Lasalle - I'm Doing It Again...

Ever since it was published, I’ve strongly fancied having a serious shot at Sam Mustafa’s Lasalle Napoleonic game. I was enthusiastic about his earlier Grande Armée (and the incomplete Fast Play version of the same), though my enthusiasm extended only to borrowing ideas from these rules – I was rather put off by some of the activation and command procedures, which added a lot of labour for marginal benefit. The fact that I didn’t just adopt Grande Armée as my main Napoleonic rules for ever afterwards is not necessarily a criticism of the game – it was merely another in a long series of rule sets for which my complete devotion did not survive a full reading.

Where Mustafa did impress me especially, though, was in the commonsense department – the Grande Armée booklet contains a wealth of footnotes which explain the logic of how he produced a playable game from the chaos which was the reality of horse and musket warfare, and much of what he said turned on a few lightbulbs for me in rationalising game mechanisms. There is a discussion of routing troops, for example, which makes sense to me – I have, like everyone else, spent many hours of my life moving defeated units towards the rear in accurate 2D6-inch steps, or whatever. Mustafa says that routing troops are not actually anywhere – shepherding them to the rear like this is not realistic – routers are nowhere – they do not hold a formation, they are not identifiably in a particular position on the battlefield. Good – I like that. That seems to me like commonsense.

Lasalle got a fair amount of advance publicity, and looked very promising. I was a little put off by the hefty cost of buying the official book from the USA, but managed to get a cheaper secondhand copy from eBay in the UK. It looked very good. At the time I got it I did not have the time to get properly involved in it – I was in the process of applying Commands and Colors to my Napoleonic games. It did seem to me that Lasalle would give a useful complementary set of rules, to cover smaller, more tactical actions. When I originally read it through, of course, I considered whether it would be a simple tweak to change it to fit a hex grid (no, of course not - idiot), and I had a few concerns about basing and unit sizes, but it still looked very promising, and I still do have the intention to give it a good try-out when the time is right. I also gave myself a slap and told myself firmly that when the time came I should set out with the objective of adopting the game as tested and published, not some mutant version which I cobbled together myself, based on prejudices and things I once used to do as a boy.

Recently I got the book down off the shelf, considering whether now was the time, and for the last few evenings it has been my bedtime reading. I also got myself a little notebook and a fresh pencil, to record “thoughts and issues” - areas of the rules which gave me concerns, or where I thought I might have problems getting my existing armies to work without re-basing them.

I wrote, very carefully, right at the top of the page, “DO NOT ALTER THE GAME UNLESS YOU HAVE TO”. I know myself only too well, I think.

The “issues” come in two broad groups. Group 1 consists of things related to base sizes, unit dimensions, the balance of the game – I am very keen that any fixes I have to put in here do not distort the way the game plays. Thus, for example, the game works comfortably with my infantry battalions of 4 bases, each of 6 men in two rows, and works pretty well with my cavalry basing – no problems there. Artillery is not such a good fit – I use 2-gun-model batteries, and Mustafa has one model equals two cannons, which would give 4-model batteries for the French. I worked out that I can tweak some of the numbers in Lasalle so that my 2-gun batteries behave the same as the 4-model Lasalle ones (and I have to admit to a certain dislike of the look-of-the-thing idea of 4 guns in a battery in a game where a battalion is only two dozen men, so – as long as it doesn’t spoil the game – a tweak to handle 2-gun batteries seems acceptable).

One of the notes in this first group is, in fact, based on a personal niggle, but it doesn’t alter the game, so I kept it in Group 1. Lasalle uses measurements in “base-widths”, or BWs. This is good for making the rules read sensibly for a variety of scale implementations, but the advantage is entirely to the benefit of the authors – to the user who has fixed on a single scale, the permanent use of the generic BW terminology is something of a pain. In fact my BW is 50mm, or 2 inches, so it makes more sense to me to simply double all measurements, and refer to the distances in inches. I refuse, point blank, to go on talking about BWs simply because they suited the author and simplified the publishing task. It also means I can use a ruler I bought in a shop rather than some home-brewed device.

There are a few more things like this, and they are going down in the jotter in Group 1. Things which are not stoppers – things where I simply have to tweak the game a little to get it to work as intended with my own armies. Dr Mustafa would be all in favour of Group 1, I’m sure.

Group 2 gets a bit more edgy – this is getting into bits of the game which I don’t like very much, to be blunt about it. Yes – I know, I know – I should just accept the whole game as is because it works like that, and it is what the originators developed, with all their wisdom and experience. Despite myself, I find that I am questioning things – cheeky beggar. I am all in favour of the mechanisms for handling skirmishers – there is an element of abstraction in there which comes pretty much from Grande Armée – anyone who likes placing individual skirmishers behind bushes etc will not like this section of Lasalle at all, but I do – as Mustafa points out, the abstraction avoids the game getting bogged down in what was a minority activity, beneath the attention of the generals, and in any case what real skirmishers did is not at all like what you are doing with your riflemen in the bushes, so it’s a fair cop. Good. Then I find with amazement that moving units – changing formation and front, for example – is complicated and, well, fiddly, and not very abstracted at all. When I see a diagram showing how I am to measure the outside circumference of a wheeling manoeuvre, and how to calculate the movement allowance in rough terrain, for example, I find that I have written two notes under Group 2 in the jotter – “manoeuvre – fiddly” and “George Jeffrey lives!”, and at this point Dr Mustafa would not be so happy.

And so it goes on – my notes say:

Discipline Tests – fiddly

Army Morale – fiddly

Rules for whether or not in cover – fiddly

Rules for crossing obstacles - fiddly

Rules for flank/rear – fiddly

At that point I stopped and put the book down. This isn’t going well. This is what happens each time I read rules with a view to using them – Group 2 becomes a big obstacle. I really don’t want to teach myself a game of which 50% is the famous and well-received Lasalle, created by the highly respected Sam Mustafa, and 50% is a hotch-potch of gluings and transplants inserted by the madman Foy. The chances of such a game working well are negligible, and it would potentially be unfair to the original and a waste of my time.

It isn’t a problem – I can slap myself again and go about this in a more businesslike manner, or I can promise I will come back to it when I’m more positively disposed. What really grates is that I find myself in the same position I have been in so often before. I got to about this point with Lasalle a year ago and shelved it, and I wouldn’t like to guess how many such episodes I’ve had with Shako, Napoleon’s Battles, Empire and so many others over the years. No matter – I’ll come back to it.

I still intend to have a proper go at Blücher, too, and though my track record shouldn’t really give me a lot of optimism, you would think, I suspect that (as was the case for Commands & Colors: Napoleonics) the game scale and the concept are sufficiently different from what I’ve done before to give a better chance of my keeping an open mind. I hope so, anyway.

My ECW Rules - available again

I've had some email recently, most of it from members of TMP and boardgamegeek.com, about my removing access to my Commands & Colors-based rules for the ECW. Though I still have the intention to do some updates to the documentation, I found this morning that the extant versions in Google Docs date from February 2014, so are not far off the current state.

The text panel at the top right of this screen should now once again show the links - if you attempt to use them and they don't get you there, please let me know.

I am reminded that I removed these links a while ago because I was getting a steady trickle of complaints about the rules, and some requests for changes, which is OK but represents a level of user support I had not prepared myself for. Since the number of requests to reinstate the links now exceeds the number of complaints I used to get, I've put things back as they were.

Thus the links at top right will get you to pdf files for the rules and play aids for my CC_ECW game, which is certainly not a supported product, though you are welcome to use it provided you give me appropriate credit if you publish anything.

I am currently using this game with a growing collection of add-on or alternative rule sections, which I intend to document in the same sort of way once they settle down a bit.

In Odd Moments

I've been very busy recently, so time to involve myself in hobby activities has been infrequent, and - more to the point - unpredictable. Such moments as have presented themselves have been happily spent making the most of two recent purchases.

The artillery of the dastardly Parliamentarians prepare to fire on the home of the Laceys

Firstly, I was very pleased to obtain a good, secondhand set of DVDs of the 1980s BBC ECW historical drama series, By the Sword Divided. The set (of 8 discs) includes both series; thus far I have got most of the way through the first series, and jolly good it is too. I neither watched nor heard about the original transmission, so it is all new to me. The 1983 date is apparent in the 4:3 picture aspect  and the modest approach to special effects (night-time scenes are pretty much invisible!), but it has the advantage to me that, with a couple of notable exceptions, the cast are mostly unfamiliar (since I never watched Holby City...) and the production is modern enough for me not to be distracted by its shortcomings.

The one stand-out performance is Julian Glover, always a fine actor, as Sir Martin Lacey, a Royalist landowner, but the whole show rings true and is convincing. It also demonstrates a keen awareness of the history and the military aspects (from which I learned quite a bit - which I had not expected), and it comes as no surprise that the historical advisor was Brigadier Peter Young. The slight downside, of course, is that the Brigadier's personal points of bias come through along with his undoubted wisdom, so the Parliamentarian side get the benefit of very little doubt, for example. I also found that the moments when the cast stand and recite historical events to each other, as contextual background disguised as family chatter, were the least convincing of the whole production, but they do tie things together nicely.

I am a bit nervous to note that Sir Martin was killed in last night's instalment, so I am hoping the series does not dip in his absence. I shall continue to work my way through the remaining discs - this series is pretty expensive to get hold of - I was lucky to get a bargain set - but is very highly recommended if you are interested in the period. Michael had informed me that you can watch it on YouTube, which is terrific, but sadly is not practicable at my local broadband speed.

Second bit of shopping was a copy of Blücher, Sam Mustafa's long-awaited grand tactical cousin for Lasalle, in his Honour series of horse and musket rules. I haven't got very far into this yet, but it looks very interesting indeed. One thing that surprises me a little is that it is the logical replacement for Mustafa's Grande Armée rules, yet some of the most cunning, trademark devices from that earlier rule set have been dropped. There are other, newer innovations, of course, but familiarity with the earlier set gives an intriguing insight into the background.

Anyway, I haven't got very far into it yet, so will carry on reading as time permits.

ECW Campaign - Activation Again - Crude but OK

In my recent Battle of High Cark (previous post), I had another example of a medium-sized action which did not lay out nicely in the official play-across-the-table, left-centre-right sector format which best suits Commands & Colors. In fact, the battle did sort itself into across-the-table, but it might not have done.

Since it was also a solo game, there were a couple of reasons why I decided for this occasion to swerve my customised ECW set of C&C Command Cards for activation. I’ve done this on occasions in the past, usually replacing the cards with a semi-improvised dice system to fit the scenario. These systems have all worked tolerably well – my personal view on each of them is based on very short, Stone Age-man criteria.

(1) Does it restrict the number of activated units to about the right level (i.e. something comparable with what the C&C cards would give)?

(2) Is the extra overhead of labour and mental arithmetic acceptable, in view of the advantages offered (i.e. is it a pain in the butt)?

(3) Does it make sense (i.e. can it be explained in sensible, real-world terms, or is it just an obviously artificial game mechanism to limit each move)?

Dice manufacture in the Stone Age - lack of a numbering system was a major problem

Point (1) is simply that C&C provides the player with a hand of cards (usually the cards he doesn’t want), of which he may play one – typically, the sector cards allow activation of between 1 and 4 units, though some allow activation of a number of units equal to the number of cards in the player's hand. This gives an approximate idea of how much activation is appropriate for tested use with C&C’s movement and combat rules, and with the required (short) duration of each turn, to keep things ticking along.

Point (2) is obviously also about keeping the game moving, and a personal aversion I have to command radii (which, of course, are loved and embraced by a great many players whose views and opinions I respect). I have had unhappy flirtations with caches of Command Chips and similar – as soon as they become a nuisance, the Activation rules are abandoned, and I use tasteful application of Point (3) to justify this.

My latest improvisation came after reading some of Neil Thomas’ rules. It does not appear in any of Neil’s books as far as I know, but I find Mr Thomas invigorating for a number of reasons. First and foremost, he is not scared of doing something unorthodox in the interests of simplifying and speeding up the game – I frequently disagree with individual manifestations of this, but at heart he is definitely my kind of wargamer. I have a slight difficulty with the fact that he often has several different approaches for the same period, and I am never sure just how tested and proven these rules are, but once you challenge accepted thinking the gloves are off, and all sorts of new and sacrilegious ideas spring to mind.

All right, Foy – enough preamble, already – what did you do for the ECW battle?

Well, first off I applied my recently-developed “brigade order” rule. An “order” (activation counter) may be placed against a single unit, or against a Leader/General figure – and in my ECW games the Leaders go down to brigade level. Thus far it looks rather like C&C. The ordered Unit or Leader may then move, fight, whatever. However, if the order is given to a Leader, and if he is attached to a combat unit under his own command, then a contiguous group of units from this same brigade may be activated by this single order. Thus my armies have broken out in rashes of coloured counters, to identify the various brigades, and the need to keep them together to take advantage of this feature (an effect I term “daisychaining” when explaining it to bemused visitors) forces the army commander to keep his army organised. If a unit gets separated from its brigade, it requires a separate order – perhaps it will be moved back into contact with the brigade. In broken ground, or if a unit in the middle of the line breaks, or if (heaven forfend) the brigadier stops a bullet, the additional hassle of keeping that brigade under control is considerable.

A more senior Leader may take command of a brigade (only one at a time) if the brigadier is lost. All Leaders attached to units are, of course, at risk if the unit takes losses.

OK – that’s not really all that new – I’ve mentioned this before, and bits of it are sort of derived from CCA. The new bit was the Activation rule. The “phasing” player (don’t you hate that?) is about to take his turn, and he arms himself with a handful of my patent blue ACTIVE counters and a D6.

He is only going to get to place a limited number of Activation counters, so he had better prioritise, and he had better be selective. He gets the first one for nothing – place a counter against any unit or leader he wishes.

It gets harder as he goes along. For his second order/counter, he must throw a 2 or better on the D6. If he gets 2+, he places a second counter, and then he must get 3+ to place a third. And so on – he may stop whenever he wishes, and if he doesn’t make the next number (or successfully places a 6^th counter) then he must stop. Yes it is crude – I am proud of how crude it is – but it works, on average it gives something like the number of Activation orders you might expect from C&C, but you don’t know how many until you find out the hard way. Ideal for a solo player - I found it easy, convenient and still with a good few stings in the tail. On four, possibly five occasions in the Battle of High Cark I decided to place an order against one of the C-in-Cs, to move him nearer to where he was needed (just in case). As soon as the C-in-C was identified, without fail, the D6 rolled a “1” and the C-in-C remained where he was. It became a bit of a joke – a sad, solo joke, but there you go.

For a bigger battle, I guess I might use a D8, or a D10, but the D6 might do for even very big actions if the brigade orders feature were available. Anyway, there’s the outline. I liked it the other day – it passed all my Stone Age tests. You can reject it out of hand, or improve on it, or try it out, or tell me that it actually appeared in an SPI game in 1978, but do – at least – think about it. Out of the mouths of fools and single-cell organisms cometh wisdom – when you are contemplating the unthinkably crude, you may come up with a few new wacky ideas of your own.

And, if you haven’t already, have a look at Neil Thomas – I read and shrugged at his Napoleonic book, and did pretty much the same with his One-Hour wargames book, but – by Gum – my mind was racing afterwards. Homeopathy for wargamers?    

A Matter of Honour - The Professor and the Field Marshal

I have to record that the kicking-off point for this post was a recent entry in the blog of the worthy Old Trousers, which is invariably entertaining, and often usefully informative, so my thanks for that, Mr Trousers. [I must add here that I do not have the self-confidence to handle these noms de blog with ease – I pondered whether it would be more matey to address the gentleman in question as just “Old” – for short – but decided against it]

His blog post, you see, made me aware that the long-awaited Blücher game in the Honour series is due to appear very soon. [Again, this gets me near to the edge of my natural comfort zone, since I would be very nervous about the risk of appearing enthusiastic]

It’s a demography thing, really. The dates of the beginning of the post-war growth of miniatures wargaming, along with the inevitable passage of time since then, mean that of recent years we have lost a few of the pioneering heroes of the hobby, and there have been appropriate tributes published – without stopping to check the back-obits, I would recognise that Paddy Griffith, Terry Wise, and Don Featherstone all made a big contribution to my own fascination with tabletop warfare, and there are many others – some of them still alive! – to whom I also owe a great deal. I don’t really do eulogies – not because I am unappreciative, you understand, but because somehow it seems silly when I try to write one. It feels like saying “me too”, but not quite loud enough for anyone to hear.

It is entirely correct that we recognise these key individuals from the past, but I have to say that there is also a list of more recent people that I take very seriously – among so much that is good and positive, there are a few thinkers and rule-writers who particularly strike a chord with me, who can be relied on to give well thought-out games, or at the very least to talk sense. This is all very subjective, and anybody might object to my personal list, or feel I have overlooked someone far more important – they would almost certainly be correct.

Dr Sam A Mustafa

I invariably find the works of Frank Chadwick, Howard Whitehouse and the guys from the Too Fat Lardies worthwhile; I also got a lot out of the commonsense approach of Doc Monaghan’s Big Battalions, and of recent years, of course, I have become quite a fan of Richard Borg. To me, one of the most impressive of the lot has been Dr Sam A Mustafa, the man behind the Honour series of games, and he is my subject for this morning.

Dr Mustafa is a historian and a teaching professor at a US college, so his authorship of wargames is a sideline – by his own admission, the time he has available for the hobby stuff is limited. I first came across him when I became very keen on his Grande Armée Napoleonic rules, and on the later, beta-test prototype Fast Play Grande Armée, which was an unsupported variant which was available for download online for a while.

Let me put this into context – “very keen” in my case does not mean I actually adopted GA as my rules of choice, but I found much that was fresh and sensible in there, and some of the ideas were a big influence on subsequent changes to my own in-house rules. I particularly liked the fact that the rules were aimed at a size of game which I found most enjoyable (i.e. big), and I liked the abstraction or suppression of fiddly bits which were mostly a distraction in a big game. Examples were the disappearance of musketry volleys into a simple, combined close combat phase, what seemed to me to be a novel, practical approach to skirmishers, and the removal of explicit divisional artillery batteries from the game – such artillery was now just an adjustment to the combat effectiveness of each division. Yes – I know – this stuff doesn’t suit everyone, but for big games I found all this very sensible. I had some issues with the Command and Control rules, but then I always do.

In particular, a feature of the Grande Armée booklet is a series of explanatory panels which explain the rationale behind some of the less orthodox rules, in terms of the realities of Napoleonic warfare – I consider these notes to have been worth the price of the booklet, just as an educator and something to get me thinking.

In time, Dr Sam launched his Honour series, and the first product I became aware of was Lasalle. A couple of things about Lasalle: I was a little disappointed that the rules book was of a newly-fashionable format which I call “Big Shiny Books” (BSB), I was surprised that the game was almost a step back towards Old School from GA (it was, after all, aimed at smaller battles), and I had a personal problem in that I could have used my existing armies – organisation and bases – absolutely as they stood, apart from artillery – 3-model batteries would not be an insurmountable obstacle, obviously, but I was reluctant to start dabbling with a very expensive ruleset which required immediate tweaks, right at the outset, to suit my armies. The key word here is “expensive” – BSBs are always too thick, too heavy, packed with irrelevant pictures (to amuse those with a short attention span?), overpriced and far too costly to mail to the UK from America. You can, of course, download a simpler pdf file, but then you have to pay for the ink, the paper and some kind of binder. Hmmm. In fact I did find a cheap secondhand copy of the hardback version in the UK, on eBay, so I own it but – like the gentleman accordionist – I have not yet played it (though I intend to).

What I was really excited about in the Honour series was that a grand-tactical companion game, Blücher, was next in the queue. Well, after some announcements about delays, Blücher was eventually shelved because, said Dr Sam, they couldn’t get it to work well enough, and so they had cut their losses. If you can have degrees of devastation, I was certainly a bit devastated. I took the huff sufficiently to pay scant attention to Maurice and Longstreet and the next products in the series, though I heard they were excellent, and by personal choice I steer clear of user forums (which always seem to me to be dominated by points-scoring exchanges between opinionated guys who don’t know very much), so I was very pleasantly surprised when the Trouser man recently announced that Blücher is back in the plan. Yes!

It looks good – it features an integral mini-campaign system called Scharnhorst, and a whole pile of other goodies, and it is expected to appear in February. There are copious downloadable samples and illustrations on the Honour website, and there is a series of excellent introductory podcasts done by the man himself. The original intention was to have a series of four podcasts, ending before Christmas, but they generated so much interest and so many further questions that Mustafa has produced a fifth, which may well be the start of an occasional series. I listened to all the podcasts last night. The first four are interesting to anyone who might be thinking of buying the game, of course, but the fifth is a beauty – though he apologises for going into detail, Mustafa spends some time explaining the design features of the game, including some of his personal philosophy on what works and what does not work in a wargame of this type, and an extended discussion of activation mechanisms – this, admittedly, is just the sort of thing I find interesting, but if you are with me on this, I recommend it highly – you’ll find it here.

That’s probably quite enough about that – the book will be expensive, that is for sure, and the add-ons (packs of unit cards for specific campaigns and so forth) will all be a further expense, but it looks very promising. It is designed to be playable using printed unit cards as well as with miniatures. I hope it will be available through a European retail outlet, or the postal costs will leave the poor old camel with a badly broken back!

Morale – Now I Remember

I thought I should write this while I still feel the need to do so. It’s amazing how you forget. Yesterday, I blithely set about playing out a small cavalry skirmish for the ECW campaign (previous post, if you can be bothered), and felt that, since the game was too small and fiddly for my usual Commands & Colors style rules, I should get back to some proper, old-fashioned wargaming, and use more traditional rules, such as I knew and loved when I was young and enthusiastic. I was rather looking forward to it.

I didn’t go into this completely blind – I decided to use a derivative of Victory without Quarter, which I have used before for larger ECW actions – including a very large one at Old John’s HQ two years ago. Fine. As I recall, apart from a couple of gaps in the rules (which the derivative is intended to fix), the games went OK.

Well…

I got a bit of a shock yesterday – I mean, the game was OK, but the very small scale of the action threw up an effect which I didn’t expect – or, at least, if I should have expected it then I’d forgotten what wargames used to be like.

The rules I used were a wholehearted effort to do things the old way – put the boards with the non-hex side up, dig out the measuring tape, have the QRS tables taped up on the dresser to keep things grooving along. I didn’t have a bounce stick for roundshot, but it would have felt even better if I had. The action involved a grand total of seven units, with two generals, and I was very happy to measure out march distances, divide the last three inches by two because that was a rough patch of ground, take a full move to deploy from march column into line, measure the outer-edge travel of a line wheeling, all that good stuff. There was a lot of manoeuvring and measuring and moving about, which was fun, and there were two cavalry melees, in quick succession. Then, it seemed, there were about thirty morale tests, which must have taken 80% of the total brain effort and about half the elapsed time.

Holy smoke. The tests in this game require 2D6 to be supplemented by various plus and minus factors, and you pass by totalling 7 or more. You fail by getting 4 to 6. You fail disastrously (and have to go away, quickly) if you get less than 4. Some of the plus/minus factors are constant givens for a unit (level of training, quality etc) some change slowly as the action progresses (increasing losses, past upsets) and some are transients based on current situation (proximity of friends, command, cover, enemy etc). It is a pretty standard, traditional approach to morale. Though it is not complicated, and you can remember a lot of it without reference to the sheet, there is a fair sized list to check against. Every time.

EVERY TIME.

No real surprises here – those of us who learned our wargaming from Messrs Featherstone, Wesencraft, Tunstill and Co would expect a wargame to be like this. It was, if I remember correctly, a point of pride amongst us that this particular clever bit of the game made it more scientific than (for example) Snakes & Ladders. I can remember explaining to my mother that the game wasn’t just bang-bang (such a game would be childish, of course), but the morale mechanisms actually gave the little men a say in what happened, and the challenge for the general was coping with the frustrations which the rules and the dice (and therefore Fate, of course – we were in distinguished company here) handed out. Well, I’m sorry, Mum, but I’m not so enthusiastic now – perhaps I should have cut my teeth on Young and Lawford instead – it might well have given me a more pragmatic education in these matters.

Here’s an example from yesterday. Two cavalry units – both rather shaky – face up to each other on a hillside in Northern England in 1644. Let us call them A and B.

A get within charge range of B, and declare a charge – good for them.

First have to check their morale, to see if they are up for it. Yes, they pass. Charge.

Unit B wish to countercharge – have to check morale. They pass, but in the event the chargers are too close, so B receive the charge at the halt.

The first round of melee takes place, in addition to everything else, A are uphill of B, so the melee is a bit one-sided. B take heavier loss, are shaken and pushed two inches down the slope. They have to have their morale tested  to see if they rout – no, they hold their ground, albeit shaken.

In the next turn, the general in charge of B is lucky enough to get the initiative, so his first order is to rally the shaken unit B. This obviously requires a morale test. They pass, rather surprisingly, so they straighten out their line and wait to be charged again.

A’s turn. A are ordered to charge again – since unit B are now rallied and steady again, A need a morale test – they pass, and charge.

There is no question of a countercharge, the newly-rallied B receive the charge at the halt, and take many casualties – they lose the melee, so – that’s right – they must test morale. They fail – they collapse, and rout 3D6 inches immediately.

Right. A’s commander does not wish them to pursue, so he attempts to hold them by means of – you guessed it – a morale test. They fail, so they pursue, out of control, a distance of 3D6 (which, as it happens, is less than the other lot’s 3D6, so they do not catch them).

From this point, the respective commanders can each look forward to a morale test for A and B every turn until they rally. In yesterday’s action, the routers (B) passed very close to a friendly unit (C), who thus required a morale test to see how they reacted to this. They failed – they were shaken, and thus not able to take orders from the commander.

Round about the same moment, the uncontrolled pursuit brought A face to face with C (who couldn’t have attacked them anyway, but A did not know this), and A had to take a morale test to see how they reacted. They got double 1, which is a bit extreme, and thus they not only stopped their wild pursuit but did an about-face and routed back the way they had come. There were now 3 units who would require a morale test each turn to try to rally them.

Enough of this – you get the idea. Whatever else happened was almost incidental compared with this relentless industry of morale. Obviously I survived the experience, but the tiny action had served to highlight the disproportionate effort which goes into these tests in this style of game.

I had forgotten. I remember now. I don’t really want to do this again – not like this. Commands and Colors just hands out retreats as part of the loose change on the Battle Dice – easy peasy. It’s surprising how quickly you get used to that, though it might not suit everyone. I had a think about what else I used to do – there was life before C&C, and it wasn’t all as wretched as yesterday, so what else was there?

Well, 4 years ago I was using in-house Napoleonic rules which owed a lot to many sources, but particularly to Doc Monaghan’s The Big Battalions – I especially liked his inclusion of musketry volley fire into melees, which made a lot of sense and simplified a lot of things, and I liked the approach to melees themselves, which virtually eliminated all the morale testing around that area.

In TBB, each side has an effectiveness score based on type, nationality and formation, with additions/subtractions for context; add 1D6 for each side, and subtract the defender’s total from the attacker’s. The table of results takes care of all the morale testing at a stroke. You can just get on with your charge…

I quote from TBB – this table gives net results and what they mean:

+5        Defender routed before contact

+3,+4  Defender routed

+1,+2  Defender retreats

0          Violent Struggle takes place

-1,-2    Attacker retreats

-3,-4    Attacker routed

-5         Attacker routed before contact

-6         Attacker refused to advance

Then there are instructions for how many casualties apply to victorious, defeated and routing units, and how to conduct the retreats. Oh yes, a Violent Struggle means that both sides suffer heavy casualties, as though they had been defeated.

So?

Well, the game still contains a lot of detailed rules, but – to me – that seems a more sensible – not to say humane – way to cope with the morale implications of a melee. For future detailed, tactical games, I shall try to find rules which are more like The Big Battalions.

That is, of course, provided I have not forgotten again.