I had been putting off this game for a while. I'm not sure why.

It's my solo game, we call it a big game, since it involves many factions and plays for months.

The rat men were an upstart faction, discovered by the Templars as they explored the area around their base. Our rules spawn random factions with random amounts of points at bases found through exploring. The Templars only had a small force and encountered a mass of rats and withdrew.

I like all the factions involved in this game. I've always been a Templar fan. York is one of the first custom factions I made and I have recently been adding to it. And who doesn't like rat men? They are always a problem to deal with but there's something charismatic about them.

York was also a randomly spawned base, but it had been overrun by rats and captured. The Templars were allied with York, so the guys in white came to the rescue. Combined- the remnant forces of York, 100 points,...

My son has just designed his first virtual army in our email Sylvano-scape game. He lives in a small apartment and doesn’t have a lot of stuff. He has no miniatures with him. In the past he’s moved a bit and cut his belongings down accordingly.

When we started playing email games I’d send him faction lists so he could pick his armies. Growing up he spent years making custom figures with me and knows a lot of our pointing formulas by heart. So he sat down and whipped up a mercenary army- The Red Company- to play in our game.

I highly approve. I love the heroes and the implied back stories. He did some interesting things. The Red Company archers have seven range and five move, making them top of the line human ranged fighters. But my son also gave them melee penalty one and setup. The melee penalty robs them of an attack and defense dice in hand to hand. Setup means it takes them a full attack turn to prepare to fire after moving, so when they move they can’t...

It was a battle in one of our big game scenarios. On one end of the huge wall map the dwarves controlled the North-East, while the Samurai held the South-East. There was an unspoken truce as both factions extended their lands westward.

Unspoken truces always end, don’t they? It seems our species is a warlike one; always fighting for one reason or another. In our big game the factions have personalities. It’s what the person playing them thinks that faction would do.

My son was playing the dwarves. There were carefully building a strong empire and had decided it was time to head south into Samurai lands. After all, there was no official agreement, so they weren’t violating anything.

I was playing the samurai. We were outraged. We’d considered the dwarves allies, and felt betrayed. Most of our points were in the West so they immediately turned around and headed home. We had very few points available in our homeland. We withdrew and...