Where the hell did March go?

I’ve failed to do any miniature hobbying for over an entire month now. I have a half written post on painting my IA stormtroopers from the back end of February. Three partially built and painted Zen Terrain Hab buildings that I was supposed to be painting up for the Mayacast 2017 Q1 Masterglass competition. I started those in January, got side tracked by IA models, and I’ve ended up completely failing to get those done for the deadline.

Still April is looking good so far. I’ve built some models, for a completely different game!

A good friend of mine, who I have been gaming with for over 15 years, has an interest in Japan and Japanese culture. I think he has trained in more different styles of martial art than I have owned different game systems over the years. He has spent a year over in Japan through university, and took up another martial art while he was living there. If it wasn’t for the fact he’s a tall white bloke he’d fit right in over there. Anyway it was his birthday recently and i thought i’d get him a new game to mess about with, one that he might have more than a gaming interest in – Warlord Games’ Test of Honour. As it seems very reasonably priced for what is in the box, I got myself a copy too. EG store link.

I love the art work on the box, so much so I took a picture to prove it. Inside the box is a host of different stuff. Two sheets of thick card, a couple of mm thick, tokens, and templates. The tokens are for determining the activation sequence, how heavily wounded your samurai are, battlefield objectives, and various other in game statuses. The templates are 2D representations of terrain elements, such as walls and buildings. All the tokens and templates are reversible, and the neat part about this is that the flip side of the walls are hedges, and the other side of the buildings are ruined versions of that building.

There is a plethora of cards in the box, injury cards for your samurai hero, dishonour cards (which are neat in that you take a cheeky bonus during an activation and you gain a dishonour card, which may cause problems later on), and a lot of skill cards to progress the skills of your Samurai Hero over the course of a campaign.

Then there are two sets of warrior cards, the cards that allow you to build your force and play with them during the game. One set for the blue team, and one set for the red team – the box is set up as a two player starter set. The Geisha was a pre-order model, which was supposed to be an unarmoured Samurai, but due to a mix up i have got the Geisha and not the Samurai.

Speaking of the Geisha model…

What I am surprised by with this game is the amount of models provided with the game. Sprue after sprue of them. One Samurai sprue, two Ashigaru missile troop sprues, and four Ashigaru spearmen sprues – plus all the bases. What I didnt take a picture of was the ten multi-bases, that allow you to move groups of 3 models around as one unit. You’ll see one at the end of this post though.

Finally in the box are two small books, the Main Rulebook, and the Battle Book. The former is obviously the main rule book and is available from Warlord games as a free PDF (along with an Errata/FAQ PDF and an Optional Rules PDF). The latter is the book that contains the scenarios that link together to form the story within the box. In addition to the scenarios themselves it describes how to use the various cards (skills, dishonour, injury, quests) along with how to buy your forces.

There are also three double sided sheets with instructions on how to put the models together. One sheet per different sprue.

The first scenario in the campaign book, which is also a tutorial mission by the looks of things, uses 6 models per side.

• 1x Samurai Hero
• 3x Ashigaru spearmen (or Yari as it turns out, in case you were wondering from the assembly instructions)
• 2x Ashigaru bowmen (or Yumi as I have found out)

There is a whole lot of cool names to learn, or not – as it isn’t really necessary, but useful when looking at other manufactures model’s names in some cases.

Here is the first three models I have assembled. I have to say working with hard plastic again is really nice. Simple to get mould lines off, and polystyrene cement easily allows you to get the arms right for holding those spears.

You can see the multi-base, and how it acts as a movement tray for the unit of spearmen.

The bad thing is – I’ve already been looking at the expansion boxes, terrain, and other manufacturers for different models. Is this yet another started project, or one that I’ll finish this time I wonder?