GMTs Commands & Colors Samurai Battles is a great re-implementation of this classic title from Zvezda company. The game allow players to portray important engagements of Japanese history – mainly 15th century AD. The battles, included in the scenario booklet (40 of them!), focus on the historical deployment of forces and important terrain features in scale with the game system. The scale of the game is flexible and varies from battle to battle. For some scenarios, an infantry unit may represent an entire clan of soldiers, while in other scenarios a unit may represent just a few brave warriors.
What I really like is grouping some of the scenarios into the linked, chronological and logically connected sets. This usually means some particular battle being separated into couple of phases. That process can be done based on timeline with battle interlude, main action and final phase. But we shall also see the split based on troops location – like overview scenario, left flank, right flank, etc. I find both approaches enjoyable and allowing for much closer familiarization with the particular historical event.
We just received the reprint from GMT Games so I though it would be great occasion to gather in one place and share my training materials which I created over couple of years since the game was initially published. Let us have what I prepared:
I hope you will have as much fun with that game as I did. However, if you prefer written articles to video format, do not hesitate to have a look at those session reports. Enojoy!
Great game, but I found the map and blocks’ graphics and colours to be very « Meh ». I replaced them blocks by purple and yellow blocks: much nicer! 🙂
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I use figures from original Samurai Battles
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I do not have the original game but probably this is very thematic!
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