WSS: Time for a Rules Update - Cutting the Umbilical Cord

This weekend I have a note in my diary to get busy, consolidating a sheaf of odd notes and scribblings into the next coherent release of my CJ-Lite rules. Coherence is in the eye of the beholder, maybe a hopeful direction rather than a recognisable state.

It's maybe worth setting out a summary history of where CJ-Lite came from, and where it has been since. Such a summary would be useful to me, if no-one else, so please bear with me for a paragraph or two, and then I'll say some things about recent changes, and evolution of the presentation and style. 

Very quickly, then. I bought an existing collection of 20mm WSS soldiers in 2019, and set about organising, repainting and augmenting what I now had. I had a look at the commercial rules which were available, and fairly quickly decided to go my own way. The Covid period found me working away in self-imposed exile, painting and grinding away at a new rule set. Lockdown allowed very little in the way of playtesting, and by the time things got back to normal I found I had produced the most awful set of wargame rules I had ever played; just dreadful. Tedious.

Disappointing.

Because I was now heavily committed to this new period, the search for Plan B was pretty frantic. I fell back on a familiar strategy - bought in a game which already existed, which ticked as many boxes as possible. I bought Richard Borg's Tricorne, which was the AWI cousin of his Commands & Colors series. The game obviously needed a little customising to fit the European theatre  of 70 years earlier, but I got busy and was much happier with the way this developed. This was the beginning of Corporal John. I was very pleased with the new game, it actually worked - it was even fun to play.

Since then I have produced a development which worked for multi-player games and even remote games by Zoom. This was (jokingly) branded as CJ-Lite, the most crass name I could come up with. [The spirit of The Emperor's Toenails is alive and well]. 

The new release is Version 1.03. Over the last few years, CJ-Lite has dropped the Command and Combat cards of the parent game, ditched the fancy (and unobtainable) custom dice, acquired a new activation system. In addition to various improvements in function, I have now made a conscious decision that the game has less and less to do with Tricorne or C&C - it uses tweaked versions of the movement and combat systems, but much of it is new.

I have decided that it is no longer necessary to hang on to terminology which is identifiably part of the Borg games. Very early, I reasoned that, since effective musket range in 1700 was about 80 paces and my hexes are 200 paces across, musketry just becomes one of the unpleasant things you can do to an enemy who is next to you, and thus musket fire and melee were jointly subsumed into a generic Close Combat activity, most of which, for infantry, would in fact be short range musketry. 

Next up was the resounding Retire & Reform option for cavalry under attack - this was so obviously straight from C&C Napoleonics that I have changed it to the simpler Evade - most people can imagine what that means, and it is generally less flatulent. A new change in Ver 1.03 is that the Tricorne-specific Rally Check is now just called a Morale Check in my game. Thunderous in its unpretentiousness. I thank you.

This may seem a bit over-thorough, but I hope and expect that it will help avoid confusion. Anyone who plays CJ-Lite who is aware that it has blood lines from C&C may find it easier to remember which rule set they are playing if it doesn't look or sound like its ancestor to any unnecessary extent.

Ver 1.03 also makes some small changes to terrain effects, amends the rules for artillery firing over friendly troops, corrects some ambiguities and grammatical irritants.

I still have to hand-polish the QRS sheet to remove a few bugs and incorporate new changes - I'll work on that today. I have to update a draft leaflet which explains how to use CJ-Lite in ECW games [I'll keep the title the same - it has been suggested that CJ could be an abbreviation for Cromwell's Jockstrap, but I shall ignore this].

I also want to edit the Corporal John appendices that cover the solo campaign system, and the little siege game which features in that system, to make them fit with CJ-Lite, and I need to have a look at another leaflet which explains how to use CJ-Lite to handle the tactical bits of my Leaguer siege game (not much to change there - some simplifications, some smaller unit sizes, some changes to the Morale and Retreat rules - how do you run away when you are the garrison...?).

That's all OK, I think. The trick will be to get it done before I forget what it all meant.