My first game of Dragon Rampant - Goblins vs Gondor

I've been painting armies for use with Dragon Rampant for a while.  I finally was able to put some models on the table and play a game.

Randy took control of the forces of Gondor and I led the Goblin horde.  We played the Death Chase scenario from the Dragon Rampant rule book.  The forces were pretty basic as this was a learning game.

I thought I would share a few pictures of the game and a few of my first thoughts.

The Goblins where the attackers and were trying to stop the men of Gondor from crossing the field of battle.

The men of Gondor set up their forces with an archer unit on each flank and their foot units and general in the center.  The Goblins split their forces pretty evenly between the north and south sides of the board.

The men of Gondor had better quality troops, while the goblins had a bit larger force.

I like the generic nature of the rules.  You can use any models and call them whatever you want.  Of course, there is a certain amount of common sense that should be applied, but that is necessary in any game.

Another neat idea is allowing units to have different sizes by allowing models to have multiple wounds.  This lets you play the game with larger forces or small warbands.  We only had a one unit that had multiple wounds, but I plan to try a game using a single model for each unit to see how these work for a skirmish kind of game.

At first I thought the activation rolls were going to be easy and everyone would get to activate every turn.  That was not the case.  I'm sure you could have games that play out that way, but we were missing 5+ or 6+ regularly.  I wasn't sure if wounds on the unit affect the activation roll, we chose not to apply any reduction to the roll as it would have been very hard to activate a unit after it took a few wounds.  I think we did it correctly, but it was our first game.

I like that units that fail to rally take another wound as they run away.  It gives a feeling of your unit actually running for their lives.  Alternatively, it also makes rallying more difficult each turn if you fail the roll.

Overall, I was impressed with the game and look forward to playing it a few more times.  I'd like to try more options and see how this works for skirmish level engagements.