Board Extension - Done!

Well it took a bit of fancy timing, with ducking and weaving, watching the World Cup games between coats of paint, but the new 28-inch extension to the battleboards has been duly collected and finished. As an option, I can now play a Commands & Colors game on a 17 hexes x 9 hexes field (over 30% bigger, as they would say in washing powder adverts), or use a similar enhancement in my non-hex plain boards if I deploy them the other way up.

The flank marker is shown as the triple dash marks at the left edge for the normal
13 x 9 game; the single dashes are the flank marker for the 17 x 9 game, with the
three sectors becoming respectively 5, 7 and 5 hexes wide

After 3 coats of the official Crested Moss shade, it became clear that the insert was never going to get to be quite the same colour as the original sections (it's the same paint - it's even the same tin, but the surface texture is slightly different), but it's near enough for jazz. In fact the photos make the difference a little more obvious than it looks when you're in the room with it.

This is just a hurried mock-up to check it works - for a battle, the table stands
in the middle of the room, so there's less space than there appears here

I still have to paint the backside of the new piece, to be honest, but there's no immediate rush for that. My war-games may not be better, but I have the option now of making them bigger.

By the way - in passing - I read that the forthcoming C&C Napoleonics expansion for double-width games is to be called La Grande Battle. What language is this, exactly? I have a good number of American friends, and I know for a fact that as a nation Americans are neither stupid nor ignorant, so why would GMT Games want to try to convince us all otherwise? Why not The Bloody Big Schlacht?

I guess it's a worthy successor to Guard du Corps - Franglais êtranglé strikes again. Come on, GMT - don't blight a good game with a crappy name.

How about Something in a Larger Size, Sir?

Last September I finally took the bull by the wassname and repainted my 40-year-old battleboards. I had some misadventures on the way, but ended up with a much smartened tabletop – one side now having the hexes the correct way round for Commands & Colors (previously I was 90 degrees off, though I could justifiably claim that I was there first), while the other side is now very smart, plain Old School green.

I was so pleased with the results that it started me thinking again of producing an extra section of table, to produce an optional, bigger battlefield. There are a number of drivers for this.

(1) I’ve always fancied a huge tabletop as an occasional variant – the fact that I have nowhere handy to set up such a thing is an issue, of course. I have a secret hankering for a vast battlefield in a marquee in the garden, but that is impractical for a number of reasons. Nice idea though.

(2) I recently read the Black Powder horse and musket rules, which I enjoyed, though it was a bit of a shock when they casually announced that, of course, the game was best played on a table at least 12 feet long. Er – right. Of course, I ignored this, but I kept finding myself thinking, “hmmm, 12 feet long…”

(3) When I repainted the battleboards, I did some thinking and some measuring, and I came up with something, as follows:

My tabletop is 8 feet wide by 5 feet across, cut into 4 sections, each 2 feet x 5 feet, for easy storage and to enable them to be laid out on our (large) dining table, in a dining room whose design, if I am to be honest, was influenced by wargaming needs. The C&C-style hex board is the correct 13 hexes wide by 9 across, and the hexes are 7 inches across the flats. These are big hexes, but they sit well with my 20mm (or so) armies. Since the 4 tabletop sections are symmetrical, the centre line of the table could have a 4-hex-wide fillet inserted, which would give an expanded version of the table which is 28 inches wider, and a revised C&C board of 17 hexes by 9. This would require a couple of MDF hex plates to be painted to allow the C&C flank demarcation line to be shifted one hex in from each end when the long version is in use, but this is a trifling matter.

I estimate that this extended version of the table will still fit in the room, though it will now be necessary to walk around it at one end only – full circumnavigation will not be possible, but – hey – I need the exercise.

At risk of getting really wild, it would be possible to add further, similar slices to the centre of the table in future to produce a Memoir 44 Overlord (or CCA Epic) style giant board – but at this point we really are looking for the marquee in the garden, or a church hall yet to be identified.

Back to the point. The first 28-inch extension fillet is feasible, and I have plenty of paint left over from September. If this is not going to go ahead, I’ll have to come up with some new and better excuses. The most obvious excuse is that the tabletop is made of old-fashioned ½-inch chipboard, which I am not sure is available any more.

That excuse didn’t last long. I phoned my local branch of B&Q, who have masses of 12mm chipboard, and are absolutely itching to use their computer-controlled cutter to produce my new extension for what is really a very small cost.

Well, I don’t have my truck any more, so how will I transport it home? That one didn’t last either; with the back seat folded flat, my car will take a 5 feet x 28 inch panel, no problem.

So I’m going to do it. I measured everything up accurately, and (allowing for inaccuracy in the 1971-vintage cutting of the original boards) I need a perfectly rectangular piece 1531mm x 711mm.

I have a feeling that somehow it can’t be as easy as this, but I’m off to B&Q tomorrow morning to do the deed. There will be a lot of marking up (with my tongue sticking out) and painting and suchlike, but my extension should be coming up shortly.

All Better Now

Commands & Colors board with 7-inch hexes - official layout at last.

With thanks for messages of sympathy for my dalliance with senility – much appreciated – I am pleased to announce that I have worked extra hard today, and the battle board refurb job is pretty much finished. I have some minor touching up to do to improve two points where the joins don’t quite line up, and to an extent I have proved that a battered old board repainted is still a battered old board, but mission accomplished, I think.

I’ve also wheeled out some of my new scenic plates with roads on, to see how they look – simple, but useable. Genuine C&C devotees will be perplexed by this, since roads do not feature in Mr Borg’s games. However, I have recently been reading Tactique, which is an old Napoleonic game based on Commands & Colors, predating C&CN – this was published in Vae Victis a good while ago. In this game, roads are used – interesting. I am, in any event, giving thought to including road rules in my ECW variant, so – anyway – here you see some roads, which will not win any prizes but are a big improvement on the laminated paper efforts I used in my Battle of Nantwich.

Mr Borg may have already realised that roads don't run naturally straight across the table in
C&C - maybe that's one reason they don't appear?

I’ll leave everything to cure for this evening, then get everything tidied away. You are familiar with the concept of a Portable Wargame – my wargames are Stowable Wargames, of necessity, since I use the family dining room for games. Thus all components must be flock free, easily handled and capable of disappearing into cupboards when required to do so!

Oh Strewth...!

Boards #4 and #3 (behind) - good so far...

Good news and bad news. There is even a moral – the moral is that it is possible to outsmart myself by trying to be too clever. The working definition of “too clever” is not as impressive as it once was...

I’ve been promising myself for a couple of years that I will replace my current battlefield boards with some nice new 18mm MDF ones, and paint them up with the hexes the right way round for Commands & Colors. My existing table is battered, ½” chipboard, and was painted in the mid 1970s with hexes that are, sadly, 30° awry for C&C. I did have the foresight, however, to have the correct table proportions of 13 hexes by 9. Yes – I know, I know – I even had a number of Mr Borg’s game mechanisms spot on all those 35 years ago, but somehow I still managed to avoid inventing Battle Cry, and avoid becoming rich and famous as a result.

Anyway – no matter. This week I suddenly decided that, instead, I would just refurbish my old boards. If I really didn’t like the results I could still do it again with the full MDF, and the practice would be useful. So I went to the hardware store in Dunbar that does paint mixing to order, and bought in the official shades. I was trying very hard to remember the history of these old boards, and how I had painted the hex cells last time – last time being in the days when I had crisp eyesight and knew no fear.

Last Time

My boards were originally the sort of dark, hen house green that I had seen at my local wargames club. It was the sort of green that made the room actually seem darker when you switched the overhead lights on. When the time came to apply hexagons, I switched to a paler, pea-soup shade which I have used ever since. The hex-cells were painstakingly scribed in pencil, using a homemade cardboard stencil (which I still have), then I inked in the grid lines – literally – with black Indian ink and a fine brush. I felt a bit like one of those fabulous Japanese artists you see on the TV – as I got into the job, my skill improved, and they really were surprisingly neat. Well, I thought so, anyway. Only problem was that the black ink was very vivid, and the overall effect was like the old Pop Art from whenever-it-was (1960s?). If you stared at it for a little while the room started to rotate, which is distracting during a wargame. So I had to tone it down a bit.

My plan was to thin down some of the pea-soup green – about 40% water – and apply it with a roller, building it up, coat by coat, until the grid lines were sufficiently obscured to give a better effect. I was concerned about the waterproof qualities of Indian ink – I had nightmares about my nice black lines running in all directions when I overpainted them. I recall that I asked Allan Gallacher what he thought, and he reckoned it would be all right, so I went ahead. In fact it was all right, but when I discussed it with Allan later he said he based his opinion on the need for Indian ink to be capable of withstanding monsoons. Thank you, Allan...

This Time

I decided this time I would use a similar approach, but instead of spidery black lines I would make a feature of the fact that it was hand-painted, and use a pleasing khaki shade in rather thicker lines, the intention being that I could still apply coats of thinned-down green if it was too much.

I started on Wednesday. Two coats of pea-soup green to obliterate the old markings – 2 hours drying between coats, then pencil scribing and freehand painting with the khaki, and then block-in the off-table areas outside the 13 x 9 hexes with a complementary grey-green, in proper C&C style. It looks OK – I’m pleased with it. The khaki was a bit of a fright after the old arrangement, but it has grown on me and I have decided against the over-wash.

There are 4 boards in total. I started with No.3, which is the right-hand middle sheet, and then moved on to No.4, the right hand end. Great. As of this morning, the second coat of green on No.2 – the other middle sheet – was dry and I was ready to start scribing to match the meeting edge of No.3. Because of the limitations of my work area, I had to rotate the board through 180° and work the other way round. Sadly, because I managed to confuse myself by this rotation, I then transposed the sequence of half-hexes and whole hexes at the meeting edge, but didn’t notice until I had finished painting the grid lines. I mean FINISHED PAINTING the grid lines. I made a nice job of them too. I had been really pleased with myself today – in much better form than of late – popping in from cutting the lawns to apply more paint – all that. Around 8pm I suddenly realised that I had screwed up in a big way, so board No.2 is now green again, and should get its second (fourth) coat of green about 11pm. By 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, after I get back from an appointment at the hairdresser, things will be exactly as they were this morning at around 8am. It’s hard to see this as progress.

I did get the Contesse to check that I really had got it wrong, in case I painted it over, back to green, when I didn’t need to, which would be even less amusing than the current situation. She confirmed it was wrong – I had almost kept a little hope alive that it was somehow correct...

Never mind, I’ll be even better and faster tomorrow, but it’s hard to dress this up in a way which conceals the fact that I have lost a complete day through my own, mind-boggling stupidity. The job is now half done (again? still?) instead of the three-quarters I had aimed for by tonight. Still hope to finish it off by tomorrow night, but a few other things I should have been doing tomorrow are going to fall by the wayside. That’s OK – it will feel like a little penance, and something small and dark and mean in my upbringing approves of that.

More haste, less wassname. If time permits, the plan is also to apply coats of plain green to the reverse side of the boards, so that I may keep the option of some proper wargaming if the mood takes me.

Onward and upward – with a few staggers on the way.

What the Hex That Thing?

Well, since you asked, that's the first instalment of my new Stack-o-Hex scenic plates, manufactured to order and sent to me by Uncle Tony at ERM. They are 7 inches across the flats, same as my table hexes, and are laser-cut from 3mm MDF. They are going to be painted in the regulation baseboard green (Dulux Crested Moss #1) and then will be adorned with various hand-painted sections of road, stream, village and wood bases and so on - whatever else takes my fancy, or is required by whimsical scenarios (what's the plural of scenario - could it be scenariones? - hmmm...).

3mm weight is heavier than I intended, but it makes a neater job, and will help avoid warping - they are also less liable to slide about in moments of stress than thinner ones would be.

This is all a reaction to the embarrassment I felt as the result of deploying some old laminated paper scenic plates at my recent Battle of Nantwich. I'll work away at a few examples of the new type, and once I know what I am doing I'll crack on. The idea is to keep them flat and pretty much flock-free, so they stack in a compact manner and don't get damaged much. There will be some plain green ones, too, so that I can, if I need to, buy myself a little extra level ground to position houses around the edges of a BUA.

The little unit of 20mm French sappers is just to give an idea of what a 7 inch hex looks like. This is, after all, sort of a job for the engineers.

A Little More on Tri-Chess

I'd like to be able to blame Hugh for this, after his comment on my recent Pythagoras post, but I think really I just had to produce a graphic to punish myself for losing my 1970s photo. This is how my Glinski-based (accidentally Glinski-based...) Tri-Chess game looked.

I actually built a set, albeit with very cheap, nasty, unweighted plastic pieces (all we could afford in them days, Pet). It was spectacular, but the game itself was sadly flawed - brave but ill-judged, like Babbage's pocket calculator, Cross-Country Billiards and other fleeting glories which history has consigned to File 13. The physical set disappeared long ago, though I remember throwing out the board relatively recently - might even have been in this Century.

Please don't ask me about the rules. It is still a sore point, and I shall just smile mysteriously. No, I do not regard this Grand Folly as clever - merely further evidence that I am basically a moonbeam.

The Man Who Killed Pythagoras – and other tales

Pythagoras, indicating the tricky diagonal

I’ve recently been involved in a number of Real Life issues which have left me very little time for any hobby-related activities, but I have managed to spend the odd moment reading other people’s rules, and scribbling and pondering ideas – some of them very old ideas, it has to be said.

I have banged on about hexagons and their pros and cons at great length in the past, and am confident that I don’t have very much more to say on the matter – you would think...

In one of my odd moments, the other day, I was recalling a series of debates that I had with a few friends – a very long time ago now – in which we considered gridded miniatures games and their advantages, but which mostly served as an excuse to drink beer. We agreed, very early in our discussions, that the most innocent comment any of us had made on the topic to date was credited to our resident optimist, Alan Low, and it went along the lines of:

“It is much easier to consider the merits of hexes if you can rise above all the prejudices and sacred cows which they seem to upset.”

Yes, Alan, we said – but you can’t really separate these things – the problem is that the biggest single disadvantage of hexes is that people hate them. Whether that is justifiable or even fair is beside the point – if HG Wells had been pictured with hexagons scribed on his floor then no-one would worry about it. As things stand, hexes are an affront to everything which is cherished in miniatures gaming. Worst of all, they are associated with BOARD GAMES, which are the greatest affront of all. We are, after all, talking of orthodox religion here.

We also agreed that the only acceptable plea we might make on their behalf was that Joe Morschauser was famous for gridded games – though I believe that at the time Joe was regarded as less Old School than he is now. His game was generally seen as a harmless eccentricity, and not proper wargaming.

Morschauser, of course, used squares. Squares are easy to draw, and have an ancient precedent in the chessboard, but for wargames they have some inherent snags, the very largest of which is Pythagoras. Orthogonal moves of 1 square are fine, but a diagonal move of 1 square is 1.4142135 (etc etc) times as far. Some games get round this by prohibiting diagonal moves or combats – somehow, units which are adjacent to each other along a diagonal cannot see each other – or, as in the De Gre/Sweet game, the square root of two is taken to be a rather more convenient 1.5. That certainly helps.

A to B is easily seen to be 4 hexes

Hexes are not easy to draw at all – even with an accurate template, you can get a gradual drift with accumulated small errors, so it is necessary when marking out a hex table to have copious guidelines and preliminary sketchings. They do have the advantage of six-fold symmetry, and they get rid of Pythagoras, but many gamers object to the fact that they distort straight lines. You can either lay out your hexes so that there are straight columns going across the table (like my own hex-based games) – in which case your units may advance in a straightforward manner (literally), but do not line up side by side very neatly – or you may have the straight columns running sideways across the table (like Commands & Colors) – in which case you may form exemplary lines of battle, but your units advance in a rather odd zig-zag.

In fact both these issues can be solved visually at a stroke by having the hexes a good bit larger than the units, so that you can place the units off-centre and smooth out the battle lines and the marches.

We rambled around this subject through many beers, enjoying the scenery but not really deciding anything, and then one Sunday morning Pat Timmins rang me and announced:

“I may have just killed Pythagoras.”

Pat had been applying square vinyl tiles to his kitchen floor – in a very bold combination of navy blue and white. His wife objected to the basic chequer-board configuration because, she said, it “gave her the buzzings” and seemed likely to promote epilepsy. He had tried various alternatives, and at one point experimented with alternate rows offset by half a tile, like this:

He realised that such an arrangement on a wargames table would allow movement in six directions, and was in fact a sort of hexagonal arrangement without the hexagons. Judging distances, for example A to B in the illustration, was not quite as intuitive as with hexes, but was still possible with a bit of methodology (I reckon AB is 5 squares distant).

We were unreasonably enthusiastic about this – perhaps we could pass off our offset squares (or “squexes”, as Pat called them) as a sort of logical descendant of Morschauser’s game, and overcome some prejudices. The next non-development was that someone suggested that the squares should not be squares but rectangles with sides in the proportions of √3 to 2, which would even up the six-fold symmetry so that it was a proper 60 degrees all round. It made the table layout closer to natural hexes, but made the board look even more distorted – at this point, we actually preferred normal hexagons, which put us back where we started. So we eventually decided that squexes had had their brief moment, and resigned ourselves to being outcasts in the wargaming fraternity with our conventional hexes.

Glinski's game - note the 3 bishops

Also on the topic of hexes, I invented hexagonal chess in about 1970. My excitement was tempered more than somewhat when I discovered that there were already in existence a number of varieties of hexagonal chess, and that my own new game had been previously invented by a man named Glinski. This was useful, since it allowed me to drop the idea and move on to dabble with something else. I expanded Glinski’s game into a 3-sided version. There are 3-sided chess games now, but mine used a board with a full hexagonal grid (most of the available games now use distorted squares) – the board was a little larger than the normal (normal?) Glinski board, and the 3 sets of pieces set up in alternate corners.

It looked spectacular, but it didn’t work very well. Early experiments revealed that a game of this type for 3 players brings some interesting problems. The first is order of turns – if red plays white into check then white has to respond immediately, which reverses the turn cycle if it was in fact black’s move next.

More fundamentally troubling is the very nature of 3-player strategy. It is very difficult to have a game in which each of the players is attacking both of the others – it makes more sense to have two gang up on the third, and then double-cross each other at the end, which gets you into all sorts of negotiation, time-outs for diplomacy and other stuff which we decided it was simpler to just ban. No chat, we said – no sign language, no secret notes left in the bathroom. This left us with a game in which the only possible recommended strategy was a passive opening - allow the other two players to attack each other and weaken each other. If all 3 players adopt the same strategy, of course, you get a very strange non-game. You may feel free to draw your own parallels from history on any or all of these.

A very smart looking 3-sided chess set - mine was different from this,
since it used the Glinski layout of pieces, and  the playing board was
a rather larger version of Glinski's

So we gave that one up as well, though we did briefly consider 3-sided soccer on a triangular pitch, but abandoned that very quickly, not least because we could not agree how the offside rule would work. We did, however, think that the winner might be the team which conceded the smallest number of goals.

How very silly.    

ECW - C&C Based Rules

Over on his lovely ECW blog, Lee has published the first working version of the ECW rules which we have developed, based on Commands & Colors: Napoleonics. These have still to be properly playtested, so are likely to change a bit over coming weeks. My ECW armies are not big enough to playtest anything at all yet, so such testing as I have done has been attempted with counters on the original C&CN board.

These are the rules which came from the sketches and preliminary posts I did while on holiday (here, here, here and here), and it is only correct to thank Ross, Martin, Ludovico, Pjotr, John C, Allen De Vries and - most of all - Lee himself for suggestions and discussion which helped to shape them and make sense of them. The biggest debt of all, of course, is to Richard Borg and the guys at GMT for the original C&CN game. The extra Chaunce Cards pack also shows the influence of Tony Bath, Doc Monaghan and The Perfect Captain among a host of others - if anyone detects some of their own intellectual property in there anywhere then thanks very much - you have always been a hero of mine...

Once again, bear in mind this game is just an amateur-produced freebie - I intend to use Victory without Quarter rules as well as these, but I strongly fancied the logical feel and quick cycle time of a Richard Borg-style game for the ECW, so am pleased to have been able to get a prototype game together. If and when Mr Borg produces his mooted 30YW period C&C game, I shall be happy to see our little effort blown without trace into the undergrowth.

The Command and Chaunce cards exist as pdf sheets which can be printed and cut out, and they are designed (when the playtesting suggests that they are pretty stable) to be laminated in 95mm x 65mm laminating pouches.

This is really only a fun game intended for Lee and myself, but if anyone would like pdfs for the extensions to the C&CN rule set and for the two packs of cards, please send me a comment with your email address (mention if you don't want it published) or email me through my Blogger profile. What you will get will be the latest version - there won't be any ongoing customer support (!), though naturally I'll be very pleased to get feedback or suggestions if anyone wishes to contribute them. Please, though, don't bother to take the trouble to tell me that it is not as good as Forlorn Hope, or that I am an idiot - I already know these things.

Late edit: I hope the following links to Google Docs work for you - if not, please let me know - you should be able to download the extension to the basic C&CN rules, the Command Cards and the Chaunce Cards - if you do not have the C&CN rules they are available for download from GMT Games' website.    

A Nation Divided – into Hexes? (4) – Command Cards

Here is a very first-cut attempt at producing a Command Card pack for my proposed application of Commands & Colors: Napoleonics to the English Civil War. This gives the text for each card, and the number of each card type. The whole listing is very obviously an edited version of the corresponding section in the official CCN rule book – I hope this is neither illegal nor impertinent – regard it as a respectful tribute, if you please!

The proportions of the cards, the wording and (for example) making the cards reflect the less mobile nature of the Foot, compared with their Napoleonic equivalents, owe a lot to the original CCN cards, the Ancients version of C&C, and also White Mountain, from Anubis. The mix, however, is all my own, as is much of the content, so please don’t go blaming anyone else.

This is an Aunt Sally – please feel free to tell me what you like or dislike about it. If it becomes stable enough, and if playtesting looks promising, I hope to produce a set of card images (don't hold your breath).

Section Cards (48)

Section cards are used to order units in a specific section of the battlefield to move and/or battle. These cards indicate which section of the battlefield you may order units or leaders, and how many units or leaders you may order. An attached leader ordered by a Section Command card may be ordered to detach and move separately. Command cards that state ‘order units equal to command’ mean the number of units you may order is equal to the number of Command cards you hold including this card. Cards that are on a player’s Foot in ‘Stand of Pikes’ tracks are not counted as Command cards you are holding.

SCOUT LEFT FLANK - Issue an order to 1 unit or Leader on the Left Flank. When drawing a new Command card, draw two, choose one and discard the other. (2 cards)

SCOUT CENTER - Issue an order to 1 unit or Leader in the Center. When drawing a new Command card, draw two, choose one and discard the other. (2 cards)

SCOUT RIGHT FLANK- Issue an order to 1 unit or Leader on the Right Flank. When drawing a new Command card, draw two, choose one and discard the other. (2 cards) 

PROBE LEFT FLANK - Issue an order to 2 units or Leaders on the Left Flank. (4 cards)

PROBE CENTER - Issue an order to 2 units or Leaders in the Center. (6 cards)

PROBE RIGHT FLANK - Issue an order to 2 units or Leaders on the Right Flank. (4 cards)

ATTACK LEFT FLANK - Issue an order to 3 units or Leaders on the Left Flank. (4 cards)

ATTACK CENTER - Issue an order to 3 units or Leaders in the Center. (6 cards)

ATTACK RIGHT FLANK - Issue an order to 3 units or Leaders on the Right Flank. (4 cards)

ASSAULT LEFT FLANK - Order a number of units or leaders on the Left Flank equal to command (the number of cards held in your hand including this card). (2 cards)

ASSAULT CENTER - Order a number of units or leaders in the Center equal to command (the number of cards held in your hand including this card). (2 cards)

ASSAULT RIGHT FLANK - Order a number of units or leaders on the Right Flank equal to command (the number of cards held in your hand including this card). (2 cards) 

COORDINATED ADVANCE - Issue an order to 4 units or Leaders. Order 1 on Left Flank, 2 in the Center and 1 on the Right Flank. (2 cards)

FLANK ATTACK - Issue an order to 2 units or Leaders on each Flank. (2 cards)

REFUSE LEFT - Order a number of units or leaders on your Right Flank or in the Centre equal to command (the number of cards held in your hand including this card). (2 cards)

REFUSE RIGHT - Order a number of units or leaders on your Left Flank or in the Centre equal to command (the number of cards held in your hand including this card). (2 cards)

Tactic Cards (20) Tactic cards allow ordered units to move and/or battle in ways not normally allowed in the basic rules. Terrain movement and battle restrictions still apply when a Tactic card’s Actions take precedence over basic rules.

BOLD DRAGOONS—One unit of Dragoons may make a further complete move after firing (but may not fire a second time) – thus they may advance, dismount, fire, mount and retire, for example. If you have no dragoons, use this card to order any 1 unit of your choice. (2 cards)  

BOMBARD—Issue an order to 4 or fewer Artillery units. Ordered units may move up to 2 hexes and not battle, or may not move and battle with 1 additional dice. If you do not have any artillery units, issue an order to 1 unit of your choice. (2 cards)

CAVALRY CHARGE—Issue an order to 4 or fewer units of Horse (not Dragoons). Ordered units battle with 1 additional die the entire turn. Ordered Cuirassier and “Trotter” units may move 3 hexes and still battle. If you do not have any cavalry units, issue an order to 1 unit of your choice. (3 cards) 

COUNTER-ATTACK—Issue the same order card that your opponent just played. When you play this card it becomes a copy of the card your opponent played on the last turn. Following the instructions on that card as though you were actually playing it, except when countering a Section card. Then the right flank becomes left flank and the left flank becomes the right flank. (2 cards)  

EVADE—Play this card after opponent declares a melee attack, but before the dice roll. The attacked unit evades. The attacker does not roll dice. The defender may opt to retire 1 hex, but the attacker may not take the ground or carry out Cavalry Breakthrough. At the end of the turn, you draw a replacement Command card first. (2 cards)  

FIRE AND HOLD—Issue an order to 4 or fewer Foot or Artillery units. Ordered units will perform ranged combat with 1 additional die. Ordered units may not be adjacent to enemy troops. Units may not move before or after combat, but foot may come out of ‘stand of pikes’. If you do not have any foot or artillery units, issue an order to 1 unit of your choice. (2 cards)  

LEADERSHIP—Issue an order to all Leaders. When a Leader is attached to a unit, the unit is also ordered as long as the Leader remains with the unit. Any ordered unit shall roll 1 additional die if it battles. A Leader may detach from a unit. If a Leader moves and joins a unit, the unit is not ordered. If you do not have any Leaders, issue an order to 1 unit of your choice. (2 cards)

PUSH!—Issue an order to all units adjacent to the enemy. Ordered units may melee with 1 additional die. Ordered units may not engage in ranged combat. Units may not move before melee combat. After a successful melee, foot may Take Ground and horse may breakthrough and may make a Bonus Melee Attack with its standard number of battle dice. (1 card)  

RALLY—Roll battle dice equal to command (the number of cards held in your hand including this card). For each Foot, Horse or Artillery symbol rolled, 1 block of this type is returned to any under strength unit anywhere on the battlefield, as men return to the ranks. A unit may not gain more blocks than it started the action with. Rallied units that gain at least one block are ordered, and may move and battle as normal. (2 cards)  

THE DEVIL’S MATCH—One enemy artillery unit (dice for which – first to roll an Artillery symbol with 1 dice) suffers a powder explosion. The unit selected will roll 2 dice – an Artillery symbol or a Crossed Sabres symbol will eliminate 1 block. If either of these dice produces Crossed Sabres, the explosion is very severe – roll 1 dice for each adjacent unit (of whatever side) which is not in a town, a wood or earthworks. A Foot, Horse or Artillery symbol will remove 1 block if it matches the unit type – a Flag symbol will remove a Leader. If the enemy has no artillery, use this card to order any 1 unit or Leader of your choice. (1 card)

THE LORD IS WITH US—Roll battle dice equal to command (the number of cards held in your hand including this card). For each symbol rolled, 1 unit of this type is ordered. One unit or leader of your choice may be ordered for each Flag symbol rolled. Sabres order no units or leaders. Ordered units battle with 1 additional die the entire turn. Reshuffle the Command card deck and discard pile. (1 card)  

   

A Nation Divided – into Hexes? (3) – The Cuddies

Horse

Mounted troops I have worked on thus far are types CU, TR, GA – being respectively cuirassiers, “trotters” and “gallopers”, and there should probably be lancers and some other kind of light horse still to be thought about.

I have to come clean here and admit that, having spent some time reading about Parliamentarian cavalry early in the war advancing cautiously and using their pistols, I got completely carried away and produced some monstrous cavalry melee rules which were about as straightforward and easy to use as the inside of my grandfather’s pocket watch. Having been shocked out of my excited state by the realisation of what I was doing, I am pleased to say that I have finished up with some CCN-based rules which are much simpler – very much simpler. In case it comes in useful in 30YW contexts, I have preserved a little of my frenzied “pistol melee” efforts as a rather crude “caracole” rule, which I shall append here as something which I do not intend to use at present – and possibly as a kind of warning to other kindergarten rule-writers.

Anyway – these are the first-cut rules:

No cavalry may carry out ranged combat – all pistol and carbine capability is assumed to be covered by the melee rules.

CU move up to 2 hexes and battle, GA move up to 3 and battle, TR move up to 3, but cannot move more than 2 if they are making a melee attack. Typical units of horse in my armies will have 2-4 blocks/bases of 3 figures (on 60mm square bases – these are 20mm figures).

Melee combat: 1 dice per block/base, +1 dice for CU (heavier), +1 dice for GA in first round of a melee (more dashing), +1 dice for certain identified Royalist GA units (not more than 25% of all cavalry present) who are nominated as “rash” (crazier).

The standard CCN rule allowing cavalry attacked by infantry to carry out a manoeuvre called Retire & Reform is lifted straight into this ECW variant. Combined Arms attacks with artillery support are not allowed, since artillery of this period could not co-ordinate in this way.

In CCN, a victorious cavalry unit which eliminates its melee opponent, or forces it to vacate its hex, may take advantage of a Breakthrough rule, by which it may opt to claim the vacated hex, plus (optionally) move another hex, and may carry out an immediate Bonus Melee attack if it is now in a position to do so. My ECW variant will also allow this, but the breakthrough and bonus melee may be repeated as many times in a single turn as the general wishes. 


Rash Cavaliers: to reflect the extra difficulty of controlling successful Royalist horse, a special variation applies to Royalist GA units which are designated as “rash”. Such units must carry out a breakthrough, unless they are brought under control, and must carry it out in such a way as to create a bonus melee if it is possible to do so – the Royalist commander may choose which unit to attack if there is a choice, and he does not have to attack villages, woods or earthworks - terrain situations which put horse at a major disadvantage. If he wishes to stop the breakthrough and continued attack by such a rash unit, after any melee victory, the Royalist commander must get them under control. This is achieved by rolling a Cavalry symbol or a Flag on a single Combat Dice; if a Leader is attached to the unit, control is also gained by a roll of Crossed Sabres.

The Caracole

I fear you are not going to like this – it needs more work, and I don’t intend to use it for the time being anyway.

CU and TR units may make a special melee attack with pistols – the Caracole - and this is the subject of a special rule, as follows:

CU & TR may ride up to melee contact, and declare a Caracole attack. The attacker rolls a single Combat Dice for the whole unit. There may be terrain or other tactical situations which require a deduction from the number of dice, such that the attacker is left with no dice to roll! If they score a hit on the defenders (and crossed sabres doesn't count for this particular type of melee) or frighten them (dice turns up a flag - which can't be ignored - but defenders don't retreat yet), remove any casualties, but there is no immediate "battle back" from the defenders - what happens is the attacking CU/TR cavalry now carry out a CCN-style "bonus melee" - on the spot. So a second round of melee takes place immediately (it counts as a continuing melee, so any defending GA do not get their 1^st-round bonus dice). This melee is a normal 1-dice-per-block-plus-valid-bonuses combat.

If the single dice caracole attack does not produce a fright flag or a valid type of casualty, the defenders get to fight back with a single dice. If this causes the attacking CU/TR to retreat (or eliminates them) then that's the melee over. If it doesn't, the pistol-armed attackers may choose to retire a single hex. If they opt not to, the melee continues in future turns as a normal continuing melee combat.

Dragoons

Dragoons (DR) are neither horse nor foot, and so they require their own rules. The first complication is that I am duplicating my dragoon units so that they may appear on the table in either mounted or dismounted form. Since in their mounted form they will be on cavalry-style bases of 3 figures, it makes sense to put the dismounted dragoons onto special open-order bases of 3 figures too. When they mount or dismount, simply switch the models – it’s a hassle, but it’s less of a mess than most of the options.

Dragoons may not fire when mounted, and they are very poor in melee. Their musket range (when dismounted) is 2 hexes, same as the musketeers. Theoretically, they have a 3-hex move, which they may use to do the following things:

* if mounted, move up to 3 hexes on horseback, or up to 2 hexes and dismount

* if dismounted, up to 1 hex on foot, or mount and ride up to 2 hexes

If they are on foot at the end of the move, they can shoot (half a dice per base/block of 3 figures, rounded up) – so 3 bases get 2 dice, for example.

They can melee at the end of the move, whether on horse or on foot - but not very well (half a dice per base/block of 3 figs, mounted or not).

Unlike Foot units, Dragoons can fight as soon as they arrive, whatever the terrain.

A Nation Divided – into Hexes? (2b) – Mixed Foot Units - contd

It would probably be neater and potentially less embarrassing to do most of my thinking aloud and U-turning off-blog, but I would miss out on some valuable input if I did.

I am not back where I started – this is progress. On the subject of mixed pike & shot units I have gone from conveniently crude to more-correct-but-too-fiddly and now back to crude-but-justified, as we shall see. My thanks to Ross, again, and to email input from Ludovico.

The table produced in yesterday’s effort is not wasted – it gives a useful cross check for other approaches, and it served to remind me how much I dislike tables, when it comes down to it.

Here’s a mixed list of thoughts – some of them are useful, some are merely statements of policy (to keep me straight), some are blinding flashes of the bovinely obvious, and a few are the recording of some “doh” moments.

(1)   I don’t like look-up tables.

(2)   I don’t care much for rosters – I like to be able to see everything I need to know about a unit by looking at it, without worrying about what it used to be, or what it has lost, and without looking up any offline information.

(3)   Yesterday’s table demonstrates that shot-to-pike ratios of 3:2 and 2:1 may be regarded as effectively the same, given the rounding errors.

(4)   My foot units consist of 3 bases, usually, with 2 bases of muskets and one of pikes, so on a bases count this is 2:1, but in fact if you count the little men on the bases you will find that the pikemen are closer-packed, and provide 8 of the 20 figures in the unit, which is 3:2, I think. So take your pick – it doesn’t matter anyway. The units are structured like this because they are designed to work with Victory without Quarter rules, and because cosmetically it looks OK.

(5)   Going back to my original rules of thumb, a base of pikes gets 2 combat dice in a melee and gets none in ranged combat (firing); a base of muskets gets 1 dice for melees and one for firing.

(6)   My original idea was to allocate Casualty Markers, rather than remove bases, to denote attrition (since the troops are not homogeneous), and deduct 1 dice from any kind of combat for each such marker. The first “doh” moment was the realisation that removing a base of muskets would reduce both melee and firing dice allocations by 1, which is exactly the same as awarding one of the proposed Casualty Markers, however it might look on the table. With one stroke, that looks like the end of the Casualty Markers.

(7)   I am still left with the issue of “pike heavy” units – which I’ll define as ratios of 1:1 or less. 4-base or 2-base units can be represented in a straightforward manner, with equal numbers of pike and shot bases. Intuitively, a 3-base unit is less convenient, since the bases do not show the correct proportions of troops. The second “doh” moment was realising that a 3-base pike-heavy unit is simply a 4-base one with one base removed [cue spontaneous applause], and, courtesy of the first such moment, we know that the missing base should be a musket base. Since I probably wouldn’t have available troops to make up a unit with 2 pikes and 1 muskets, and since such a thing would look wrong, we just need to field a normal 3-base unit with some kind of marker to denote that it is pike heavy. Such a unit, as proposed by Ross a while ago, should get an extra dice in melee and lose a dice when firing.

(8)   I know that this all rather overstates the effect of casualties on firepower, but will live with it. In any case, it’s worth remembering that “firepower” means ranged combat in CCN terms, which means, in turn, fire at ranges greater than 1 hex, or maybe over 150 paces. The majority of effective fire would take place at ranges less than this, and CCN abstracts this as part of melee combat.

Right – where does that get me? The recycled rule for units of foot (FT) is:

Foot [rewrite]

In my ECW army a unit of Foot consists of 3 blocks (bases) – 2 of muskets and 1 of pikes. Other mixtures are possible, including all muskets, but the 2:1 mix appropriate to the later years of the war is the norm here. Any units which are specified as having a musket-to-pike ratio of 1:1 or less are termed pike-heavy, and are marked as such.

In CCN-speak, infantry units will be of classification FT – they may move 1 hex and Battle. In melee, pike blocks count 2 dice each, muskets 1 each; identified veteran units (which may not be more than 25% of the FT units fielded) count an extra dice. Identifed pike-heavy units get an extra dice in melee.

All losses for a mixed unit should be taken as musket bases – this is so that the fighting value reduces correctly.

In Ranged Combat (shooting), the musket blocks count 1 each, the pikes zero. Range is 2 hexes. Again, veterans may count +1 dice, and 1 dice is deducted for a designated pike-heavy unit. The number of Ranged Combat dice is not reduced if the firers moved (CCN does reduce it).

FT units which have pikes may adopt Stand of Pikes formation against cavalry – the rules and operation for this are exactly the same as for Squares in CCN.

A Nation Divided – into Hexes? (2a) – Mixed Foot Units

With thanks to Lee and Ross for their thoughts on the previous post, here’s another go at producing a simple treatment for mixed units of pike and shot, trying not to distort things as a result of oversimplification.

I am still keen to avoid look-up tables if possible. As Ross proposed, making the number of Combat Dice for melee and Ranged Combat an attribute of each unit seems to be the way to go. All of what follows can be produced by mental arithmetic, but at 2am the summary table might come in useful.

This is specifically for mixed foot units – any unit which consists of a single weapon or troop type does not require this level of detail. As suggested, I have worked out for various musket:pike ratios the required number of Combat Dice for a unit. In each case, the proportions of muskets and pikes are not necessarily as represented by the miniatures employed – though the fact that more than one type of armament is depicted indicates that the unit is mixed, and the number of bases gives an approximate numerical strength (at about 150-200 men to the base).

Losses to a mixed unit are recorded by attaching Casualty Markers, not by removing bases/blocks. A unit is eliminated when the number of Casualty Markers is equal to the number of bases.

In this new version of the draft rule, pikes count 2 dice per block in melees and 0 in Ranged Combat (firing), muskets count 1 dice per block in both melee and ranged combat – all as before. The number of dice produced is then proportioned for the specified musket:pike ratio for the unit and for the fraction which has been disabled as Casualty Markers. The result is rounded to the nearer, exact half up – this is where the rounding errors come in, but the game requires a roll of an integral number of dice! After all this, the number of dice to be rolled may still require to adjusted for the “veteran unit” bonus, and for any terrain-related or tactical bonuses or deductions (as per CCN rules).

The table which follows gives the number of dice before the last two adjustments described above. The figure before the slash applies to melees, the figure after applies to ranged combat. I have considered only the ratios 1:1, 3:2 and 2:1 – any other ratio required should be assumed to be whichever is the nearer of these 3 options.

I hope that the table makes sense, and is simple enough to be used without bogging the game down. I am still half-inclined to insist that all foot units should be 2:1, since that is what VwQ does, and since the differences are not large in any case!

Number of Combat Dice for a Mixed Foot Unit – Melee/Ranged Combat

	No.of blocks (bases) less Casualty Markers
Muskets:Pike	5	4	3	2	1
1:1	8/3	6/2	5/2	3/1	2/1
3:2	7/3	6/2	4/2	3/1	1/1
2:1	7/3	5/3	4/2	3/1	1/1

As an example, consider a 4-block unit with a musket:pike ratio of 3:2, which has acquired 1 Casualty Marker. The table shows that the unit is entitled to 4 dice in a melee and 2 dice when firing. This has to be further adjusted for any “veteran” bonus, plus any terrain or tactical adjustment.

Easy-peasy.