Two Hour Supers!

Graham over at the Pairadice Saloon has been working on a set of supers rules using the Two Hour Wargames reaction system as its base.

This is exciting stuff indeed.  The THW reaction system isn’t for everybody and it does take some getting used to but once '”you get it” then you’ll never look back.

A supers game is perfect for this system for a few reasons:

1. The reaction system works best with fewer miniatures so a supers game of 4-6 miniatures a side is just right for a fast game with a lot of interaction.
2. The way the reaction system flows back and forth until a character is knocked down, out of the fight or runs away should replicate the short and intense bouts between heroes.
3. The reputation system (defined in Chain Reaction as “represents a combination of training, experience, morale, and motivation and is an expression of a characters overall fighting quality”) is a simple but effective scale of a heroes power that also allows for improvement, which brings me to…
4. All THW systems are perfect for campaign play.  Why play one game when you can play 5 or 6.  And let your heroes gain (or lose) skills and abilities on the way.
5. Solo game play.  This is great for a gamer that doesn’t get to play as much as he’d like, I can set up on the kitchen table and play with myself… by myself… a game on my own.  Or better still…
6. Same side play.  I can play a game with my kids, not against them.  This is important on so many levels but it makes it so much easier for my five year old to handle losing a game if Dad lost too.  “We’ll get them next time mate just you see!”

I’m very keen to see how Graham goes with this and the timing is perfect with my recent search for some good supers rules, maybe I’ve just found them.

Sorting out the Super Heroes

Searching through the mass of HeroClix miniatures it quickly became apparent that it was going to take “a long time” to find the dozen or so figures I needed.  So I foolishly decided to kill two birds with one stone and sort the miniatures while I went along.

This is what it looked like about halfway done.

I had previously started to sort the miniatures into their appropriate release sets but this time I decided to group them by their teams affiliations.  WizKids have made this easy by putting team affiliation logos right there on the base.  This has left me with about a dozen plastic bags worth of teams and two huge loose piles of figures, the non team specific ones and a whopping pile of bits where the mini has come away from the base.  These are mainly the flying characters which come shipped separate from the their base.  Sorting them out is going to be a couple evenings worth of Googling and gluing.

Right now though I have found all the minis I need and have a small collection of other cool looking minis that I’ve verified against the S2 Character Sheet Builder.  So when I the mood gets me all I need to do is grab a bag of miniatures and start making some cards for that team.  Justice League is up next and then I’ll switch to the Marvel universe and have a look in at the Avengers.

All that will have to wait though because tomorrow night me and the boys are going to roll some dice.

Making the Hero Cards

With the final look and feel of the cards sorted (well for now anyway) I decided to get a couple printed out and laminated.

I started by cutting out the cards, using a cutter makes quick work of this.  Then fold the cards along the centre line.

 

My first thought was to put six cards per A4 sheet but I ended up sliding in the last two once the sheet had taken and was rolling though.  It’s very important to hold the sheet while it’s moving through the laminator as you don’t want the cards to move.

Once its though you’ll have something like this.

And when you’ve done them all you’ll have this.

Which after you’ve cut up will give you this.

I just use scissors when cutting these out, they don’t need to be stacked or shuffled so their size isn’t so important.  Just make sure to leave 3-4mm around the edges to keep the seal and your fingers will also appreciate it if you round off the corners.

I’m working my way though both the DC and Marvel universes and trying to match up miniatures I have with stats that have already been created for the Super System.  There’s a few annoying omissions such as no Harley Quinn but that’s something I really can’t complain about and it’s something I can remedy by sitting down and nutting it out myself.

Now to sort out the rest of the miniatures.  I started this ages ago and have got six boxes like these full of teeny little heroes.

Just got two more boxes to unpack and sort…

Almost 2,000 of the little buggers before I stopped counting.  What else can I say except I love those 99 cent deals on eBay.

I’m thinking about debasing some of these and putting them on the 30mm rolled shoulder display bases such as these from eM4.

A bit of work but they should look nice.

Holy Skirmish Rules, Batman

I recently picked up a copy of Super System 3rd Edition and wow what a great set of rules.  I won’t go into too much detail about them until I’ve played a few more games but I will say that if you’re looking for a deeper set of rules for your Hero Clix minis then you simply can’t go past these.

The core game mechanics are simple but still have a lot of flexibility.  Most dice rolls are opposed and you tend to roll a lot of dice with plenty of rerolls.  Characters don’t tend to die often either, they may get weakened or hurt but they’re be back next episode.

Best of all the character creation rules are deep enough to create any character you can think of, or in my case you can easily recreate your favourite comic book heroes.  Better still is that someone has already done a lot of that work for you here.  One nice touch is the section on adding non combat related skills to your characters to add an RPG element to the game.

I’ve created a few hero cards for the game, mainly because I like pretty cards but also to help my kids get a grip on the system with colour coded stats.

Here’s a link to a PDF version of the cards above.  Just print, fold and put them into a card sleeve or laminate them like I have.

I’m very keen to get a few games going with the kids so I’ll post some reports up when I can.