Friday, August 31, 2007

I Ain't Been Shot, Mum!

Yesterday I picked up (PDF) copies of "I Ain't Been Shot, Mum!" and its "Gottterdammerung" supplement. IABSM is a set of rules for playing WWII company level wargames. The rules are the brainchild of Too Fat Lardies, "a vibrant wargames development partnership that produces an ever growing range of rule sets for what we think are discerning wargamers".

I think I first heard of IABSM sometime in 2004 from fellow gamer Dennis Cunningham. After reading a lot of positive reviews and after action reports I was intrigued enough to give them a try. A quick read through revealed several nice features. These include variable length turns, "blinds" and dummy units, deemphasis on charts and modifiers and potential for creative umpiring. As our players have always liked creative umpiring the last feature is particularly appealing.

Ravi and I are planning to do some "detailed reading" followed by play testing sometime this weekend. We plan to play one of the easier scenarios from the TFL scenario archive.

3 comments:

James said...

Any progress with the IABSM guys?

Manoj Govindan said...

We have made good progress. These rules have some good ideas but some of it is written quite badly. For the past couple of weeks we have been trying to get clarifications from the mailing list.

Things seem to be working out. If everything goes well we will have a game this weekend.

James said...

Oh yeah I noticed some of your (detailed) questions on the yahoo group. I have been a member of that for over a year but usually have my email option switched off as it generates a huge amount of emails a lot of which are frivolous. Dennis' little group puts up battle reports sometimes.
Good luck with the game if it happens.