Salute Part 2 - So How was your Salute

My Salute was crazy, too many people to see and too much to do. It was like swimming through treacle. I did see some of the show but missed out on half the people I wanted to see. Simply crazy! In my last blog I touched on my personal view of the show, this time I wanted to focus on our Ninja game.

‘Tenchu Stealth Assasin’ went excellently, better than expected. Due to commitments, I could not run the game and had to rely on some good friends to do it for me. My sincere thanks to my fellow Berserkers, Paul, Pete, Martin and Rossco. More thanks to the legendary Mark Backhouse, Mark’s friend Derek and Simon (of Big-red-bat fame). It is good to see what started out as a crazy idea I’d had work time and again. The cries of ‘Ninja!!’ kept drawing people to the table, that was quite fun by itself. There was a ‘Golden Ninja’ available to be won for each time we played the game, which would be awarded to the player who did the best – not in ‘kills’ but completing the mission stealthily! In hindsight, we should have booked one more playing slot as we were booked solid for each game, even having to expand the players to six for the last game.

Here are some highlights of the game. One Ninja had to rescue Aguro (the wonder horse!) from some evil horse thieves. He asked as he was saving ‘that horse’, couldn’t it help him and kick the Ronin guarding it? Then there was the other Ninja who tried to drop stealthily from a rooftop to surprise a guard only to fall flat on his face…

One player suddenly announced “I have my lucky dice with me!” when it came to a pivotal moment. You guessed it; he produced the said die from his pocket and promptly rolled a ‘1’ with it! He did walk away with a ‘Golden Ninja’ though.

There was also the young lad who was playing with his father who managed the amazing feat of rolling six ‘ones’ in a row on a D6, only to follow it with a roll of a ‘two’.  Mark was kind and let him drink a health potion when he was ‘dead’, saying he had feigned death.

Another notable player was the last Ninja to play the ‘rescued the hostage’ scenario, in the last game of the day. He was very sneaky player, letting everyone else draw lots of attention first. He then infiltrated the castle, killed the enemy guarding the hostage and nearly had the perfect home run apart from the one incident… On the way out he had to make a climb roll for them both to climb down the wall. The Ninja was fine but the hostage rolled a ‘1’, fell and broke his neck! You can’t do a lot about bad dice and actually his dice were fine until the last two rolls!

The only criticism was some of the duels went on a long time with the big bosses. After 10 rounds of blocks and parries there was still no result, which left the other three players having finished waiting patiently for the last Ninja to complete his mission. So a straight dice off seemed right and the good guys invariably won.

You can try Tenchu for yourself in the next issue of Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy!