Carnevale: How to Win

As with most modern wargames Carnevale comes with a good number of scenarios and the victor is determined by the accumulation of Victory Points. Back in the good old days it was all about kill for most games but things have moved on to give a more varied experience.

Not all of the methods for generating VP's are used in every scenario and it's not unusual for one side to have different methods to the other. Carnevale uses it's Agenda objectives to add a random element into scoring VP's. A scenario may ask you to draw a certain number of cards and then you score VP's for each you complete, if an objective is impossible then you just draw another one instead. 

The Agenda card system can also then be further modified by a series of factors which change the way in which they behave. Just having the combination of the thirty five different agendas and five modifiers (which can be combined with each other) gives a massive amount of variability on how to score VP's.

We can use the Acrobatic Display agenda as an example of the movement system in Carnevale as well. As I wrote before Carnevale uses a number of tables to determine the outcome of actions your model takes and below is the Jump table. A basic role always has a target of 7+ (on a D10) and every success is called an Ace in the game. It follows then that the higher your Dexterity the more likely you are to achieve the Success state and the further your jump will be. You always one roll different colour dice (Destiny Dice) in each test and if you score a 10 on the Destiny dice & one other Ace you get a Critical and if you score a 1 on the Destiny dice and no Ace's you get a Fumble.

So someone like the Capodecina with his Dexterity of 6 and Acrobatic (2) which allows the reroll of 2 dice in a Dexterity check is going to have a much easier time pulling off long range jumps than the Radruu with it's Dexterity of 3.

You can also get VP's by killing the enemy though it seems more usual to score them by having models survive the battle, as you can see below. It will be interesting to see if that encourages a more conservative playstyle as it prioritises living over going after the enemy and perhaps gives a boost to the side with more models. 

In a game in which you may only have 7 - 10 models in play at the start losing one or two could mean a big swing in VP's to your opponent.

The third way of scoring VP's is via objectives, these are markers or areas on the board that can be controlled in one way or another and yield VP's at the end of the game. I've not seen any scenario's that give VP's for controlling them during the game.

The types of Objective are:

Claimable - cannot be moved so you need to be in base to base contact to control

Destructible - can be destroyed to deny anyone VP's

Hidden - has a hidden value of 0 - x which is revealed by a model in contact with it

Mobile - can be picked up and carried

One important factor to keep in mind is that whilst characters with the Mindless rule can claim / carry objectives they cannot score VP's with them. So whilst the Rashaar Urchin would be great at stealing a mobile objective it would need to be dropped off to another character before the end of the game to score VP's. Of course just denying your opponent the change to score may also be good enough as you may not both be after the Objectives.

The three different methods of scoring VP's two of which have modifiers that can change them up give a great array of ways to score a scenario and give the home-brew scenario maker a good number of factors they can change up in custom scenarios.