Commands & Colors – the “Battlelore” Tweaks

Battlelore; the big guy on the left suggests this is not the Wars of the Roses

There should be some kind of regulation against old fools like me quoting things they do not understand – I had never heard of Battlelore until a couple of weeks ago, but I am assured that is huge and well-established. As everyone on the planet apart from me is probably well aware, it is a board-cum-miniatures game designed by Richard Borg and launched in 2006, which uses his Commands & Colors game system and is set in a world(?) of fantasy and mythical pseudo-history, and very good it looks, though it is not really my cup of tea.

Why is that, then? Why do I have this unreasonable prejudice against fantasy and sci-fi wargaming – is it simply that I am old and lacking imagination?

Well it might be, to be truthful, though in fact I am not really prejudiced against these categories of gaming. In principle, the idea of fighting games which do away with the limits imposed by recorded history and its technologies (and life forms) is exciting, and I can well understand why they have such an appeal. My doubts about them – the reasons they do not rock my boat – are entirely personal, and probably do not stand up to very much examination, but here they are, for appropriate mockery:

(1) A lot of this is based on cult movies or books – which is not in itself a criticism (after all, a lot of my wargaming is based on cult books written by Charles Oman and Donald Featherstone, amongst others), but many of the ideas and themes become repetitive and derivative. For example, someone who goes to the trouble of creating a fantasy world which is very obviously a crude and inferior rip-off of the works of Prof Tolkien or similar is actually displaying rather a lack of imagination, as I see it, though he may well be driven by a very shrewd commercial awareness. Not a real problem, and if the games are enjoyed by a great many fans then good for them.

(2) My suspicion that the imagination deployed is less than free-flowing is confirmed by the copious documentation for the games and their expansions; giant spiders, now there’s a really unusual idea (yawn), but there are very strict published tables of what these spiders are allowed to do, so play nicely, please. Whoever’s imagination this is, it had better not be yours, and don’t you forget it. Far from being a free-form, open-architecture playground for the creative soul, fantasy gaming is complex, fiddly and beset by heavy documentation which makes 1970s Ancients national championship games look very casual indeed.

(3) Much of it is heavily fashion-dependant, and bolstered by branding and commercial copyright. All those spotty people who hang around GW shops (how did you guess I would get to them eventually?) will mostly move on to other fads, which means that wargaming will become The Thing We All Did Last Year, which means that historical miniatures gaming, for example, might not be high on the list of potential Next Big Things for these guys. 

My cup of tea

Right, that should irritate a few people, for a start.

Iain has been on holiday in Scotland with his daughter, and yesterday he took the time to drive here from Aberfoyle, to say hello and have a quick wargame, which I appreciate very much. Sadly the day was wet and foggy, so the Front of Beyond was not at its most attractive, but the wargame took place. Iain took pictures, so I hope that some of those will appear here in due course.

Laying on a game for an experienced wargaming visitor requires a bit of unaccustomed thought, I discovered. Most of the games I play these days are solo, and the social games I play with friends are usually because I bully them into taking part, so there is not a lot of pressure to make the game balanced or anything. Normally, here, no-one gives a toss who wins, so my approach to scenarios is relaxed to the point of being horizontal. I’m not suggesting for a moment that Iain is likely to be at all precious about the occasion, but I would be very sorry to waste his time – especially considering the travel involved – and he has no previous experience of Commands & Colors, so it would be doubly embarrassing to turn him off completely.

For the first time I can remember, I spent a while looking through the published scenarios – an area on which have always thought that regular CCN players are excessively fixated – to find something suitable. I was also using my widened table, so I came up with a game which was a stretched (17 hexes x 9) adaptation of GMT’s San Marcial scenario from the Spanish Expansion set. To cope with the larger armies and the bigger field, I also adopted a Battlelore tweak for the use of Command Cards (which seemed a good idea, but added to the risk of screwing up the game through unfamiliarity). I’ll set out this tweak, which was the main reason for this post, below, along with some further ruminations on CCN.

The game went well enough. I gave Iain command of the attacking French army, on the grounds that the Spanish have only one strategy – stay put on the hills, hold your fire and roll good dice when the French arrive. In the real battle of San Marcial, Soult failed to dislodge the Spaniards and gave up. Iain’s experience was similar, but my initial reasoning was that at least he would have something to do if he was attacking. No doubt we’ll discuss it further when he gets home from his holiday; he found CCN interesting, not least because it has a character of its own, and he picked it up very quickly despite my stammering explanations, but it will certainly not replace Black Powder as his game of choice.

There will be more about the actual game when the photos become available. Here is the Battlelore tweak for the big game, as promised. One of the characteristics of Commands & Colors style games is that the Command Cards restrict each turn to a small number of units, and for a big army on a big field that can be too piecemeal an approach.

The Battlelore tweak allows you to use more than one card per turn and, unlike the full Memoir 44 Overlord or Epic-sized CCA games, it allows you to work with a standard pack of Command Cards, with a very small amount of amendment (which is especially attractive if, like mine, your brain is full and easily confused).

Battlelore Epic rules applied to C&C Napoleonics

This works with an enlarged C&CN map (e.g. Battlelore Epic standard is 17 x 13) and with a single standard Command Card deck.

Rules:

The Command Cards are of two types: Section cards (which refer to the left, centre and right of the battlefield, and carry an icon showing arrows) and Tactic cards (which do not).

An extra “Epic” card draw deck is created with three Command Cards drawn from the Command deck, visible (and available, in their turn) to both players. If, at any time, when it is first created or when it is replenished to bring it up to 3 cards, the Epic deck does not show at least one Section card, discard all 3 cards and take 3 new ones until it does.

During the Command phase of his turn, a player may either:

Play a single Section card, which may be from his own hand or may be from the Epic deck, or

Play two Section cards, one of which must be from his own hand and one must be from the Epic deck, or

Play a single Tactic card, which may be from his own hand or the Epic deck

At the end of his turn, when the cards used are replaced, the player’s own hand must be brought back to strength, and the Epic deck must (if necessary) be made back up 3 cards, at least one of which must be a Section card.

When playing two Section cards, the orders on both cards are carried out.

When a Section or Tactic card played activates a number of units equal to “Command”, this is the number of cards in the player’s hand, not counting the Epic deck.

Some cards have a slightly modified interpretation:

“Scouting” Section cards offer a chance to draw two cards and discard one of them; this does not apply if the card came from the Epic deck.

“Elan” Tactic card: ordered units battle at +2 dice for the entire turn, and the Command deck and discards are combined and shuffled – the Epic deck should be discarded and replaced at this point.

“First Strike” Tactic card: if this card is drawn to the Epic deck, discard it and draw another card.

Partly as a result of the brief discussion of CCN with Iain which was possible after the game, and various ideas I have been nursing for a while, I may have some further tweaks in mind.

First off, I am now in favour of simply discarding the “Short Supply” Tactic card whenever it appears, and drawing again. I find this card does not sit well with the overall game.

Next, I am not really very comfortable that the role of a Leader in the game is simply to prevent his troops from running away and avoid being a casualty himself. One of the things that I found hardest to come to terms with in CCN is the lack of army structure – any general can attach himself to any unit. That’s OK – it’s the game rules, but it is counter-intuitive based on all my past gaming. To give a Leader a rather more proactive job in CCN, I like the idea of allowing his troops to gain an extra die in combat if he is attached to them, in return for which the Leader casualty test will require only a crossed-sabres result on a single die for a hit. The trade-off is that the Leader adds to the fighting ability of his men if he puts his own neck on the line, but he has a higher chance of being hurt.

I’m not going to do anything drastic about this until I have seen what is coming in the mooted Marshals & Generals expansion for CCN – it looks as though the role of the Leader may be about to be jazzed up a bit, so I look forward to that. It is, in any case, possible to put a Leadership rule tweak in any particular scenario, so I could try out a few ideas in solo games.

The Big Table Takes a Bow

I'm expecting a visitor tomorrow, so I've set up the newly-extended version of my wargames table for a battle. This will be an expanded (17 x 9 hexes) Commands & Colors: Napoleonics session, which is basically a stretched version of the official scenario for San Marcial (August 1813) from Expansion 1 of the GMT game, and I'll use the Battlelore tweak for the Command Cards to facilitate the bigger battle. [If you are at all interested in this rules tweak, let me know and I'll explain it in a further post.]

The set-up - Spaniards on the left of the picture, Gen Freire with the yellow border

View from behind the French right flank - the Spanish hill at this end is held
by a brigade of voluntarios,  who are classed as militia and thus are subject to triple
retreats. There may be trouble ahead

The pictures show the set-up, ready for tomorrow. The French (mostly Germans and Italians, really) under General Bertrand Clauzel will cross the Bidassoa, which is fordable along its length, and try to knock General Freire's Spanish army off a line of 3 hills. 10 Victory Points for the win, and there is a special rule that the side occupying the greater number of hexes of each of the hills at the end of their turn will gain a temporary VP for each hill held. I'm not using the Guerrilla rule for this game, mostly because I think it's rather a silly rule…

The historical Battle of San Marcial ended with the French abandoning the attack, and thus losing on points. We'll see how it goes.

Assorted Wargames Nostalgia

This post really is just a collection of bits. I was going through a file of old paperwork connected with my wargaming past – nothing very distinguished, but I was reminded of a few things. Sadly, the accompanying photos for the first item were lost ages ago, during the hostilities which followed my split with my first wife (which almost certainly serves me right).

(1) Waterloo Day – yes, today is the 199^th anniversary of Napoleon’s Really Bad Day, and one of the items I found in the file was a sheet of scribblings from a 160^th anniversary Waterloo game I played at my old flat in Marchmont, Edinburgh, with some friends [that’s 1975, ladies and gentlemen]. The first thing that struck me was that, of the players involved – Philip Snell, John Ramsay, Dave Thompson, Alan Low, Allan Gallacher and myself – I am the only one still alive. Good grief – I hadn’t thought of that before. The game was considerably scaled down, but still used inappropriately detailed rules (around about this time I started using Charles Wesencraft’s rules, with all distances halved, but June 1975 is just a little early for that, so I guess we were using a hybrid game which was mostly Tunbridge Wells [George Gush?] with some bits of South-East Scotland WG thrown in). This was probably one of the last biggish games I staged before I started painting hexagons all over my tabletop – we hadn’t thought of Old School yet, though there was definitely some creaking associated with our enthusiasm for what we naively regarded as increased realism.

One thing I remember fondly was that Allan G was supposed to bring the Prussians, since otherwise we didn’t have any, but he actually turned up with Russians, since he didn’t have any Prussians either but hadn’t the heart to tell us. Thus this particular version of the B of W was notable for an unusual lack of authenticity in the OOB. The battle staggered on all day – eventually we agreed that the Allies were beaten, and that was that – we caught the last orders for drinks at the Bruntsfield Hotel and got into the obligatory justificatory arguments. We had decided that the [P]Russians would arrive after 2pm as soon as Wellington threw 11 or better on 2D6 (or “two dice”, as we would have called them at the time) at the start of his turn. As soon as they arrived, Napoleon would start rolling dice each turn, and a French reserve force under Grouchy would arrive on a 9 or better. Don’t ask me where these scientific probabilities came from, but – anyway – it’s academic, since Wellington never managed the requisite dice roll, and his bewildered Russian allies were not called into play, and eventually returned to Dunfermline in their toolbox – I’m not sure if they were relieved or outraged.

(2) Having mentioned the South-East Scotland chaps, I am delighted to have had an email from Mark, in Canada, who knew the notorious George Jeffrey back in the 1980s (rather after I knew him), and was, for a while, a disciple of George’s famed (but little understood, especially by me) Variable Length Bound system, or VLB. This, in theory, is the answer to a great many problems which wargamers have struggled with over the decades, but is reputed to suffer from the slight problem that it doesn’t actually work. Whatever – without making any pre-emptive judgements – I have invited Mark to contribute some notes about VLB, which we have briefly mentioned here before, and he hopes to send me something – excellent.

(3) I found a bunch of photos of my old (early 1970s) Ancient armies, which were dreadfully crude but served me for many years. Now gone – a nice chap in New Zealand bought them on eBay some years ago – their only claim to a place in my heart is that they are – like my Waterloo collaborators – no more. I don’t expect anyone to be excited by my crap painting or my very basic Airfix + Garrison + Atlantic armies, but – if we are to preserve a hallowed whisper for Old School – it is as well to remember that this was the reality. You may notice that my dread of paint-shedding by plastic figures was such that I kept spears and the wobbly bits of chariots etc in the raw plastic, which explains the distinctive vibrant orange preservative obviously employed by the Celtic chariot builders.

I am still quietly pleased by the onager, which I built from balsa, with shirt button wheels (all right, all right), based on the drawings in the WRG’s nice little book. Purists will protest that the Romans did not have shirts, never mind shirt buttons.

Note early view of The Cupboard - I didn't have so many figures in 2001

The occasion commemorated by the first few photos is my first wargame in my present house, New Year 2001. The room is what was the dining room at that time, which has subsequently become the downstairs shower/toilet (so wargames in the bog almost took place here), and my opponent was Malcolm Turner, who – now I think about it – is also dead now. Maybe it’s me then? That will have cut the queue of people wishing to visit Chateau Foy for a wargame, I would think.

The remainder were taken 5 years ago, when I was proposing to sell them.

(4) I also found some vintage, typed casualty tables I derived from the kill rates in Bill Leeson’s reprint of Von Reisswitz’s Kriegsspiel rules, which I am still poring over. These may be too dry even for the standards of this blog, but I’ll see if there is something useful which could be put here.

I think that’s probably quite enough of all that…

Thoughts of a Toygamer

As an appropriate foreword, here is a clip from a thread on boardgamegeek.com (of which I am a fairly regular reader) which I offer as an example of something I have struggled with for a long time – including a few heart-searchings on this very blog, I believe.

The author of the clip has published this on the Internet, where everyone can see it, and appears even to be quite pleased with his idea, so I see no reason to change any details of it or protect his ID. Everyone is perfectly entitled to express their views (subject to moderation, of course), and it is only reasonable that everyone else is entitled to a free opinion of those views (without moderation), and of the sort of people who express them, and why they feel moved to do so.

Respect all round; fair is fair.

I don’t have a problem with this view – it seems a tad bitchy, maybe, but it’s quite amusing. Equally, I don’t have a problem with Martin’s most recent instalment of his serial emails to me on the subject of the evil that is Commands & Colors, and how it will never replace proper Old School wargaming. Martin has probably never thought of himself as a Toygamer, but he appears to be just that, and will probably be proud of the fact now that he knows.

So what is all this about? What is it that makes us (all of us, including me) pay lip-service to the enrichment which diversity brings to our hobby, while still taking every chance to stick pins in some “other lot”, because they offend some fundamental ideal which we’ve held so long we can’t remember where we learned it?

I don’t feel I ever got close enough to the human race to have a valid view on human nature – whatever that is – so I’ll spare you some embarrassment by grasping the opportunity to keep quiet on that one, but I had a couple of thoughts while shaving.

(1) Is it, in fact, a single hobby? Is a single hobby too straightforward? Do we all need some imagined opposing faction within it, to which we can feel superior?

(2) Are we all a bit defensive anyway, because of the traditional (imagined?) contempt felt for wargamers by the rest of the world? Is it easier to take out one’s touchiness on near relatives?

(3) I’m on shaky ground trying to produce unqualified generalisations about the hobby and its disciples – my own preferences and areas of interest are much too limited for that, and I do not have as wide a general understanding as I sometimes like to think. I can only have a go at analyzing where I am myself, and how I came to think the way I do.

(4) …and, because he deserves it, I’ll have a go at Martin.

As briefly as possible (not least because I have written all this numerous times before):

* I was originally excited by the same books as most wargamers of my age

* I’ve spent a great many years since then trying to make the games as enjoyable as I expected them to be when I started

* I’m still trying, but I’m more pragmatic about it now

* I love little painted soldiers in neat rows – the more colourful the period the better; this love is out of all proportion to any sensible reason for it, but it is a major influence on the types of games I like to play

* I was deeply shocked by board wargames; it took a long time before I would try one, but I was amazed at the clarity and completeness of the rules, the speed and logic of the play, and by the almost total lack of arguments

* However, I found the visual spectacle less satisfactory, and I missed the little men, so I spent the next 30 years looking for some satisfactory middle ground that combined the best of both worlds

* Commands & Colors (played with miniatures, in my case) has gone a long way to filling that hole for me; it doesn’t suit everyone, and it doesn’t provide absolutely everything I need either, but I wish the game had been around many years ago

At which point Martin appears and tells me I’m mistaken and that I have sold out to the enemy. He does it pleasantly and amusingly, of course, and his reasoning has an orthodoxy that I have come to recognise.

You see, my friends (whisper it) – Martin has also struggled with the disappointment which much of his wargaming has generated, but he has dealt with this by going back to the original books and starting again – back to the time when he was still excited. I can see a flaw here – it is something to do with failing to learn from history. If I were to go back 30-odd years – good heavens, it’s 40 years now! – I would recognise all the holes and shortcomings in the game which led to all the blind-alley tweaks and improvements and the eventual realization that boardgames had something which was useful and (more whispering) sometimes better.

I’ve got them all here – Featherstone, Wesencraft, Young, Morschauser, Grant. I really enjoy them – so much that I have actually replaced a couple of them that I had sold on eBay in a rash moment. But this is nostalgia, for the most part. Particularly Wesencraft’s Practical Wargames, which was the biggest influence on my developmental years – I sometimes have a mad urge to play a game using Wesencraft’s rules, but when I stop and consider how it will be – all the morale testing especially – I usually go off the idea.

So do I play a lot of board wargames, then? No – I own a good few, but seldom, if ever, do I play them. I recently bought a decent old copy of Ariel’s The English Civil War on eBay, entirely because it is considered an excellent instrument for conducting solo compaigns as a framework for miniatures battles. I haven’t used it yet. By the time I had checked that all the (rather dull) cardboard counters were present and correct I couldn’t face it. All those counters – all that effort to sort them out, change a 20-point cavalry counter for a 10 and a five and 3 ones after each action – as a solo experience I find this, I regret to say, dismal. I live in hope that I shall shake off this lack of fortitude and get on with it, but I find that handling large numbers of cardboard counters is a great chore, while – strangely – I will happily arrange cupboards and boxes and tables full of painted toys all day long.

Discuss. I also have to point out that the attraction of the cardboard squares is not helped by my dwindling eyesight, nor the fact that my fingertips appear to be changing into elephants’ feet.

Martin, meanwhile, is feverishly setting up games which look exactly like the photos in the original Charles Grant (Sr) books, and even fighting those same battles, in his rush to recapture the thrill. Good for him. He knows he is right, too.

As ever, I haven’t really got anywhere here, other than confirming that there are a lot more questions than answers, but often the consideration of the questions is useful. Or at least it passes the time until I can’t remember why I was doing it in the first place.

Which reminds me that my original intention was to say a few words about a book I am reading on my Kindle. It is Simulating War, by Philip Sabin, and I believe I was prompted to purchase it by a comment on one of the blogs I read – I can’t remember exactly where I heard of it, but if it was your comment then thank you.

I’ve not really got very far through it yet, but have found it fascinating. Sabin discusses many aspects of the theoretical modelling of warfare, and compares the approaches and relative success of professional strategists, educators and hobbyists, and the various strengths and weaknesses of paper layouts (which we might describe as boardgames) and computer games, which, briefly, he considers to have been less successful than expected, since they are market and technology led, and tend to be designed bottom-up. The criterion for success here is not commercial profitability, but Sabin’s central theme of the optimal balance between realism and playability – a subject which we could all bore the legs off donkeys with for many years.

I offer no kind of review here, other than to recommend the book if this is the sort of thing you find interesting. I did notice, however, that occasionally I found myself pleased because he had expressed something which I feel myself, but rather more skillfully and convincingly than I could have managed. If I am honest, I was especially pleased at the occasions where he was criticising some “other lot”. At other times I found he was sticking pins in my lot, at which point I would say to myself, “ah, he doesn’t really understand that”, or “that’s true, but it doesn’t really apply to me…”

That other lot have much to answer for.

Topsy Turvy Wargames – why not?

This will be another of my more ruminating posts – asking a pile of questions, and offering very little in the way of answers. There’s something I can’t quite put my finger on – definitely some idea which is just out of reach. You might well be able to explain it to me, or even convince me that the matter can be safely forgotten about. This is not going to be a competent review of the Huzzah! wargames rules, though it might encourage you to have a look at them.

There were quite a few starting points this time – some probably more obviously significant than others:

(1) I was telling someone about one of my favourite daft moments in a military book – in Frederick E Smith’s screenplay paperback of Waterloo (from the 1970 Bondarchuk movie) there is an episode during the Battle of Ligny where Smith states that “suddenly a shot rang out”, and – of course – Blücher’s horse is hit, and the old bugger is pinned underneath. History notwithstanding, think about it for a moment – suddenly a shot rang out? – and, presumably, it broke the complete silence in which the Battle of Ligny had been enacted prior to that point? Yes, this is silly, but somehow it encapsulates what we expect military dramas to say – more significantly, there is maybe something here which reflects the way we think of battles.

Certainly, my wargames are a bit like this. Because of the tricks we play with time and activation to make the game playable, the tabletop action consists of a series of isolated volleys, separated by periods of measuring and calculation (and whatever else it is you do during your games). Sad person that I am, I sometimes play a background soundtrack of a horse-&-musket battle during my wargames, which is fun, but it is very obvious that the activity on the audio is not very like my battle, which seems much more like a series of shots suddenly ringing out, as it were, in an otherwise silent and mathematical context, in a style which Frederick E Smith would recognize immediately.

(2) In a comment about a recent blog post, I mentioned that I suspected that – certainly at the time of the ECW – the proportion of people killed by an aimed shot intended for them was small. If someone dispatched you while holding the other end of a sword, or if he fired at short range to stop you attacking him, then there was some personal malice involved, but otherwise casualties must have been men who were hit by a passing ball – if there are enough bullets flying about, someone is definitely going to get hurt. It’s like running with scissors – you just know it’s going to happen.

(3) I remembered a minor (low wattage) lightbulb moment I had a couple of years ago when working on Grand Tactical rules; I realized that the tedium of answering the same, repetitious questions about the tactical situation of an artillery target fired on by more than one battery in the same turn could be simplified by considering the total effect on the target unit in one go, rather than as a series of separate shots from the firers. In other words, turn the thing back to front and think about it from the target’s viewpoint. Topsy Turvy, in fact.

(4) As part of an ongoing pastime I have of reading wargames rules, I recently came back to Huzzah!, published by Oozlum Games, which is a ruleset I have never really played with, but which interests me greatly. It is, so to speak, back-to-front in that it focuses on the risks to, and demoralization of, a unit in a combat situation rather than studying individual volleys and the reaction to them.

(5) (This is the last one, I promise) – I was reading someone else’s ECW rules, and was surprised at how effective musketry at long range (100 to 200 paces) was. I can see that someone coming within 200 paces of a musket-armed unit is getting into a stressful situation, but somehow the risk doesn’t seem to me to be simply that of being hit by an aimed volley at such long range.

OK – that’s all the inputs. This left me thinking: what is it that a musket armed ECW unit does to an enemy unit 200 paces away? I think what they do mostly is they frighten them. The potential damage and pain that is implied is more significant than the loss occasioned by the aimed balls at this range. How the recipient unit reacts to this is dependant on a familiar list of things such as their training, fatigue level and so on – the Morale shopping list.

The important point here is that a battlefield is an appalling place, filled with noise, horror and flying metal. Any unit coming within firing range of the enemy is, first and foremost, entering a very dangerous place – an area of high risk. The Huzzah! approach seems appropriate. A commander’s view of one his regiments is not how many have been killed, it is are they still in action, and can they still hurt the enemy? Inability to hurt the enemy any longer could certainly be explained by their all being struck down, but I think there is a general agreement now that what mostly happened was that the effects (physical and mental) of being in a very dangerous and stressful place for a period reduced the effectiveness of a unit to a point where they no longer contributed to the army’s effort.

My battlefield soundtrack seems to portray complete mayhem – a whole pile of firing going on throughout – yet we know that units would try to conserve their ammunition, and that there would be little point in firing blind at distant targets. The Topsy-Turvy approach (courtesy of Huzzah!) is that we consider the situation of a unit which is such-and-such a distance from various threats, and is thus stressed by the sum of the various hazards – as currently experienced and also the expectation of what could happen next. There is a whole pile of lethal material flying about – the nearer you are to the source of the firing, the more discouraging (and damaging) this will be.

The emphasis shifts to examining each unit’s exposure – how far are they from each potential threat? Never mind the individual firers and their activity, assume they will be keeping busy, making things unpleasant, and consider instead the state of each unit exposed to fire.

I have no draft rules to sum this up, and no firm ideas yet, other than an itch which needs scratching, though you might be interested to read the Huzzah! rules.

Topsy Turvy. Interesting. Maybe?

ECW - Updated C&C-based Rules Available Again

Since I have now managed to arrange for a proper PDF Editor on my Mac, I have been able to update my Commands & Colors-based ECW rules, which for file-storage purposes go by the snappy name of CC_ECW, and thus I have re-inserted the section in the top right-hand corner of this window where, if you are interested, you can (or should be able to) access the latest versions from Google Docs, or whatever it is called these days.

I am now up to Version 2_64 of the test rules, which implies a lot more activity than has been the case – my numbering system is too pathetic to explain. Death by Version Control - the legacy of a life in IT. I have dropped the summary of changes (from C&CN) sheet, since it was just one more thing to maintain, and I have revised QRS sheets and a nice new Stand of Pikes tracker, similar to the Squares tracker in C&CN.

Changes in the rules since the last available version are based on my own playtesting and feedback from friends. The significant ones are:

Foot - foot may now move a bit quicker - they may stand still (and carry out either melee or ranged combat), move 1 hex (and carry out melee combat) or move 2 hexes (and then may not combat at all). They may not make a double move if it starts, or at any point brings them within, 2 hexes of the enemy. This is subject to normal terrain rules, and seems to work well.

Horse - this has been a bit trickier - the advantages for Gallopers over Trotters (and Trotters includes Cuirassiers) were too generous - with lucky dice, Galloper cavalry could become unstoppable. Revised version of the rules are:

Gallopers fighting Trotters will get first blow in a melee, regardless of who is the attacker, and may follow up and carry out cavalry breakthrough in a successful fight even if they are not the attacker (i.e. if it is not their player's turn). Trotters attacking will still get to carry out follow-up and breakthrough if they win and a hex is vacated. Other changes here - bonus die for attacking Gallopers is scrapped (they have enough advantages already), and the number of breakthroughs and bonus melees is limited to 1 (the open-ended series of bonus melees can give a crazy game, so I've dropped that).

Rash Gallopers - and these are strictly limited to 1 or 2 units in a game - are like other Gallopers, but they also get a bonus die in melee against non-Galloper horse, and they MUST follow up and carry out breakthrough and bonus melee if they are able to (which simulates their getting out of control). Again, only 1 such bonus melee. Veteran Rash Gallopers fighting Raw Trotters is not a pretty sight…

One further change – because the Chance Cards occurred so infrequently as to have little effect, I’ve doubled the number of Hazzard a Chaunce cards in the Command pack from 2 to 4, so, if you download them, print p8 of the Command Cards twice to give you the extra cards.

Any problems with the links, and/or anything crazy in the documentation, please let me know.

ECW – Gallopers, or Whatever

Tweakle, tweakle, melee rule;

Still not ryte, thou bless’d owld fule 

Artwork by Paul Hitchin

Dalliance with my variation on Commands & Colors rules for the English Civil War is going well. The games bash along nicely, but my preferred “suck it and see” approach to changing the rules has sometimes produced some unexpected results.

One area of study has been the rules for Melee Combat involving horse. For those who are interested in this stuff, and anyone else who has a few minutes to spare, let me explain a little.

Commands & Colors is a boardgame. I’m quite comfortable with this fact, though occasionally stones fall on my house because I have painted hexes on my tabletop. The advantages of using C&C with miniatures, for me, are that it works, its mechanisms are simple almost to the point of being crude, there are no debates about what happens in certain situations and the game trots along nicely – invariably reaching a conclusion which all parties can understand. All of which adds up to the thing being – well, a lot of fun.

My ECW game is actually based on the Napoleonics version of C&C. My changes to the basic rule set reflect my understanding of how cavalry (sorry, horse) operated in this period. As much for my own benefit as anyone else’s, I shall set down a simplified version of this – if the simplicity is verging on the infantile, that’s OK – that is the sort of person I am.

In the Thirty Years War, according to my sources, there were two main types of horse – cuirassiers and general-purpose cavalry usually referred to as arquebusiers. The accepted way of using them was based on the methods and training of the Spanish and Dutch schools. As follows: 

1. Horse have pistols. These pistols are heavy, inaccurate, unreliable, almost impossible to load on a moving horse and serve mostly as a cross between a badge of a gentleman’s rank and a cudgel. 
2. When ordered to advance to the attack, the horse trot steadily up to the opposition, get their pistols ready (usually in a surprising, tipped-over-sideways posture which apparently increases the chance of the priming igniting properly), get as close as possible (preferably right in their faces) and attempt to fire (did it go off? – oh bugger – I’ve got another one here – hang on…). 
3. If the enemy flinches, or otherwise appear to be discouraged by all this carry-on, the discharged pistols are discarded, or possibly thrown at the foe, swords are drawn and the whole thing becomes a lot more energetic, one side or other being chased from the field, cut down, captured etc.

You can see this would be an unpleasant event to be caught up in, but it presents a strange, lumpy blend of chivalrous protocol and loyal commitment to the fashionable technology. At least in theory, at its peak this pistol ritual was developed into some complicated formation manoeuvres – specifically the Caracole (derived from the Spanish word for a snail, which I believe was associated with the shape of the turning movement rather than the speed with which it was delivered) – which in hindsight seem better suited to the parade ground than the battlefield.

"…pistol? - what pistol…?…"

A number of rule sets I have read make a particular feature of this pistol skirmishing, and even of the caracole, but it doesn’t look like anything I would wish to use in a game, unless it was a 1:1 skirmish – fortunately, the caracole seems to have been abandoned by the 1640s. Managing the loading and firing of individual pistol volleys within a brigade-level wargame seems to me the sort of thing my late friend and guru, Allan Gallacher, would have termed “Fannying About” – molecular-level activity of little consequence.

According to the story, King Gustavus Adolfus of Sweden (or some influential party in his gang) decided, probably correctly, that the pistol was not yet ready to be used in such a manner, and that it made more sense to forget about it and just jump straight to the sword bit and – since you then didn’t have to worry about aiming a pistol, you could thus get a bit of a move on as a result. One can almost visualize the shocked expressions of struggling pistol men being charged in this barbaric manner…

Righto – having thus reached the limits of my own attention span, I have adopted the convenient and widely used convention that my ECW cavalry will break down into 3 types – “Gallopers”, who are Swedish-style charging horse who just rush in with swords, rather than fiddling around with pistols, “Trotters”, who are the more cautious pistol chaps, and Cuirassiers, who are heavily armoured, slow-moving Trotters. I have also decided to rise above the irritation caused by these modern wargaming names for the classes, which generate a lot of heat and some contempt among purists. If you are offended by the names then you are absolutely correct – please be assured that when I say Gallopers, what I really mean is “that type of horse which are not, and never were, actually called Gallopers, but which I incorrectly and sloppily refer to as Gallopers entirely for my own convenience”. And similarly for the Trotters - I hope that makes everything all right.

Anyway – where was I? – oh yes – Gallopers. Within my C&C-based ECW rules, Cuirassiers, being heavy,  have a 2-hex move, Gallopers (which includes a lot of early-period Royalists) have a 3-hex move and Trotters also have a 3-hex move, though any Trotters moving into contact with the enemy are limited to 2 hexes, to allow for all this faffing about with pistols, and keeping everything calm in the approach. Gallopers  get an extra Combat Die in a melee, to allow for the extra elan and momentum and shock effect and suchlike – which seems reasonable – but they only get it in a newly formed melee in which they are the attackers. In other words, they do not get this in a melee which is continuing from an earlier turn, nor in any bonus melee resulting from the C&C “Cavalry Breakthrough” rule, whereby a cavalry unit which wins a melee may occupy the hex vacated by the enemy, and optionally move a further hex, and may fight an extra melee immediately (i.e. in the same turn). Neither do I allow Gallopers to claim this extra bonus die if they are “battling back”, in C&C speak, having been themselves attacked.

My intention, as you will gather, was to restrict this bonus to sections of the combat in which the Gallopers had the initiative and had a definite extra shock impact.

I am still testing to see how this all works out – the recent debacle of the Battle of Netherfield demonstrated an extreme consequence of the horse getting a run of luck (mumble, mumble), which is clearly something that has to be checked over.

An unexpected side-effect has shown up in a couple of subsequent replays of the same test game; since an extra Combat Die is a significant bonus, it is a smart move for the Parliamentarian (Trotter) horse to attack first, so that the Gallopers are restricted to “battling back” and do not get the bonus die. The result is that the Trotter horse have definitely become very aggressive – unrealistically so. In an attempt to reflect a real tactical situation in the game, I have generated distinctly unrealistic behaviour on the part of the Trotters.

I can solve this at a stroke by allowing the Gallopers the bonus die even when they are battling back, in which case there is no particular advantage for the non-Gallopers in making pre-emptive attacks (other than the obvious one that they get first blow, and only the survivors will fight back). The downside of this instant fix is that the Gallopers become even more formidable than they were already. Hmmm.

We’ll try it out, anyway. I really do like fiddling around with rules, but only on the understanding that one day they settle down into something which is demonstrably sensible.