Alternate turn rules

Hello,

I remember reading about alternate rules for turns, something like this:
Each turn, everyone rolls a die and then moves and shoots in that order. After that, a single close combat phase.
I'm not sure if I got all the details right and I'd like to read the rules again but can't remember where I saw them. Does anyone know which rules I am talking about and where I can find them?
Also, if you use these rules, what do you think about them?

/Schoel

Not a big fan of the "joint turn" idea... partially because it means that every player has to be present during everyone else's turn (without being able to pop across the store for a candy bar or a bathroom break).

The only Alternative turn we used was during some 4+ multiplayer games, we deal out playing cards at the start of every round. We go in order of the cards, highest to lowest (to add drama, we don't reveal them all at once- rather we count down. "Any Kings? No? Any Queens? No? Any Jacks?" etc.) This way, you don't always go in the same order. We don't do it every multiplayer game we played, but we thought it a fun break from the normal way.

I see what your saying about the joint turn, though I think it was developed to be more realistic. But realistic does not make for good game play all the time.

I do like the cards idea a lot. will have to try that out for fun next time I have a large game.
how did you handle ties?

Ties: Red goes before Black (the pneumonic device was "fire before smoke".) In case of both the same color, you roll off.

StyrofoamKing wrote:

Not a big fan of the "joint turn" idea... partially because it means that every player has to be present during everyone else's turn (without being able to pop across the store for a candy bar or a bathroom break).

I see what you mean. If anyone is away and get shot at or something, we have to pause the game anyway though, since looking at other player's papers is cheating

However, I'd like to try this to reduce the time one game takes. We always play a free for all 4 warband multiplayer games and the games tend to go on for 3-5 hours, which is sometimes not very fun if one warband routs very early.

StyrofoamKing wrote:

The only Alternative turn we used was during some 4+ multiplayer games, we deal out playing cards at the start of every round. We go in order of the cards, highest to lowest (to add drama, we don't reveal them all at once- rather we count down. "Any Kings? No? Any Queens? No? Any Jacks?" etc.) This way, you don't always go in the same order. We don't do it every multiplayer game we played, but we thought it a fun break from the normal way.

Is there a downside to keeping the same order each round?

There's always the 'activation' style of gameplay a la WarmaHordes.

Ie. you move/shoot/fight combat with one model completely and then move on to the next, either by turns or one player using one model then the other and so on.

It would require some altering of other rules like combat, but it might be interesting to see how it would influence the tactics of the game as a whole.

We have used that system for multi-player games. I'm not a big fan except that it does speed up multi-player games by reducing the number of Close Combat phases each round. This is good as multi-player games can be notoriously long (in our experience at least). I definitely would not recommend it for 1-on-1 games.

There are two downsides to this round sequence that we have identified from our games...

1) If there is only one Close Combat each round then you will never be able to attack stunned enemy models. This is because there is always a Recovery phase between each Close Combat phase. The solution is to have two Close Combat phases back-to-back but this does make the game go longer and so eliminates one of the benefits of this style of round sequence.

2) All out brawls where a1 charges b1 and then b2 charges a1 in the same Movement phase are awkward to resolve. Can b2 attack before a1 if b2 has a higher initiative since they both charged in the same Movement phase even if a1 technically charged first? If so then this greatly benefits high Initiative models. If precedence is given to a1 because it technically charged first then can it focus ALL of its attacks on b2 or must it direct at least 1 attack at b1 which it initially charged. We play that a1 gets to attack first and must direct at least one attack at b1 which a1 charged.

Also, there may be other issues that we have not even encountered yet as this round sequence does change the mechanics quite a bit.

Anyway, I half recommend this method for multi-player games when time is of a concern. If time is not of concern then just play multi-player games using standard rules.

The card thing does sound like fun for the occasional game.

When we play collaborative games with 3+ warbands (a popular playing style with my groups), we generally have all the allied ("PC") warbands move, then shoot, then melee, then the "NPC"/opponent warband(s) go. But for competitive play, we have always gone with the rules as written for turn order.

mweaver wrote:

The card thing does sound like fun for the occasional game.

When we play collaborative games with 3+ warbands (a popular playing style with my groups), we generally have all the allied ("PC") warbands move, then shoot, then melee, then the "NPC"/opponent warband(s) go. But for competitive play, we have always gone with the rules as written for turn order.

I've always preferred to alternate turns between "allied" and "opponent" warbands. Maybe I'm wrong since we've never tried it, but if all the bands on one side goes first, it seems like the band that goes first could have a chance of doing some serious damage to the other side before they ever get the chance to strike back.

I have never noticed a particular problem that way, but that could be because usually the scenario dictates who has the first move, and the scenarios are generally not straight-up brawls.

The main advantage, we found, to "shared" turns is that it speeds up a game considerably - which means you can work in more games!

We try to avoid multi-player games if we have an equal number of players. Otherwise the multi-player games take forever.

I've played a number of western theme games that use a hand of cards to activate units or determine the order of play. Its pretty fun.

We've played with a deck of cards to randomly activate each model across all warbands. I quite enjoyed it as you never knew which model would activate. There are some fundamental mechanical problems with this method though (e.g. hard to keep troll close to leader to avoid stupidity) but it was a blast to play and lots of fun for random one off games.

It would be worthwhile to do a search on this forum also as there have been other threads for different round sequences.

whiskeytango wrote:

mweaver wrote:

The card thing does sound like fun for the occasional game.

When we play collaborative games with 3+ warbands (a popular playing style with my groups), we generally have all the allied ("PC") warbands move, then shoot, then melee, then the "NPC"/opponent warband(s) go. But for competitive play, we have always gone with the rules as written for turn order.

I've always preferred to alternate turns between "allied" and "opponent" warbands. Maybe I'm wrong since we've never tried it, but if all the bands on one side goes first, it seems like the band that goes first could have a chance of doing some serious damage to the other side before they ever get the chance to strike back.

we play the same way like mweaver and never saw this as a problem. Perhaps a lack of heavy shooting warbands made it less difficult, because in melee the terrain and the movement-restrictions made it nearly impossible to bring the whole power of all allied players in combat. So it just start with a few models in cc. The countercharge is mostly more devastating than the first and after that it just settle in a huge brawl...

Generally in collaborative scenarios the warbands deploy at different spots, so that may also have something to do with why the shared turn has never seemed to advantage whichever group goes first.

RationalLemming wrote:

We have used that system for multi-player games. I'm not a big fan except that it does speed up multi-player games by reducing the number of Close Combat phases each round. This is good as multi-player games can be notoriously long (in our experience at least). I definitely would not recommend it for 1-on-1 games.

There are two downsides to this round sequence that we have identified from our games...

1) If there is only one Close Combat each round then you will never be able to attack stunned enemy models. This is because there is always a Recovery phase between each Close Combat phase. The solution is to have two Close Combat phases back-to-back but this does make the game go longer and so eliminates one of the benefits of this style of round sequence.

2) All out brawls where a1 charges b1 and then b2 charges a1 in the same Movement phase are awkward to resolve. Can b2 attack before a1 if b2 has a higher initiative since they both charged in the same Movement phase even if a1 technically charged first? If so then this greatly benefits high Initiative models. If precedence is given to a1 because it technically charged first then can it focus ALL of its attacks on b2 or must it direct at least 1 attack at b1 which it initially charged. We play that a1 gets to attack first and must direct at least one attack at b1 which a1 charged.

Also, there may be other issues that we have not even encountered yet as this round sequence does change the mechanics quite a bit.

Anyway, I half recommend this method for multi-player games when time is of a concern. If time is not of concern then just play multi-player games using standard rules.

I really liked this post. Thanks for taking your time
So I guess we stick with the standard rules. Both these points seem awkward.

No problem, Schoel. I'm glad that you found it useful.

In turns of 'oo thumps 'oo, we just count the allies as one big warband - so it would be based on initiative if two allies changed the same enemy. It all plays out just as it does if you have two warbands fighting each other. The allies are, effectively, a single big warband in terms of how turns play out.

there's been a discussion like this before, as we had some alternate turn rules played out on a meeting here in Amsterdam.:

https://boringmordheimforum.forumieren.com/t1635-simultaneous-rounds?highlight=simultaneuos+rounds

we rolled for initiative like in the chariot races rules... worked out rather ok in multiplayer battles, as things remained interesting for every player during the game. Downsides were the random encounter rolls, works fine for 3 players, but for more players it becomes hazardous, due to too many encounters.