Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Basement Delving: War Cry and Battle Lust

I am in Germany again (yay!) so I can go into my old basement and hunt around for weird gaming crap that might be hiding down there. Today I found this little booklet between a whole bunch of other strange stuff I never actually played:

War Cry and Battle Lust: Cover

As you might guess from the cover, this is a war game and not a role-playing game. On a quick browse it seems to be suitable for about the same kind of thing as Gygax and Perren's Chainmail. Although War Cry came out seven years later (1978) it doesn't seem more advanced in any particular way. Better organized maybe? But of course I am hardly an expert on these kinds of games. Here are the combat tables (presumably the core of the game) from the center of the thin booklet:

War Cry and Battle Lust: Combat Tables

The Acaeum reports (and the preface to the game admits this as well) that it's a very streamlined system: Maybe not overly realistic, but with reasonable outcomes and useful for resolving large battles more quickly than comparable systems.

I'd love to hear from people who have used both Chainmail and War Cry. Sadly I won't have time for a thorough comparison myself, I am mired too deeply in the role-playing part of the hobby, just not enough interest in the war-gaming part. Hey, here's an idea: If you know Chainmail well and want to explore War Cry, I'll mail the darn thing to you for free. You just have to promise to write a blog post about how the games compare. Good deal?

1 comment:

  1. I will happily take you up on that offer! I haven't written on my blog for awhile, but I will for this... akesher [at] gmail [dot] com. Blog is: http://sandboxempire.blogspot.com/

    Aaron

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