At first we played on my table which is ... ok. Rather cheap but highly customizable to fit any scenario requirement.
Game #1 Torii
My Otokodate list played by me against a sohei list during the "Find the Senseï" scenario.
During the first few rounds I'm spreading my guys in search for the senseï. The geisha don't find anything but an ashigaru with katana is luckier. The catch is that the house is in my ennemy's half table. It won't be easy to drag the senseï back into my deployment zone.
One sohei hero won't let me have my way and enters the house to kill the ashigaru and possibly capture the senseî for himself. In the next picture I've removed the house to show the fight inside:
Meanwhile, I set the remaining 3 houses on fire. Some of my men take few wounds in the process though. The remaining forces clashes and it doesn't go well for me. By the end of the 4th round, i've lost 7 miniatures and the remaining 5 are all wounded. I've killed only one sohei warior ... The sohei hero inside the house managed to kill the first ashigaru, the geisha and the assassin while suffering only one wound.
But, at the end of the day, only Victory Points matters and my pyromaniac tendencies are rewarded while my opponent eagerness to fight me till the end instead of achieving mission's goals turns to be his downfall.
It's worth mentioning that we only used the primary objective and didn't roll for a secondary.
Game #2 Ronin
Only 4 Sohei (my band) against 5 bandits. The monks are here to defend some peasants from an attack. The defending player set the scenery as he wishes and then deploy monks and peasants. The attacker then deploys on any border.
So I have decided to set a town square in the middle of the table with the peasants inside. I assumed it was the best course of action, not knowing which side the bandits will come from.
When the bandits started moving, i moved the peasants in the opposite direction and placed my sohei for interception.
The main feature in the Ronin game system is its fight system. Inside each combat, each player secretly choose a number (depending of the troop rank) of offensive and defensive moves. With theses moves you can boost Initiative, boost your defense, make one big strike or several smaller attacks, ... there are a lot of modifiers to take into account: skills, weapons, several levels of armor, different kinds of wounds, situational modifiers, ... Even with dices rolls, all these modifiers stacked together weight a lot on the final result. Individual fights in Ronin are much more detailed and computational.
That said, luck played a lot with insane dicerolls in favor of the sohei. The final result is pretty self explanatory:
The scenario was really cool. I liked the great liberties of deployment and scenery placement. But i'm really not a big fan of alternate activation. It's still better than a full army activation (like 40k) but less interesting than a full army activation WITH reaction (like Infinity or Torii).
We had another game night using my friend demo table (and full paint minis !) and I will post some new battle reports soon. Here is a sneak peek: