Well that was ... interesting

Over the past few days I've spent a good deal of time ruminating on war game rules in an attempt to create my own for my Victorian Sci-Fi games where 1 base = 1 unit (figure count irrelevant)- something of a cross between Bob Cordery's various rule sets, as well as Paper Tigers and Song of Blades and Heroes.

There are, without exaggeration, 20 pages of notes and tables and brain storms in my spiral bound notebook. Both last night and tonight I ran several test encounters to explore various ideas.

And in the end, I decided that Mr. Cordery's Memoir of Battle gives me the type of game I'm looking for. My efforts were essentially an attempt to reinvent the wheel. And doing so unsuccessfully might I add - simple situations involving just 2 or 3 units took an over an hour to play out and they weren't very fun at that Far too much dice rolling for my tastes. 

So, there you have it. For my VSF campaign, I'll be using Memoir of Battle.

It wasn't a total loss - I came up with some ideas for campaign mechanisms that I'll write about when I get my thoughts better organized. And, my various "flavor" ideas for different forces can be used as well.

As an aside, and completely unrelated to gaming, I'm writing this from my netbook - before I got into play tests tonight, I replaced the hard disk and installed the netbook-centric version of Meego as the OS. So far, so good.