can't make a face to face game, and something I'm new to but keen to explore further; a big shout-out and thank you to T2 and M from the Adelaide Wargamers FB group for the platform tutelage and lessons in humility). This is a platform I’m comfortable with because it’s been built by people who play physical wargames, to best mimic that experience in an online environment. But I’m not here to talk about all that today – I’ll circle back to RTT in a future post.

As I mentioned in my last post, I put up my hand to playtest Ray Weiss’s new title, With The Hammer: Thomas Müntzer & the German Peasant War in Thuringia (Conflict Simulations Ltd, ~2025 - this is a link to the pre-order page; WTH doesn't have a BGG entry yet). With the Hammer isn’t exactly component-poor, but looking at the manifest, I thought it was a project I could tackle.

Let me say up front, I don’t relish this kind of stuff. I ‘ve never put together a print-and-play game, and I’m simply not equipped to mount and cut oodles of counters.

Playtesting is a different thing. It’s a chance to give something back to the hobby that has helped keep me sane through some tough times, so I’m willing to put some extra effort in.

Building the perfect beast

When released,  With The Hammer will have a 22”by 17” map, a Noble Board, sixteen cards (twelve poker-sized, four tarot-sized), a set of pawns and discs for the four Peasant leaders (in four different colours), three red blocks representing the Noble armies, nine woodgrain discs for the Peasant Bands (with stickers to apply to the Noble Army blocks and Peasant Band discs), and a half-sheet of counters.

After getting a set of the print files from Mr Weiss, a visit to Officeworks secured colour copies of everything I needed (well two trips, since the first batch didn’t include the Peasant Bands). The map was easy – 22” by 17” is close enough to an A3 sheet. The Noble board is used to mark the activities of the three noble armies. For a playtest set, an A4 sheet of paper would suffice.

Now, I don’t think of myself as a hoarder, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to toss unused or superfluous game parts. I have stitching boxes full of spare blocks from Commands and Colors, and Columbia and Worthington block games. No discs though. No matter. I used three Columbia blocks (from Richard III (Columba Games, 2009) and Athens and Sparta (Columbia Games, 2007); Columbia tend to use the same colour shades for all their block games).

Noble Army blocks (at full strength) on the (untrimmed) Noble Board;
trimming build-time by not trimming.

Speaking of trimming, the Noble Army blocks were re-laminated (rather untidily, I'll
admit) after a change to their Strength matrix. Still, they'll do the job.

For the Peasant Bands, I tried to get some one-inch wooden discs from a couple of different craft shops; I’ve seen these before, though they’re probably closer to 3/4”, but would have been fine for my purposes.

Peasant Army tiles and "blanks" (in the actual game these will be round and
much nicer-looking.

Such was not to be. It may be because so much of the space is currently devoted to Christmas-themed products, but nowhere had the discs I wanted. So, I improvised. Some crafty folks use Scrabble (Unknown, 1948) letters to craft plaques with affirmations and such. You can buy bags of about a hundred tiles on eBay and AliExpress, but one store had a bag of about thirty oddly shaped and slightly thinner than regulation, but there would be big enough to do the job (and have some left over for the loose component-hoarding boxes).

Leftover blanks (or potential new game pieces).

The card images and the Noble Army labels came as picture files. I’ve had some practice with this over the years in both my work- and hobby-lives; I copy-pasted the images one by one into a Word document, reducing the images individually to the required size using the ruler at the top of the screen, then placing them together on pages to reduce the amount of printing required. I managed to get the whole lot down to about six A4 sheets for the components and one A3 for the map, about $4.00 in printing total.

The Event Card deck. These came up much nicer than the ones I made up
for The Great Northern War playtest.

The twelve random event cards printed, hand-cut to size, front-and-back, and sleeved them with slightly narrower bridge-sized cards to give them some stability. The four tarot-sized cards I also cut out by hand (I really need to get myself a little paper trimmer for this kind of thing), bought a fifty-pack of tarot sleeves, and stiffened them with cards “borrowed’ from my 7^th Sea RPG Sorte Deck (essentially a game world-themed tarot deck, with really nice cards). As these are never turned over, I didn’t bother with backs.

The starter team for my first game. The four tarot-sized sleeves were the most expensive
component in the whole project (they only come in packets of fifty). 

The most labour-intensive part of the it was the counters. The printed game will likely have seventy or so counters and markers, including supply markers, conversion markers for the locations the Peasant leaders have successfully brought into the fold, and a draw pool of Freelancers, unaffiliated Miners and Landsknecht units, as well as the usual Turn and VP counters and such.

My makeshift counters, not pretty but they'll do the job. From top row, left to right:
Turn marker (well, d'uh), Victory Point marker (VPs are tracked on a pendulum
track), Heldrungen Siege Rating marker. Second row: Supply markers (1 point/
2 point), Depleted and Exhausted Locale markers. Third row: Propaganda
marker, Freelancer markers (Landsknects and Miners).

As I said, I’m not kitted out to mount and cut sheets of counters, but I did have a baggie of 5/8^th unprinted counters left over from another game (I’m not certain, but I think they may have been from Devil Dogs: Belleau Wood 1918 (Worthington Publishing, 2019) – I remember there being a lot of left over counters from punching that puppy). The next stage involved hand-cutting (I really need that trimmer) the fronts and the majority of the backs of seventy counters, then pasting the cut-outs on the front and back of these counters. I took a guess at the excess counters I used, and it worked out; it turned out there were about eighty-four in the bag. At least they were pre-rounded. This I did by picking up the cut-out face for application, placing it on the end of a glue stick, then rubbing it over the end like a pool cue-tip until it was well coated, then applying it to the counter (checking first it was the right way up for the reverse images) and sliding it around until it was square. About 120 times. I stumbled across this technique while prepping a playtest set for The Great Northern War (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2024); it’s a little more labour-intensive, but I haven’t had any curling or delaminating on any of the counters. With the trimming it took maybe an hour and a half.

Starting set-up (the Artillery-Point marker should be on the General track,
but otherwise good to go).

So now I have a complete game. Nearly. The rules are being adjusted, and some of the components have changed (the steps for the Noble Armies, for example began as 2.5 through 10, but now are a less math-challenging 3 through 12). Actual play has been held up with the personal matter I alluded to in my last post, and the fact that my regular partner in crime tested positive for COVID last week and has been in exile at one end of his house. When I have a couple of games under my belt I’ll report in again, but it looks like a promising game, both a diversion and an education.