In Her Majesty’s Name is a miniatures war game that is set in a steam pink setting of 1895. Small bands of of figures are assembled to fight over the objectives you establish. This is a skirmish game where you will generally field not more than ten models per player. Written by by Craig Cartmell and Charles Murton the book totals 64 pages costs about 15.00 and is also available as a pdf. If you know of any book published by Osprey publishing you already know the quality you’re getting.
This Skirmish game can be bloody quick. I’ve had games last as little as 15 minutes or as long as an hour. Play is pretty smooth, it uses an alternate activation system where models take turns following the model play of move and shoot.
I found the games use of the d10 to be refreshing. It reminded me of VOID 1.1, which is still among my favorite games of all time. In Her Majesty’s Name has built most of the modifiers into skills and weapons. In fact you can use this formula 90% of the time D10 + equipment modifier + any miscellaneous modifiers. By doing this they have greatly reduced the need to calculate long equations to reach your target number. It has also eliminated constantly referring to charts to figure out what each modifier is. I found that these game mechanics are fairly easy to pick up.
I already mentioned that hthe game used alternate activations as its method of turn taking. Every turn there is an initiative roll (d10 +leadership) that determines the first player. Movement is the second phase of the turn. Followed by the Shooting phase and then the Fighting phase..
The Movement phase is pretty straight forward and it includes rules for entering Melee combat, disengaging, flying and, terror effects. All models can run by adding 3 to their movement. The terror effects introduce the pluck roll which I will talk about in just a little bit.
The Shooting Phase is pretty much what you would expect. That is say they don’t throw any curve balls at you. I think the most unique mechanic for shooting In Her Majesty’s Name is allowing models in melee to shoot at other models. That isn’t a mechanic you see very often and they did well.
The Fighting phase is where most of the damage was done in our games. Most of which came from swarming your opponent. There are two methods that can be applied to this tactic. The first,outnumbering. merely grants a +1 modifier to all models that outnumber the enemy. While the second, mobbing, applies the number of extra models as a modifier to one designated attacker. For example a defender is fighting four combatants. The attacker decides to use mobbing. His Primary attacker will receive a +3 modifier on the attack roll. You can argue all day that this isn’t as good as four roll but it sure speeds up a game. The other thing that ht introduce in the fighting phase is mystical powers. These powers can do just about anything in the game from modify skills, to improving your movement. At first I thought the mystical powers were going to be hokey, but my son proved me wrong.
The pluck roll is basically an invuln save, whenever a model is hit they make a pluck roll. If the roll is greater than the models pluck roll then nothing happens, equal to knocks the model down, and a roll less than pluck removes the model from game.
Force construction is quite possibly the greatest part of the rules. The first thing I should note is this is a sandbox system, designed to encourage you to make your own companies. What they did well was prepare you for this part of the book, in nearly every chart they include the point system used in in building. By the time your ready to builds you’ve seen enough that you’re not overwhelmed. Construction was easier for me In Her Majesty’s Name than many other games.
The last fifteen pages of the book are scenarios for you to play.
In Her Majesty’s Name has proven to be a sandbox game that has a lot of offerings in it slim package. It has given us several hours of fun. One of it’s greatest features is the simplicity of the d10 system. It’s second greatest feature is that the sandbox allows for an endless amount of possibilities.
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