#Quar Clash of Rhyfles

[maniakminis]

The Coftyr half of my Quar Clash of Rhyfles box is built, and as a little bonus I converted a Tractor Tank for them out of a Chibi Sherman model kit that's been sitting in my backlog for a long time.

For reference, these tanks look like this:

I think this will be a fine proxy, and it fits in the starter box with all the other models! To balance it out I bought 3 extra anti-tank infantry and 3 heavy machine gunners for the Crusader side. Next step is to get everything painted!

[skunts-own-truth]

U-uncle Porrip… Uncle Porrip, I love you.

[skunts-own-truth]

Got This Quar’s War on the mind, so I wanted to share some art from the setting by the game’s creator, Josh Qualtieri!

[skunts-own-truth]

Woah, all my Quar posts got noticed a bit today. Thank y’all for the Quar love, and expect more anteater guys to be posted soon. Work’s been real hell lately, so I haven’t had much paint time or willpower to do any. That said, I did get some resin prints from Zombiesmith, and they’re great! Take a look!

Love this little Crusader with his LMG slung over his shoulder, a sad droop to his head, wishing he was back in the fields tending to the moths his ma would bake into moth cakes for him. What a charmer, right?

[skunts-own-truth]

Important news for all Quar-fans:

Josh has started selling Squirrel Handlers for Clash of Rhyfles over on Zombiesmith!

[maniakminis]

Short!

I started building my Quar last night, I don't know what I was expecting but these guys are tiny! Here's a Space Marine for scale. The Quar bases are also shorter than the GW bases, but still.

And here's a Grot for scale as well. I built my 12 Crusaders, next I'll work on the Coftyr half of the starter set. All 24 models should easily fit in the box with the rule book and accessories it comes with.

I'm looking forward to painting these dudes, they should paint up really quickly.

[skunts-own-truth]

This is written hours after our game, so it won’t be an action-by-action write up, but I did want to write a little battle report for my first game of This Quar’s War:

It was a small game, two teams of 5 Rhyflers (basic troops,) and their Yawdryl (a sergeant,) with a very simple game-type. Whoever had the most models standing at the end of the game would earn 5 points, and 2 points would be earned per-model that crossed the middle point of the table onto the opponent’s side.

I was playing the Crusaders, who are slightly better at reaction shots with their Bogen rifles, and my roommate was playing the Coftyrans who are a little better at close combat with their basic gun than the Crusaders but a little worse at reaction shots. The two forces felt pretty even, at no point during the game did I feel like any stat differences made something unfair… despite how things actually went once dice hit the table.

We decided to do 3 full turns, and off the bat we were engaged with Quar’s turn mechanics. During each turn, the active player’s opponent draws a card that indicates the number of activations the active player is allotted. This card is kept hidden from the active player, but at the minimum you know you have 3 activations for your force. At most you can have 5. The fact that you don’t know how many you have until you get to your 3rd action makes moment to moment play very tense. Just spending an activation to move can be nail biting, as your Rhyfler runs across the battlefield to get a shot off at one of his foes you could find that you actually don’t have that 4th activation… and that poor lad is now sitting out in the open, with no cover to dive behind. I can’t tell you how often this made us both burst out laughing as we took unnecessary risks in that hope that we had a 4 or 5 activation turn!

Turn 1 was mostly positioning. We drew through the activation deck one by one, moving our Quar about. My fellas ended up taking the middle of the board, and pot shots from my roommate’s royalist bastards had my brave crusaders forced deeper and deeper into the middle. See, when you get shot at and you decide to dive for cover (which gives your opponent a rough negative to shoot you,) even if they miss you, their roll determines who moves your model as they dive. This means your opponent can position your fellas, and this happened to me a lot. It’s frustrating, but in a good way! You get “gobsmacked” if this happens to you, making your fellas easier to shoot at since they can’t react to shots. So, he pushed me to the middle and surrounded my lads, until I was completely outflanked with very little cover.

Turn 2, I managed to knock out his Cryfen LMG toting Rhyfler before it could do some real damage, and his Yawdryl which made him split his forced a bit more than he wanted to- but it really wasn’t enough. He had the positioning and cover, and my little Quar dropped one by one. When Quar go down, they stay down until a friendly model spends an action to check on them. This can be kinda scary because technically your Rhyfler isn’t dead until he is checked on and found dead. He can stand right back up on lucky roll, and to the surprise of my roommate I did manage to stand up my downed Quar six times during the game, but again, the positioning wasn’t in my favor and each time I brought something back it was an activation spent.

Turn 3 ended fast, we didn’t even get through 4 cards in the activation deck. I was down to two Quar standing, and I decided to die fighting. As my roommate’s forces closed in and backed my remaining Rhyfler up against the wall of a building, he fired and I used my reaction to return fire… which was a mistake. If I had dived for cover it would have saved my Rhyfler, but I was banking on him to miss so I can get a lucky reaction shot off. No dice. My guy was shot dead, his reaction lost as he fell to the ground.

With that, he managed to total 13 points to my 0. Just a total loss for me, really! Was just under an hour of playtime, even with us checking rules and rereading things to each other. My poor Crusaders. Hopefully next game I’ll get them a win in!

Listen, the game rules. I love it. It’s fast, it’s quirky, it plays for fun but is still fair, and it has adorable little anteater guys. What more can you ask for? I say go buy Clash of Rhyfles from Wargames Atlantic, if you’re itching for a new skirmish game that isn’t real world WW2 themed or Warhammer. I was! I didn’t even know I was, but the moment I locked eyes on this game I knew it was for me.

Plus…

The cavalry in the setting looks like this. Maybe one day we’ll get some of these little freaks in plastic? 👀 Personally, nothing would make me happier.

[skunts-own-truth]

Hey, all you folks that have been interested in Quar! The creator of the game just posted the most up to date core book online for free:

The Rhyfler’s Pocketbook Ver 2.

Go give it a download, and join me in the trenches!

[skunts-own-truth]

While I’m Quar-Posting today, here’s an example of play from the most recent rule addendum for Clash of Rhyfles… Apparently the Quar play Quar! Ain’t that adorable?

[skunts-own-truth]

Oh my!!

New Quar fellas!! 😍❤️😍

[skunts-own-truth]

what's quar

This Quar’s War is a fresh little miniature war game, currently played at the skirmish scale like 40k’s Necromunda or Kill Team, where you’re playing as these cute little anteater fellas called the Quar:

It’s played on in a small space, usually 2x2 or 3x3, with a nice clutter of terrain scattered around to give the little guys a good amount of cover. The core box for Quar, Clash of Rhyfles, comes with two factions:

The Crusaders and the Coftyrans as shown in the picture above. These are more factions slowly being released for the game, but the main concept is the Crusaders (left hand side of the image,) and their allies are trying to flush out nobility and royalty from their world, while the Coftyrans (right hand side of the image) and their allies are safeguarding the old royalist way of life and defending their farmsteads from the invading Crusaders.

The game is played using an action deck, on your turn, your opponent draws a card from the deck and keeps it hidden from you. The card will indicate how many activations you will have in your turn, ranging from 3-5. You know you will always have at least 3, so once you hit your third activation for your turn you ask your opponent “do I have a 4th?” If you do, you get to make one more action… and if you’re lucky, you may even have a 5th! This gives a lot of the action a sense of danger, dread, and a bit of that gambling rush. Once all of your activations are used up, you draw a card for your opponent, keeping it hidden, and they begin their turn.

A round lasts until the deck is drawn out, and usually goes very fast. You reshuffle the deck and start round 2, and keep going until you finish round 3 or 4, depending on the size of your armies. Games usually last around 20-50 minutes in my experience.

Where a lot of the fun for the game comes from is the fact that you don’t know how any action will go. The tests are simple: 3d6 vs. a skill score, usually of 12, with a series of negative modifiers. When shooting at a Ready unit, the target can pick to Dive for Cover or Return Fire, giving negatives to the shooter, but also adding an element of surprise. You can absolutely see your little guy dive for cover and get gobsmacked as he landed badly, or you could see your shooter get shot along with his target if the target was lucky enough to score a hit of their own. When actually hit, a model goes down. Once down, you have no idea if it’s dead or not. You need to move a model into base contact and spend a whole activation checking to see if they’re alive! If you are lucky, they’ll get right back up and start fighting again. If not, well, you got a dead Quar on your hands.

It’s that chaos of not knowing what your opponent will do, not knowing how many activations you have in your turn, not knowing how many of your guys are actually dead and out, all that, that really just makes the game so much fun. I’ve only played a handful of times now, but I can say firmly that a single round of Quar has given me more tension and thrill out of war gaming than most Warhammer games in my 15 years of dipping into all sorts of tabletop games. Blood Bowl and Mordheim are the two I would say match its intensity, and Blood Bowl is far easier to get folks into, but there is such a charm to Quar.

Everyone I’ve brought over to my place to teach how to play it has fallen in love with the game, not just because the rules are fun and exciting, but because the Quar themselves are just so fun to look at! They’re silly little guys, and as you have them fight over a war torn farmstead, you feel so much for your silly little guys, watching them get blown up by a grenade, only to stand back up proud to continue the fight later. It’s fantastic.

[skunts-own-truth]

Begun painting my first Rhyfler from the Quar: Clash of Rhyfles box. The green is a little darker than I wanted, but I think a wash could help darken it up a bit. But the Vellejo Electric Blue for the flesh looks wonderful on this brave little Crusader!

[yelw]

YES FINALLY. i was infodumping to my therapist about quar and she loves the squirrels. she said that they needed little helmets though because it was too dangerous for them. when i get a set im gonna kitbash those helmets on

Important news for all Quar-fans:

Josh has started selling Squirrel Handlers for Clash of Rhyfles over on Zombiesmith!

[skunts-own-truth]

The lore book “Western Iron” is free, along with most of the other old versions of the game, which explain the world in good detail. The current version of the 28mm game that I’m playing in this post doesn’t currently have a PDF online, but the feller who makes the game says it should be free to download soon!

Here’s a lot of Quar books, including multiple games you can use the minis for:

This is written hours after our game, so it won’t be an action-by-action write up, but I did want to write a little battle report for my first game of This Quar’s War:

It was a small game, two teams of 5 Rhyflers (basic troops,) and their Yawdryl (a sergeant,) with a very simple game-type. Whoever had the most models standing at the end of the game would earn 5 points, and 2 points would be earned per-model that crossed the middle point of the table onto the opponent’s side.

I was playing the Crusaders, who are slightly better at reaction shots with their Bogen rifles, and my roommate was playing the Coftyrans who are a little better at close combat with their basic gun than the Crusaders but a little worse at reaction shots. The two forces felt pretty even, at no point during the game did I feel like any stat differences made something unfair… despite how things actually went once dice hit the table.

We decided to do 3 full turns, and off the bat we were engaged with Quar’s turn mechanics. During each turn, the active player’s opponent draws a card that indicates the number of activations the active player is allotted. This card is kept hidden from the active player, but at the minimum you know you have 3 activations for your force. At most you can have 5. The fact that you don’t know how many you have until you get to your 3rd action makes moment to moment play very tense. Just spending an activation to move can be nail biting, as your Rhyfler runs across the battlefield to get a shot off at one of his foes you could find that you actually don’t have that 4th activation… and that poor lad is now sitting out in the open, with no cover to dive behind. I can’t tell you how often this made us both burst out laughing as we took unnecessary risks in that hope that we had a 4 or 5 activation turn!

Turn 1 was mostly positioning. We drew through the activation deck one by one, moving our Quar about. My fellas ended up taking the middle of the board, and pot shots from my roommate’s royalist bastards had my brave crusaders forced deeper and deeper into the middle. See, when you get shot at and you decide to dive for cover (which gives your opponent a rough negative to shoot you,) even if they miss you, their roll determines who moves your model as they dive. This means your opponent can position your fellas, and this happened to me a lot. It’s frustrating, but in a good way! You get “gobsmacked” if this happens to you, making your fellas easier to shoot at since they can’t react to shots. So, he pushed me to the middle and surrounded my lads, until I was completely outflanked with very little cover.

Turn 2, I managed to knock out his Cryfen LMG toting Rhyfler before it could do some real damage, and his Yawdryl which made him split his forced a bit more than he wanted to- but it really wasn’t enough. He had the positioning and cover, and my little Quar dropped one by one. When Quar go down, they stay down until a friendly model spends an action to check on them. This can be kinda scary because technically your Rhyfler isn’t dead until he is checked on and found dead. He can stand right back up on lucky roll, and to the surprise of my roommate I did manage to stand up my downed Quar six times during the game, but again, the positioning wasn’t in my favor and each time I brought something back it was an activation spent.

Turn 3 ended fast, we didn’t even get through 4 cards in the activation deck. I was down to two Quar standing, and I decided to die fighting. As my roommate’s forces closed in and backed my remaining Rhyfler up against the wall of a building, he fired and I used my reaction to return fire… which was a mistake. If I had dived for cover it would have saved my Rhyfler, but I was banking on him to miss so I can get a lucky reaction shot off. No dice. My guy was shot dead, his reaction lost as he fell to the ground.

With that, he managed to total 13 points to my 0. Just a total loss for me, really! Was just under an hour of playtime, even with us checking rules and rereading things to each other. My poor Crusaders. Hopefully next game I’ll get them a win in!

Listen, the game rules. I love it. It’s fast, it’s quirky, it plays for fun but is still fair, and it has adorable little anteater guys. What more can you ask for? I say go buy Clash of Rhyfles from Wargames Atlantic, if you’re itching for a new skirmish game that isn’t real world WW2 themed or Warhammer. I was! I didn’t even know I was, but the moment I locked eyes on this game I knew it was for me.

Plus…

The cavalry in the setting looks like this. Maybe one day we’ll get some of these little freaks in plastic? 👀 Personally, nothing would make me happier.