By the power of the lavishly-produced Tabletop Simulator module, here’s our Turnip28 testing footage (with tuber-lar comments).
Turnip28 is a very rules-light Napoleonics game. It’s set in a weird future where black powder warfare is fought on foggy, tussocked battlefields where moldy armies of possibly-mutated scum march. We’re off to a good start, I’d say.Turnip28 simulates Napoleonic stuff such as heavy cavalry being right proper scary, or skirmishers being a pain in the ass, or horsemen being much more vulnerable than infantry when running into a bog. In fact, rules explicitly mention making enemies retreat into bad terrain/other units as a great thing to do.For a rules-light ruleset, it even gets some command-and-control in! That is, you activate commanders, and then activate the unit they command. Uncommanded units go after all commanded ones do. They can also experience special scenario blunders, which are much worse than the usual “carry out the order, but without benefits” form that regular blunders follow.There’s a surprising degree of freedom to build your army. It doesn’t seem like much at the start – you can choose from three types of infantry, two types of cavalry, and an artillery piece. However, since you can only take four units in a standard game, you’re in for some serious mixing-and-matching. Plus, there’s the choice of armaments. Is it muskets for everyone, or are you feeling pikey-and-shotty? Maybe you want bows? Sure, they allow targets much better saves, but now you can shoot more than once a turn!Adding to that are Cults, the factions of Turnip28. They don’t have much in the way of lore, but plenty of character is baked into the rules. They are rated by ease of use in the rulebook. I picked Slug’s Lament, a rooty parody of Napoleon. It provides a free unit of Grogs, an improved-type of basic Brute infantry. However, they and my general stayed off the table till turn 3. So I had a free unit, but in return, I was asked to make-do with lack of command initiative for most of the game. Trade-offs!In the end, our second playtest devolved into a mad scramble to finish off Cassa’s remaining officer. Otherwise, he would have won based on objectives. I guess this sort of comedic scramble is fully supported by the spirit of the game.All in all Turnip28 is a great excuse to take the leftover miniatures from building a Silver Bayonet army, and then just kitbash and greenstuff them into some beautiful monstrosities out of a Bosch painting.
