Planet Wargaming

Still catching up on previous games with new rule sets, we get to an AWI game played at the club a week ago using the Loose Files and American Scramble set by Andy Callan. These were published in Practical Wargamer (I think) a few years ago and have some very interesting ideas.

The basic principle behind them is that to manoeuvre bodies of men through the dense terrain of an AWI battlefield is difficult and requires patience and skilful handling by the officers. To represent this, the rules use a system called Disruption points (DP). A unit gets DPs through a variety of actions. The movement is controlled by dice and whenever a 1 or 2 is rolled, a unit picks up a DP.

Similarly, DPs come from casualties. The more DPs a unit has, the less effective it is at fire and at combat.

A unit loses DPs by standing still for a turn (and redressing the ranks) or by having an officer attached who can help it order itself. This results in officers charging back and forth across the battlefield trying to keep their men ordered. Officers have a limited number of order points that they can use each turn and this means you have to plan their movement and rallying help.

In practise, the game is very harsh against an attacker who will pick up DPs as they move, whilst a defender will be able to remove their DPs from fire each turn as they are standing still.

The British regular units have an advantage in attack and it pays for the Americans to line the fences and try to hold them off with firepower! The only solution for the British is to attack in depth so that units with a lot of DPs (there is a maximum of 5 and then you take casualties) can be withdrawn to rally in safety before going back into the attack.

I thought the rules worked very well and really made you think about advancing your troops and keeping them organised. If you have picked up even one DP as you move, you could pick up another couple whilst charging so it paid to make sure your troops were rallied and fresh before any charging.

The third most recent game was another game with Games Workshop’s Two Towers Lord of the Rings rules. I resisted the initial release of the Fellowship of the Ring game, but my resistance finally crumbled after seeing the second film and I bought the boxed game of Two Towers and a number of copies of the Battlegames in Middle earth magazine.

The Two Towers rulebook is well up to the standard of GW products with clearly explained rules and a lot of superb photographs.

As I have yet to paint any of my LOTR miniatures, we played a game using Saxons and Arthurians. My figures are individually based for WHAB on 20mm bases anyway as I wanted to use them for skirmish games.

I used some stats posted to the WAB Yahoo groups discussion list as the basis for my Arthurians and Saxons and added a few extras of my own.

The Saxons had a total of 56 figures which were a mix of normal ceorls plus slingers. They also had 4 berserkers who have light armour, but get two attacks with double-handed swords and can take 4 wounds.

I assigned them 3 captains and 5 War Dogs. The War Dogs are based on the Bernard Cornwell books and I gave little protection and two attacks. The idea is that a single figure holds each one and when released they will attack an opposing soldier. If they manage to beat him, they knock him down. In any case, they are a one shot weapon and once released (or their holder attacked) they leave the battlefield.

The best technique for using War Dogs is to use them to knock holes in the opposing shield wall and then charge in next turn to take advantage of the fallen troops. When it works, it works pretty well.

The Arthurians had 14 mounted Comitates including two captains, 20 foot soldiers including 1 captain and 12 archers.

The basic scenario was a simple breakthrough one with the Saxons attempting to get half their figures off the far table edge. I was the Saxons and just failed to achieve this, but it was a close run thing.

The rules are very quick and easy to play. The combat system is a little unsophisticated where the fighting ability of the two combatants is only used if the die roll is a tie and so a lot is down to luck. But, they do produce a fast and fun game that comes to a result in a couple of hours and there are a fair number of tactics that can be explored and played with..

The captains all have Might points that can be expended to give you an advantage of moving first if you have lost the initiative and this gives a real feeling of Dark Age heroes running forward or fighting several foes at once.

The LOTR races are heavily modelled on Saxons, etc and the game works very well for Dark Age games. I’ll definitely be playing it again.

The second game was our first chance to use the Redoubt ECW figures that Dave, a fellow club member, has been painting. And very nice they are as well.

The rules we used for this first skirmish game were Thunder and Plunder. These are part of the set Blood and Swash/Thunder and Plunder by Buck Surdu and Chris Palmer. These are the same guys that wrote GASLIGHT, one of my favourite rulesets.

I have been using Blood and Swash for my Three Musketeer games for a while and like their use of card based actions and characteristics. They produce a fun, fast game with lots of slashing and parrying!

The rules were originally written for Pirate games and Thunder and Plunder provides rules for unit of pirates fighting each other. As such, they translate to ECW fairly well. The only areas where we had problems was with the handling of Pikes and Cavalry.

We decided to give Pikemen the opportunity to attack first, if facing musketeers. If they killed their opponent then the musketeer could not fight back. We also gave the same option to cavalry against infantry. This seemed to work okay.

We allowed musketeers to either fire or reload on each turn. This turned out to be a bit of a problem as musket fire was a lot more effective than we expected, with one cavalry unit taking 2 casualties and then running away! I think we should change to reloading taking 4 turns to slow down the effect and rate of fire - although this does take a lot more book keeping than simply using a piece of smoke to indicate that a unit needs to reload.

All in all, we had a fun game but the rules need tweaking to really capture the spirit of ECW skirmish. We are going to try out Warhammer ECW in a few weeks to see if that works any better and then probably try out File Leader as well.

After all that we’ll probably combine the best bits of all the rules into our own mix.

I have played a whole host of different games over the last few weeks all with different rules sets and in different periods. Perhaps I should settle down to playing something regularly and actually learn a game thoroughly!

The first game was of Huzzah! This is the Napoleonic ruleset developed by a close friend Ian Marsh which is the culmination of a lot of Ian’s ideas over a number of years. The rules take a number of different concepts and mix them up with Ian’s own ideas to produce something unique.

The command and control rules are similar to Warmaster and it uses the same idea of staggers and kills that appear in Shako.

While I enjoy Huzzah games, I still don’t feel completely comfortable with the rules for a variety of reasons. I think the one that amuses Ian most is the fact that I still feel that there should be some shooting rules in the game! Instead of having a firing phase, small arms fire is included in the concept of threat zones. If you are an infantry or cavalry threat zone then you find it harder to move and can suffer staggers that could eventually turn to kills.

It is an elegant mechanism, but I still feel that there is something missing from game of Huzzah in that I haven’t had a chance to fire my muskets at someone! I think that this is one level of abstraction too far for me.

This , of course, won’t stop me from stealing some ideas from Huzzah for my changes to the Pictor’s Studio Warmaster based ECW rules!

I have to admit that rarely play Napoleonics these days apart from games of Huzzah when Ian comes up from the Isle of Wight. It seems to have fallen out of favour at the club (although most people have Napoleonic collections). The one set of rules I have stuck with is Piquet, which I feel work very well for Napoleonics - probably better than any other period. They are going through the process of producing second editions of most of their supplements and I am looking forward to the second version of the Les Grognards supplement.

I don’t know why Napoleonics should cause so much argument and diversity of rules systems - perhaps more than any other war (considering what a short period of time it covers) - and every Napoleonic player I know seems to be still searching for the perfect rules set.

More on the other games later…