My occasional opponent, Ian Marsh, humoured me last night and agreed to play Piquet instead of his own ruleset Huzzah. I, in turn, humoured him and we played a variant of his design: Matched Action Piquet.
While I really like Piquet, I have often felt that it combines two different systems that are attempting to solve the same problem.
The game uses initiative rolls, which determine how much impetus a player has to perform actions. These are similar to the PIP dice in DBM or the command and control rules in Warmaster or the command chits used in Terry Gore’s Warfare series of rules. Each of these has the idea of limiting the number of orders that a general can issue and thus preventing the player from simply micro-managing his troops and managing to advance the whole army.
Piquet also uses a command deck of cards that govern which actions can be performed. A player has to wait for the right card before he can move his infantry, etc. The decks are a good system for representing national characteristics - probably the best system I have seen for doing this.
Where Piquet falls down is that it combines these two systems into one game and the player is not only restricted in the number of orders that he can issue but also in the type of order. This is what causes a lot of players’ frustration and turns them against Piquet, the fact that you can wait a long time to get a turn if the initiative dice are against you and then when you do get initiative you still can’t do anything!
What Ian’s Matched Action variant does is assign a number of action points to each officer in the command chain and allow them to use those action points to use their cards. New action points are only assigned to the C-in-C and they have to be transferred down the line of command to be used. Because each individual officer has their own action points, you can adjust your plan by concentrating on one sector of the field and passing action points where they are needed.
How many action points you have depends on your officers’ quality (and I ended up with a Poor C-in-C meaning Ian’s average commander has more points to use) and the command deck reflects your army’s national characteristics.
Ian is going to revise the rules following our playtest, but it is worth reading through them if you play Piquet. We played the Complex version of the variant where each officer has his own pool of action points.
We found the game enjoyable as you were always doing something, even if only drawing new action points or transferring the points to sub-commanders for your next attack.
The variant eliminate the long runs of initiative that result in one player feeling left out of the game, but still avoids being a YouGoIGo game. Give it a try.