It looks like a tight, compact wargame. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit
down with a deep game like Advanced Squad Leader or a monstrosity like Stalingrad Pocket or TSR’s Air War.
Until the empty nest hits and my four lovely little time sinks move out,
I’ve contented myself with lighter fare such as Awful Green Things, Outpost
Gamma, and now hopefully Khyber
Rifles. The latter is a wargame
based on the campaign that kicked off the British withdrawal from Afghanistan
back during the height of their empire days.
This past weekend, the boy and I found ourselves with an
empty house and an hour to kill. With
the impending school season this may have been our last chance for a while to
squeeze in a quick wargame. It didn’t
work out so well. Apparently, you can take
the massive wargames away from a wargamer but you can’t take the massive
wargames out of a gamer.
We sat down, set up the small map and handful of counters –
each side gets around 20 to 25 of them – and reviewed the rules. That’s when things came to a screeching halt.
Khyber Rifles is a standalone title, but it is also part of
a series of games built on a common ruleset framework. The package comes with a four page ruleset
detailing the universal rules, and an extra page listing the force set-up and
scenario specific rules. For the record,
the other scenarios in the Hand of Destiny series are Lettow-Vorbeck, an East
African WWI game, and Custer’s Final Campaign, the battle of Little Bighorn.
As a graying grognard of no small experience, when the rules
refer to a Combat Results Table, I know to look for something like this…
…and came up empty.
No player aid, no chart, nothing.
To email! Decision Games
responded the next day by pointing out that the table in question appears on the
map, but is called the Battle Table, not the Combat Results Table. It turns out this is what I should have been
looking for:
