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My gaming opportunities have been thin on the ground for the last few years, for multiple macro and micro reasons. “Nightwatch” was one of the games that I definitely did not want to fall through the cracks.

Nightwatch is a co-op miniature wargame, with a flowchart AI approach to the waves of bad guys that attack a small group of PCs. If there was a miniatures game of the Vermintide video game series (itself almost a reskin of the Left 4 Dead series) then it would probably look a lot like Nightwatch.

The premise is one of an elite organisation (think MiB, BPRD, the fancy crossbow suppliers in Van Helsing) in a fantasy medieval world, that sends elite teams of hunters – “Pacts” – to take out scary monsters and their minions. The mechanics of the game are based on the “Exploit Zero” (formerly known as “Hardwired“) rules, which I played a couple of times and really enjoyed, so when I heard about the premise and upcoming release of “Nightwatch” I watched it closely on the authors blog.

Not long before the release of the game, about a year ago now, the author kindly offered me a version of the rules late in the editing stage, and we had a chat about some elements. I got a mention in the “Conclusion” section of the Nightwatch book as a result, which I only spotted last week when playing using the print copy of the rules. That was a fun surprise.

I finally got to play a couple of games of Nightwatch with Bazpaz last weekend. He provided the venue, terrain and every miniature bar the witch hunter, the Brettonian spy and the hound. Primarily that meant his Sylvaneth (plus faun) force made up the antagonists.

I love the Sylvaneth designs and I get a kick out of playing games with those figures. I also enjoy imagining them in a morally grey area, where the “heroes” are the invading aggressors, and the “villains” are potentially very creepy elemental spirits who are likely more principled than the stars of the show.

Having a buddy with a load of painted miniatures that you would like to paint and play games with is the next best thing to having them yourself.

We played two games, the first two of our “The Mark of Greenfinger” campaign, themed around the collapse of an uneasy truce between the human and forest dwellers in the region of “Mourning Wood” close to “Batinburg“. Scenario one involved escorting a suspected Bretonnian spy through a hostile wooded area to testify to the local magistrate, a run and gun scenario where speed was key.

Although the Bretonnian steadfastly refuses to speak anything but its peculiar native tongue, the three survivors managed to escort the strange foreigner to temporary safety.

Pursued by the strange and terrifying elemental creatures of Mourning Wood, the second game involved our heroes protecting the same taciturn spy in the ruins of an old farm.

Siege games are something that essentially every tabletop gaming toy soldier enthusiast wants to play. I have played and observed several over the years and frankly, most of them are visually striking but turgid affairs that have close to zero gameplay value.

Often missing key ingredients are the ability to make real decisions about where to apply limited resources in defence and the ability to actually move. It also certainly doesn’t hurt to have the waves of attacking forces played by a flow chart, rather than bored players. Neither of those issues came up in our game; it felt like a fun b-movie.

This mission turned out to be an exciting nail-biter. The ruined farmhouse terrain (from Fogou Models) that The Bazpaz had painted happily turned out to be ideal for purpose.

Evocative of the creepy old refuge building trope in countless movies, while being a clean, practical design for actually gaming with, the ruined farm set was in some ways the unsung hero of the game, doing everything right, with minimum fuss. It is funny how a thing like that can make or break a game of toy soldiers.

There are numerous other aspects of Nightwatch that I could happily blather on further about – I didn’t even mention the very entertaining game mechanisms forcing Helga to pay off a mysterious debt throughout the campaign, and the vow of piety that disrupts Byron’s plans at all the wrong times for example – but this post is already far too long. If you want to find out how that works, then buy the PDF: it costs less than lunch.

As for the fate of Helga, Byron and Elsa… I suspect that now that we have the rules of the game a little clearer in our heads, we will either restart “The Mark of Greenfinger” campaign, or we will do the dirty birdie thing that turned Annie Wilkes into a psychopath, and have our heroes crawl from the rubble of the farmhouse, dust themselves off and gloss over what must have been a pretty messy end. It will be fun either way I expect.

Filed under: Games in Progress | Tagged: 2021, Batinburg, Bazpaz, Fantasy, Mourning Wood, Nightwatch, Sylvaneth, The Bazpaz, Witch Hunter |