DBN Tournament 2010

This weekend is our wargame club's (Colorado Military Historians) annual three-day weekend. This Saturday morning, ten members (including myself) participated in a Napoleonic tournament using the excellent DBN rules.

Each person played three, one-hour games with each person scoring a point for each enemy element destroyed in their battles. Almost all of the games ended before the allotted hour was up, but there were I think three that ended at the timer, and one was a draw.

The top three players points were actually very tight, with myself finishing third. I won both of my first two battles by scores of 5 to 2 and 4 to 2, but lost my third battle 2 to 4. Silly thing is that I was ahead 2 to 0 in that last fight and ended up losing! The Gods of war are fickle!

The winner of the tournament was Terry Shockey - one of the finest gentlemen I know as well as an excellent drinking partner and gaming partner. He was awarded the DBN board I made (seen on this blog).

A special thanks to Dan Gurule and Matt Vigil for organizing and managing the fun we had and for investing their time, cash and friendship into the terrain boards we battled upon. here's Dan getting us into battle formation.

I have to say that I really like DBN.It always produces fun and challenges and does force me to make decisions while elegantly limiting my options! When people say DBA (and this is a DBA variant) is an acronym for "Dice Before Ability" I think they just have missed out on the appreciation of the system. How you set up, how you maneuver, how you get your troops to battle in advantageous conditions is what matters. Sure, you can roll a "1" and your would-be victim can roll a "6" - but that's baseball. That's what dice do - in this game and all others that have dice. The factors of the conditions of the engagements weigh on the die roll result as they should.

Here are some various shots of the gang at play...

Colin (left) and Dan

Scott (left) and Nate

Matt (background), Andrew (left) and John

Greg (left) and Terry

The gang going at it

Andrew, relaxing before defeating me

Terry (left) and Nate

Here are some various battle shots. We had 5 French armies battling against 2 British, 2 Austrian and 1 Prussian armies. Although Terry, the overall winner was an Allied player, the French actually edged the Allies in total points scored!