Reserve Chips in Ramekin (the Genie Delivers?)

New supplies of 18mm chips in two colours, and the requisite D3 to sort out the mysteries of off-table reserves. Hot from the Genie.

I've been doing some work on my Ramekin Napoleonic rules, to encourage the realistic use of off-table reserves. Ramekin is my house variant of Commands & Colors:Napoleonics - it uses the movement and combat systems from C&CN (with some minor changes) but replaces the Command Cards with a dice-based activation system which allocates Order Chips to units. The introduction of this hybrid game has gone pretty well to date, though my recent Neumarkt scenario got a little bogged down in the introduction of off-table reserves into the action. I have been thinking how to improve this problem, and I was delighted (and very surprised!) by the number of interesting contributions and ideas I received.

I am very grateful to Arlen, Dave, David, Chris, Chris, Mark, Peter, Dan, Ross and Rob (and certainly one or two others - if I've omitted you, you know who you are) for applying their very considerable intellect and gaming experience to the issue of my humble rules, and, especially, to Goya, for analysing my rambling draft, and to the Archduke, for coming up with the logical but ground-shaking idea that there should be two types of Order Chips - ordinary ones (as at present), and (exciting, new) Reserve Chips, which are a bit different, as I shall attempt to describe with some attempt at brevity. Thank you, gentlemen.

 

A proportion of this post is copied from an email exchange I had earlier today - the previous recipient may well recognise sections of the text - apologies, as necessary, but it seemed a shame to waste it! What I like about this is the simplicity - even I can understand it! No doubt some further tweaking will be necessary, but this seems to be shaping up, and it now needs a little playtesting.

Eventually there has probably been sufficient interest in this to justify a short blog post - it will mean little or nothing to most readers, but never mind. Here is what is beginning to look like The Answer (or the First Draft of The Answer...).

* Ramekin rules are pretty much unchanged, except there are now two colours of Order Chips - one colour is Reserve Chips.

* These Reserve Chips arrive by a slow trickle, controlled by the dice, rather like the Order Chips, but there are a couple of differences...

* If your army includes an off-table reserve (of any size) you get to roll an extra D3 along with your Initiative Dice each turn - it doesn't add to the Initiative Total - the only thing you can use it for is to generate Reserve Chips.

* All you can ever do with Reserve Chips is use them to move off-table units on to the table - you can double up these Reserve Chips if you have accumulated enough, to allow the reserves to travel a little further on to the table, but you can't use them for fighting, and once the reserve units are on the table you need normal Order Chips to do anything with them - which is in itself a good reason to wait a while before bringing them on. You can't change Reserve Chips into Order Chips. No.

* If any of your off-table reserves are delayed for any reason (such as the Prussians at Waterloo) then the scenario will include a rule to determine/restrict when they are allowed to come on.

* If you have Reserve Chips left after you've brought all your off-table units on, you can ditch them, and stop rolling the extra die, since it doesn't achieve anything.

* Ramekin already stipulates that normal Order Chips can be carried forward to the next turn if not used, subject to a maximum carry-forward of 5; Reserve Chips may be carried forward without limit. [I am thinking of also allowing Order Chips in the player's stash to be converted to Reserve Chips, without the option to change them back later, but haven't decided about this]

* [Designer's Note...] I have been nervous of creating gamey situations where (for example) a player may use the existence of a reserve as a crafty way to generate extra Order Chips for his army. I think the system set out here works for a number of reasons. I've also abandoned various ambitious plans to allow reserves to be activated by the surrender of accumulated Victory Points - not least because I was at a loss to explain what this represented in a real battle. Apart from the good sense of keeping the reserve fresh and safe, it requires some time to accumulate sufficient Reserve Chips to get a strategic advance organised, and also bringing on the reserve too early runs the risk that there won't be enough Orders to go round - when the army is getting worn out, some of the units will not be using Orders any more, so there should be spare to look after the reserve. The tactic of bringing on the reserve prematurely, to jam up the table when there are insufficient Order Chips to do anything with them looks (historically, I hope) like a bad one!

Anyway - it obviously needs a bit of testing. In the meantime I've taken delivery of a shipment of what spielmaterial.de (of Moenchengladbach) describe as Crusader-Dubloons - in two colours. These will result in the phasing out of my rather whimsical collection of blue Tesco customer tokens, which have featured on this blog in a number of conflicts of late - I shall miss them, I guess, but this looks a bit more professional.