Skirmish Wargame Rules [Part 3]

In today's post I'll be going through to cement some of the concepts we went over in Part 2, as well as talking about actions, initiative order, and leadership.

O-rings, Oh My

I talked about using red O-rings as Blood Counters to track damage, and I still think it's a great idea (if I do say so myself). These are the little rubber washers you can buy at any hardware store, and they come in tons of different shapes and sizes. Well not shapes so much as sizes. I'm pretty sure most O-rings are... well, O-shaped. To expand on that concept, I was starting to think about some special abilities units might have, and I realized that we can use more than one color of O-ring to specify different kinds of damage. A red O-ring is just plain old bloody damage - cuts, bruises, scrapes, eviscerations. Some of the elite, specialized units might have abilities that let them cause different kinds of damage. So here are a few basic ideas that I came up with for types of damage and how they work:

O-ring Color
Red - normal damage. This is caused by getting your ass kicked.
Green - poison damage. Certain kinds of units/races, like Assassins or Lizardfolk, carry poisoned weapons. An attack made with a poisoned weapon gives the victim a green o-ring. A poisoned model doesn't die quicker, it just gets nauseous and loses one die to all of its attack rolls for the rest of the game, unless the poison damage is healed somehow.
Black - pestilence damage. A disease-ridden rat carries pestilence in its bite, which gives the victim of its attacks a black o-ring. A model with a black o-ring causes an immediate wound (also black) to any other model that comes into base contact with it. Except other models of the the disease-carrying persuasion, of course. Pretty wicked stuff. Stay away from the infected guy!
Yellow - necrotic damage. This is the only type of damage that cannot be healed or cured. It stays with the model until death or until the end of the game. Even if a model has the ability to heal or cure damage, necrotic damage is not removed in this way.
Blue - magic damage. Damage caused by any spell is grouped into this category. More on this later.

Leadership and Actions

Turn phases are booooring. So there aren't going to be any phases in this game where everyone moves, everyone attacks, or everyone bends over and moons the enemy. I like the idea of actions and leadership, instead. The leader of the pack doles out commands every turn based on the tactical situation of the board. It's the only way to rationalize how one model two feet away from another model is going to turn his crossbow toward a charging enemy to defend his comrade from a distance.

I also can't get past the fact that it sucks to sit there and watch your opponent move his entire army, or warband or whatever, then attack with the entire thing, etc. before you get to react. None of that! And no initiative values or initiative rolls, either. I'm using a deck of cards. That's right, regular old playing cards. Here's how it works.

1. Shuffle the 52, and every player picks 3 cards from it. Or gets dealt 3 cards, or however you want to run it.
2. A round begins. Everyone stands there until somebody decides he's going to do something.
3. Somebody finally declares that he's going to do something, so that person must use one of his 3 actions for the turn. He chooses a card and throws down. It goes on the table, face down.
4. Here's where the gambling begins. If anyone else wants to try and use an action before the other player, they also put a card down. This continues until the wagering stops. Each player can only put one card down at a time, and they only have to do so if they want to.
5. Everyone turns over their cards, and the actions proceed in order from highest card to lowest card. Aces beat everything except other aces, and cards go from King down to Duce from there.
6. Once everyone who put a card down has gone, start the betting again until no one has any cards left. Then re-draw and start the next round.

Is this going to work, or should everyone have to play a card each time?