ECW Rules - documentation update for new version 2.65

Having received a comment from Paul about the rules, and a couple of email enquiries, I've updated the documentation on Google Docs. If you follow the link at top right for "My Own CCN-based ECW Rules", you'll get to the placeholder post which should now link to the new version. The changes are to the Rules Booklet and the QRS, and they bring it up to Ver.2.65, dated yesterday.

The changes reflect some previously-undocumented tweaks which I have been using, plus some typo-fixes, plus a few changes which are a result of my discussions with Peter Brekelmans about his 30YW variant.

Specific mods in the game include some amendments to Battling Back in Melee Combat, corrections to the Terrain Effects, and Light Artillery (by which I mean frame-guns and similar tactical, mobile pieces) now appears on the field only as attachments to units of Foot - light guns cannot be deployed as standalone units. Also, losses of artillery units no longer count for Victory Banners.

As ever, I think I've tested the links - if they don't work, or you are still getting the old versions, please let me know - many thanks.

I hope that some semi-formal documentation should also appear soon for the ECW siege game which I tested a few months ago - I'm a bit busy elsewhere at present, but it's in the pipeline!

My Own CCN-based rules for the English Civil War

The latest test version of these rules is maintained on Google Docs - if you wish to download them for personal use, these links will get you to the Rules Booklet, a Quick Reference Chart, a Stand of Pikes tracker, the Command Cards the "Chaunce" Cards and details of the "Ramekin" system for activation.

The last page of each of the card sets is to be printed on the reverse side of the sheets, to provide card backs.

The full Commands & Colors: Napoleonics rules, which are available to download from the GMT Games website, are also useful background reading, and give good worked examples and diagrams.

These rules are still being developed, so I am pleased to receive feedback on any play experience you have with them. Please do not distribute any of this material without contacting me, and I would expect to be credited with authorship if the stuff is shared. If you don't like the game, please don't slag me off in some arcane corner of the Social Media - helpful suggestions will be welcome! Courtesy never cost anything...

[This post is simply a place-marker, to tidy up some of the chaos in my layouts!]

Current version is 3.01, updated April 2020 - QRS sheet and a note on the alternative "Ramekin" activation system are new for Ver 3.01

Peter Brekelmans' Thirty Years War Variant for Commands & Colors - Latest V 2.2

Back in June I made reference to a Thirty Years War variant of Commands & Colors which I had been discussing with the chap who was developing it. During the course of what, for me, for family reasons, has been a rather fragmented Summer, Peter Brekelmans and I exchanged a great deal of correspondence, which I have enjoyed greatly, and from which I learned a good deal. Peter, like me, felt that it should be possible to develop a decent 17^th Century variant from the existing GMT Commands & Colors games – his starting place was my own attempt at an ECW game, but he wished to extend the scope to cover the Thirty Years War more completely and – unlike me – he wished to commit a proper effort to developing some scenarios.

Peter uses the concepts of Command and "Chaunce" cards, as did I, but his card sets are rather different from mine. He also was keen to amend the game so that melee combat was simultaneous, rather than the C&C system of attack-and-then-battle-back. We spent some time working with this, and developed systems which would make simultaneous melee blows possible, but we had concerns that the fundamental balance of advantage in the game might be distorted (in favour of the defenders, I believe), so Peter has retained the 2-stage C&C-style melee combat, and offers simultaneous melee as a game option.

My own ECW variant has been in use for some years now, though I confess the current documentation is a little out of date; Peter’s game has been well thought through, but we have lacked the opportunity to do any proper playtesting. Since Peter is running out of enthusiasm to develop this further, in the absence of a potential audience, we’ve agreed that I should make the game available on this blog. I can claim the best of both worlds here – if there is any reflected glory going, then I was a contributor, but if you wish to take issue with any of it, don’t come to me – it wasn’t my game anyway!

I think the game, as presented, is a very nice package – certainly it is thought provoking and a useful education to people like me who know little of the TYW. I shall persist with my own ECW game, though I shall certainly incorporate a couple of new tweaks which came from our discussions, and I hope to get a chance to do some proper testing of Peter’s rules when opportunity presents itself.

*** Update - as from 9th April 2017, the rules and the scenarios have been revised to V 2.2. The presentation of the Command and Chaunce Cards has also been greatly simplified. ***

 You can download the sheets from Google Docs – you will find

Rules Booklet

Army Reference Sheets

Calculation Sheet

Terrain Effects

Chaunce Cards

Command Section Cards

Command Tactics Cards

Scenarios

I shall keep this post linked from some panel near the top of my blog display, so that you can find it easily, and we’ll also set up a specific email address so that you may contact Peter about his rules.

I hope you will join me in complimenting Peter on his efforts, his knowledge of the period and his splendid rule-writing style.

Peter wishes to emphasise that the scenarios, in particular, are really drafts - in some cases almost discussion frameworks - and, in particular, have not been properly game tested. They provide a valuable reference as suggestions for games, but they come with no guarantee that they are quite ready for use as a rewarding social event!

Peter may be contacted at ga1632<CURL>rogers.com (replace <CURL> with the usual email AT symbol) if you wish to give him some feedback on his game or your experiences with it, or any general discussion points on the Thirty Years War.

Battle of Montgomery - rule tweaks

Because of the relatively small size of the forthcoming battle, I am intending to allow a little more tactical detail in the rules. The combat will remain pretty much straight Commands & Colors, but units will have a front, flanks and a rear, and will be able to do some (limited) changing of formation - thus the activation and movement rules will be different, and there will be a "reaction" test (based upon the quality of a unit) to allow emergency changes of front or configuration during the opponent's turn. [As ever, I hasten to add that this is not intended as an improved version of the published game - it is merely that C&C is rather a blunt instrument with which to fight a very small battle!]

This is all lifted straight from a rather long-winded (though much read) post I put up here about a year ago, Manoeuvring in Hexes; the only problem is that that note was about Napoleonic games, and extensions to Commands & Colors: Napoleonic - I've never actually written down how this translates to the ECW variant. I shall not attempt to batter through all the discussion in that post - please follow the link if you can be bothered, if not, just assume that I have thought about this before!

In the tactical extension to my ECW game, the recognised formations for Foot will be:

Column of March - essential if you wish to get anywhere in a hurry
(especially on roads - columns of march get a bonus hex of movement on a road)
but can't fight at all - not even a bit.

Formed Line of Battle (or battalia - choose your own jargon) - muskets on
the flanks, pikes correctly in the centre -  optimal fighting formation, but
moves slowly, cannot fire on the move.

This rather stylised arrangement of bases represents Stand of Pikes -
Renaissance equivalent of a Napoleonic square - this formation cannot
move, has no front, flanks or rear, has limited combat power but is good
defensively against Horse

Unformed - no formation, minimal combat ability - units which fail to
redeploy are in this form (with their original front), also units occupying
villages, woods or enclosures will normally be unformed, which is a useful
reminder that they must stop to reform as they emerge!

Units of Foot may be seen in this form, simply because their commander
has not got around to specifying what they are doing - this is just a
default "don't know" formation - to an extent, they are assumed to be getting
on with things, but must move at slowest rate, and if involved in combat
will be Unformed unless they shape up, or pass a reaction test

For Horse, things are less complicated:

This is a general purpose formation in which Horse can fight or move
- the front is defined, intuitively...

Column of March is almost a cosmetic device - it probably looks good to move
Horse around in this formation, and is essential if you wish to claim road bonus,
but remember they can't fight like this!

What else? Oh yes - for the purposes of the Reaction Test, the forces at Montgomery will all be Class 2, apart from the rather war-weary "Irish" Royalist foot units from the Shrewsbury garrison, and Tyldesley's two units of Royalist Horse, which will be Class 3 - which means that they are rather less likely to carry out emergency manoeuvres on the battlefield, and are subject to double retreats if things go badly.

The details about turning rates and all that are in the Napoleonic post from last year, if you have the stamina.

The units of Horse will all be of Trotter type, which means they have a standard move of 3, but advance to contact is limited to 2 (because of all the fiddling about with pistols).

The only other thing I can think of at present is that, since this particular game is to be played end-to-end of the table, temporary rules are needed to force units to face the flat side of a hex, rather than a vertex, which involves some intuitive, minor alterations to movement rules, firing arcs, definitions of flanks and permitted retreat directions. Easy peasy.

That's quite enough about that. Oh yes - artillery? There wasn't any. That was easiest of all.


*****Late Edit*****

Not so fast....

I received an email from Jack Mortimer, asking me if I would publish the full rules, or at least send him a copy by reply. The answer to both these questions is no, but I can set out a bit more of the detail.

Foot move 1 hex in line, 2 in column or unformed, + 1 hex bonus for a column of march which spends entire turn on a road. Cannot move and fire in same turn. Stand of Pikes cannot move. Terrain rules are pretty much as C&C. Units entering a new hex may turn 60 degrees without penalty; any larger turn, or any stationary turn (which includes a turn BEFORE moving) takes a full move. Any ordered change of formation takes a full move; any change of front or formation in reaction to opponent action is instantaneous, but requires the unit to pass a Reaction Test (q.v.).

Horse move 3 hexes, but only 2 if advancing to contact. Horse have negligible (i.e. no) range combat ability - pistol fire is abstracted into melee. Non-free turns and formation changes take 1 hex of movement (not a full move), otherwise movement rules as Foot. Charge to contact must be in a straight line - i.e. any necessary turns must be carried out (with necessary penalties) before final charge. Column of march gets 1 hex road bonus, as for Foot.

Units can only fire within defined frontal arc. Units attacked in flank/rear who fail reaction test and do not turn about do not get to battle back in melee, and opponents get an extra combat die. Horse in melee with Stand of Pikes roll just 1 die, the SoP itself also rolls just 1. Since a SoP cannot move, any retreat it suffers must be taken as casualties instead of movement.

Reaction Test - units are ranked Class 1 to Class 4 (elite to dross). When required, unit may take Test in reaction to enemy action; to pass, must roll 1D6 >= (Class + 1 for each loss counter - 1 if general attached); natural roll of 1 is always a failure, natural 6 always a pass.

Otherwise, the game is basically my CC_ECW variant!

A 30YW Variant of Commands & Colors? - some background development

My own adaptation of Commands & Colors (substantially based on the Napoleonics version of GMT’s game) to facilitate wargames based in the English Civil War is still downloadable from the top right of this screen. In addition to the downloadable materials, I have a growing collection of tweaks, mods and scenario workarounds, and I have also developed a simplified, fast-play version of the same game. I do not want to try to sell anyone anything at all – if it is useful or interesting, you are free to download and use whatever you wish, though I would prefer if I were to get a little credit for my efforts!

Whatever, it is becoming obvious that I need to revise the current draft, and work is in hand to update the documentation shortly (to version 2.65, if memory serves me adequately). I have recently received some requests – in one case, a complaint! – that I should publish (and maintain?) a set of scenarios to accompany the rules, since without these they are of little use.

While I respect that this is part of the established C&C culture, it is not a part that I am particularly interested in. I developed the rules for my own use, and most of my wargaming is of a type which would make a very poor “balanced” scenario. Many of my battles are campaign based, or reflect a situation in which one commander’s ambitions are limited to making the most of a pretty hopeless position – they are, in short, rather like what happened in history. This, in turn, probably reflects the fact that I do much of my gaming solo – Max No-Mates Foy strikes again.

I read the history books, do the planning, design and set up the actions – lots of scribbling in notebooks - for me, that is an important part of the fun, and the rules are there to support this approach. Without thinking about it too carefully, I tend to expect other gamers to do the same sorts of things. If someone is looking for a set-up-&-go ECW based on a competent scenario book then I am clearly the wrong guy to look to. For one thing, I am not especially interested in the sort of scenarios which are published with the GMT games – their historical basis is often distorted in the interests of a playable game, and by the size of the board. I emphasise that I have no problem with any of this, since they are accepted as being excellent games, but it is not what I wish to do. For another thing, if I (not an expert by any means) can take issue with the accuracy of the published Napoleonic scenarios, then I hate to think what enthusiasts would make of my own ECW scenarios! – I have no intention of defending, discussing or apologising for home-grown scenarios which fall short of the expected standards, so I shall simply not publish any.

I’ve also had some comments from people wondering if the rules could be adapted further to give a more general coverage of the Thirty Years War. I’d love to do that – it hasn’t been a priority for me, because I don’t fight 30YW at present, and my knowledge of the history is, well, skimpy. It has always been a background item on the wishlist, however.

Well, over the last couple of weeks I’ve had some very full-on communication with a Canadian gentleman who is very much an expert in the 30YW, and he has sent me some drafts of an interesting C&C style game, the starting point for which is my own C&C_ECW variant. This has been quite challenging at times – arranging to broaden the scope of the game to cope with more varied troop types and weaponry, and alternative tactical approaches, without losing the essential tick-tock simplicity of the C&C game systems, is proving as complex as I feared it might. However, my correspondent is armed with just the sort of expertise I lack in this period, and he is also proving to be logically minded and an excellent writer, so this really is most promising.

I cannot say too much yet, since the initiative is not mine, and also because I have no idea how far the author wishes to pursue it, but there is a proper scenario portfolio being developed alongside the rules drafts, and I would hope some serious playtesting will be starting shortly. The game can be played with blocks or with bases of miniatures – one of the big challenges has been in producing unit classifications which are capable of being applied to the entire 30YW/ECW period, while keeping the game manageable.

You don’t get too many giant Spanish Tercios in the ECW, but the expanded game will have to cope with them, without making them unrealistically unstoppable. It’s coming along nicely at present. It is likely that I will not replace my own rules with the new game immediately, but the ideas we have discussed in the last couple of weeks will certainly be reflected in some of the changes in my own next version.

I find that I have, once again, done something which is likely to cause some mild shaking of heads – I have given a complicated story which has no immediate end product and for which I am forced to be a little secretive – in other words, yet another No News item – but I certainly hope that I should be able to say a little more before too long.

Siege Testing - (5) Afterthoughts

The Siege Test was a success – there were a few things I now understand better, a few things I won’t bother with again, and a few things I didn’t get to try out properly – specifically mining and the little matter of provisions. These last bits I’ll look at again; for the moment, the chief success is that I played through a siege and it worked. It would have been awful if I had collected all these houses and fortress parts and trenches and gone to all this trouble and then the game had been a complete washout. So I’m very pleased with that.

Another valuable lesson was that it reminded me, once again, why I play wargames in the way I do, and what does or does not work for me. What (in short) I get out of it.

Well, I mostly play solo, for a number of reasons, and one reason that this is good for me is that I regard myself to some extent as a privileged witness to a bit of fake history. I’ve written this here before, and, yes, I am the presenter and the facilitator, and the fake history is more or less compromised by my own understanding and preferences (and bias, however unconscious), but the reason I still get a buzz from it, after all these years, is because I want to see what happens. It’s fun, it’s kind of educational, and in a solo setting I can attempt things which would not necessarily make an attractively balanced social game. So I can have campaigns which have heavily one-sided fights, I can even attempt a siege, for goodness sake. The concepts of victory and defeat – even the idea of the points value of an army – I understand what these are, but they are not things I normally consider as a priority.

One thing that I have learned in the past is that, in this kind of solo setting, a re-enactment, or any kind of walkthrough, doesn’t work. If I know what is going to happen then grinding through it is not worthwhile – no point – only passing moments of interest – no surprises. Nothing to learn, except about myself. Just a little fiddling around before it’s time to tidy the toys away. On the face of it, a siege might just be a perfect example of a procedural activity which doesn’t entertain for exactly that reason. Well, it was OK. In fact, I think I have demonstrated that a solo attempt at a siege has certain advantages.

I have read a lot of the better-known sources on how to make a siege into a game. The most useful, I think, is the famous Sandhurst game described very concisely in Chris Duffy’s Fire & Stone (David & Charles, 1975) – this sets out the important concept of accelerated time for the boring bits and the spadework, and dovetails this with a (Charge-based) tactical game to handle the exciting bits. It also sets out the pitfalls to be avoided and the need for a simple approach – I can’t recommend this too highly as a starting point. The snags are that the Sandhurst game uses simultaneous moves (and thus written orders) and – that’s right – an umpire. Ah. You can do anything with an umpire, I think.

The Duffy game is expanded a bit in Part XII of Henry Hyde’s The Wars of the Faltenian Succession, which appeared in Battlegames magazine a few years ago. This applies an alternate-move structure, and gets into more details about orders, event cards and Old School ideas like shell-burst templates and all that. It is a more detailed game, but it is still fundamentally the Duffy/Charge concept.

I also have the Perfect Captain’s Siege component of their Spanish Fury game (which is a free download from their excellent website). Like all the Perfect Captain games (and I’m sure they are very good), this relies on data cards for units, and some of the concepts are getting towards role-playing. That  excellent fellow Nundanket kindly loaned me the König Krieg documentation, which includes the famed (but rarely seen) siege game Festung Krieg – again, a source of good ideas, but to me it lacks the simple appeal of Duffy’s game.

One thing to avoid, I think, is stuffing as many tactical sequences as possible into a siege – for the leaguer of a fortified house that might be just the thing, but in a large siege it is also a means of avoiding the fact that it is a siege as far as possible. I tried to meet this head-on, rather than fudge the game into something more familiar.

Gary asked a very good question in response to my previous post – why, he asked, was there no attempt to put a secondary barrier inside the breach at Middlehampton?

I gave this some thought at the time, though, to be honest, in the absence of a sensible reason to fight on, my own Resolve was beginning to droop! In Chester, in the ECW siege, they marshalled gangs of civilians to pile earth (and dung, apparently) in all the gates and behind the stone walls. In my test, Lord Bloat was handicapped in this, since the townspeople's Loyalty had slipped further to zero, at which point they are not a valid workforce, and his two remaining infantry units were all he had available to do any kind of work of this type (cavalry, dear boy, never dig). On average, at 2-hex range in my rules, a siege gun has a 5/12 chance of damaging the wall during a strategic (1 day) turn, so I reckon (and Lord Bloat may have reckoned) that two cannons might take best part of a week to generate 5 gravelsworth of damage and effect a viable breach - so there was maybe time to do something - one possibility was demolishing the buildings near the wall and piling up the rubble, but maybe he felt (? - we'll never know) that surrender to the Scots would be the less disastrous of the options - certainly their reputation at Newcastle and York was not too awful - they were ravenous and tended to nick stuff, but slaughter, rape and ransacking were off-limits to the Presbyterians. I think the 5-chips collapse rating is maybe too high (though this might have been an exceptionally strong wall) - from memory, I think the breach at Chester (the one above the Roman Garden!) came down within a day, once the Parlies got a few big guns inside the earthwork defences and set about it, and I think that particular bit of wall had a bank erected inside it, but it was soft, Bunter sandstone (never accept the job of Governor of a red stone fort). Methinks 5 chips is too high...

Big lesson for me from these few days is that it is very important to put more effort into a thorough context and scenario narrative. There should have been better reasons for doing things, there should have been clearer time constraints, the supply issue should have been more central and there should have been some threat of Mad Prince Rupert appearing from somewhere to give the Jocks a jolly good bashing.

I enjoyed my few days at Middlehampton very much - it had the rather academic resonance which is common to many solo games, but it looked and felt like a game. I need to re-examine some of these numbers in the rules - the old walls were too tough, the digging was very straightforward (especially since the garrison did very little to interfere) and mostly procedural. The Sconce didn't last long, but was a threat while it lasted - the Sconce, by the way, could have been used as two half-sconces, and placed against the walls as hornworks, but that would have brought the siege closer to the town more quickly (which, in the absence of a sensible storyline, maybe doesn't make a lot of difference).

If I had been Bloat, I think I might have agreed with the townspeople's guild that the best strategy would be to meet that nice Lord Leven and his pals on the lawn with a tray of drinks, and discuss terms right at the start. Mind you, my mindset, my library of books and (importantly) my religious views are not likely to coincide with theirs.

An interesting few evenings - time to tidy up now! I’ll set out my thoughts on mining and supply in a week or two. As ever, my humble thanks to anyone who took the time to read about the test game – I am still delighted but rather surprised to hear from readers.

Next test siege I run will be a Napoleonic one, with the Vauban fortress bits.

Siege Testing – (3) Scales, Artillery Ranges, Saps

Things are getting a little busier, as you see. The game is hex-based – I am confident it could be played without hexes, if you really like measuring things.

My hexes are 7” across the flats, and the game scale equates one hex to 200 paces across (or 100 toises, if you prefer the classic terminology). That fits with the size and theory of the (15mm scale) fortress pieces. A lot of the logic of the game is related to artillery ranges, so let’s get to that now. Since this is a little section on artillery, I’ll go into a little more detail than this discussion really needs – if the mechanisms strike you as reminiscent of Charge!, or the closely-related Sandhurst siege game rules in Chris Duffy’s Fire & Stone book, then I can only plead that this is not a bad source. I propose to use Commands & Colors style rules for melées and movement (though not the Command Cards), but I’ll stick with Chris Duffy for the artillery.

In the Tactical game, the maximum effective ranges for roundshot are:

Light guns      -           4 hexes

Medium guns -           5 hexes

Heavy guns    -           6 hexes

Subject to the range limitations of a particular piece, the effect of a shot is calculated by throwing two dice; one of these is the Accuracy Die (which is a black D6) – this has to turn up a number greater than or equal to the range in hexes for a hit. If it is a hit, a second (red) die gives the Effect; this die is a D6 if the target is close-order foot in the open, a D4 for horse, artillery, engineers or open-order foot in the open, or for close-order foot in soft cover (hedges, trees, temporary gabions), and it’s a D3 for anyone in hard cover (earthworks, stone walls). This score gives the number of figures lost. If, like me, you prefer your casualties to occur in whole sub-unit bases or not at all, then you have one more step – the owner of the target unit makes a Saving Throw (you may now groan). It works like this – we need to round odd hits up or down to a number of whole bases – if the unit suffering loss is organised with n figures per base, roll a Dn – an n-sided die; if the roll exceeds the number of odd hits, forget the odd hits; if it doesn’t, you lose a complete base.

Example: a medium cannon fires at a range of 5 hexes (its maximum) at an enemy unit of horse (and my horse is organised in bases of 3 figures). The horse are in the open.

(1) Roll the black D6 for Accuracy – at range 5 we need 5+ for a hit. Comes up 5 – good enough – a hit.

(2) Horse in the open are a middling sort of target, as discussed above – roll a D4 for casualties – comes up 2 – OK – 2 figures lost.

(3) Additional step because I want my losses to be counted in bases. At 3 figs/base, 2 figures is zero bases plus 2 odd figures. The Saving Throw has to be a D3, to match the base organisation – must roll a 3 (“beat the 2”) to save them. Throw is a 2 – tough – the horse lose a complete base.

Siege cannons (i.e. nominated wall-battering guns) and siege mortars have no tactical function at all, since they are too ponderous to move and too slow to load and fire in a tactical context (though they may be overrun during such a phase, of course).

The Strategic artillery system is basically the same, though there are additional rules for siege cannons and mortars in the Strategic game. If it seems odd that a 24-hour Strategic turn should produce similar casualty levels to a 30-minute Tactical turn then I can’t disagree – however, the arguments in favour of this oddity are thus:

(1) During a Strategic turn, rates of fire are deliberately slow (to avoid overheating the guns) and the troops would stay in cover and keep their heads down. A Tactical turn is a much more intense period of action.

(2) It is very convenient to make this assumption.

(3) Chris Duffy recommends it – if it was good enough for Sandhurst...

In the Strategic game, I had thought of giving siege cannons some extra range – maybe 8 hexes – but on the grounds that 6 hexes is already 1200 paces, the guns were pretty inaccurate and you can only fire at what you can see, I kept it at 6 hexes, like the other heavy guns – siege cannons, however, can break down walls. Fire on a section of wall is like other fire – the black Accuracy die tells you whether you hit the right place, and a D6 Effect die needs to score 4+ to do damage to an old-fashioned stone curtain wall, 5+ for a low Vauban wall with earth backing, and whatever else you fancy. A single, damaging hit to a wall is denoted by a piece of gravel placed below the target area (classy, eh?) – in my game, I have been working with the assumption that 5 such gravel-generating hits on the same section will produce a breach in the medieval walls of Middlehampton.

The common all-garden damage markers I borrowed from our driveway - this is
good whinstone, but it's a bit dark to match the walls - do you think I could get a
sample of some rather paler Cotswold stuff from my local garden centre?

Mortars also feature in the Strategic game – the range is up to 6 hexes, like heavy cannons, but the target need not be in direct sight and the effect of cover is negated. There are strict limits on the number of mortars (just one in my present game!).

Right – that was a fairly lengthy introduction to the idea that “artillery range”, broadly speaking, is 6 hexes, and this is relevant to the necessary task of Sapping Forward. In the last instalment, I mentioned that the digging of parallels and other general-purpose trenches requires infantry bases to match or better the day’s Digging Number. The procedures for such trenches mean that the position is first of all protected with gabions, to offer “soft” cover to the shovellers while work goes ahead, and then the main challenge is to score enough decent dice rolls to complete the work. Digging toward the fortress is a different deal altogether – in this situation, specialist sappers work towards the front (well, obliquely toward the front, to avoid the sap being enfiladed), and the particular challenge is staying protected from the enemy’s fire while working. In this, the challenge has less to do with the state of the ground, and more with the proximity to the enemy. Accordingly, digging a forward sap requires an engineering presence of some sort (I have sappers for my Napoleonic armies, but for the time being for the ECW I have to attach a designated “engineer” figure and imagine there are sappers present), and some infantry to follow up to widen the sap into a trench in the normal “Digging Number” way.

The current situation is a bit crude - the token "Engineer" is followed up by some
infantry, who will enlarge the sap to full trench proportions - in this form, without
any identifiable sappers, it looks a bit like a firing squad. I hope improved elegance
will follow soon.

The actual head of the sap is traced out, one hex at a time, using gabions, and the infantry follow up with the trench work. To advance the head of the sap is automatic until the sap gets within the 6-hex artillery range zone, and therafter success requires a roll of 2D6 – and at least one of these dice must come up equal to or less than the distance in hexes from the walls (or the covered way, if it is that kind of fortress). It gets slower and more fiddly the nearer you get.

Once the sap has reached the correct distance, digging a parallel and new gun positions is simply a question of doing the spadework with dice against the Digging Number. Since the Strategic game allows the besiegers to move troops to anywhere which is not forward of the heads of sap, some good dice can enable a complete parallel to be dug in a single day.

Enough nuts and bolts for the moment. In the Test Siege of Middlehampton, the attackers (Leven’s Covenanter army) were forced by the existence of the Duke’s Sconce (a modern outwork) to build their First Parallel further from the walls than they might have chosen. Once they had taken the outwork, they sapped forward without incident and constructed the Second Parallel just outside artillery range of the walls. Leven opted not to advance this first sap any further, for fear of some form of sally on the part of the defenders.

Now within range of the town’s heavier guns, further sapping was rather slower, and an engineer was among the (few) casualties, but it brought the Third Parallel within 4 hexes (800 paces) of the walls, and a position was constructed for the giant mortar (Auld Aggie). This mortar, along with the two heavy guns captured in the Sconce, now produced a steady fire on the town which mostly served to frighten the inhabitants. There were a few casualties on both sides, but the Loyalty of the townspeople had now slid to 1 (“indifferent to the garrison, but not yet a threat to them”), as a result of the Governor’s unpopular demolition of the northern suburbs and the harrowing effects of night bombardment by the Scots.

Still the forward saps continued – still there was no action on the part of Lord Bloat to disrupt the approach work with any kind of sally. By the end of the 13^th day of the siege, a Fourth Parallel was ready, and the mighty siege cannons were in place opposite the section of the curtain wall which had no earthwork protection.

Not looking good for the Royalist town of Middlehampton?

Siege cannons in place to start bombarding the old North Wall

The Scots' works, with the Second Parallel in the foreground

Lord Bloat (mounted, with red plume) must surely be thinking of asking for terms.
We have to assume that he has faithfully promised the line of red-coated musketeers
manning the earthwork outside the walls that he will open the Stockgate to let
them in pretty smartish when the time comes 

I'm not sure who this little drummer is, nor why he's involved - I guess I must
have accidentally included him as one of the singly-based engineers. He has
a certain plucky quality - I like him - he's a sort of talisman for the Resolve
Number of the garrison, but I fear his time is running out

That’s as far as I’ve got – thus far I have to say that the sapping is slow and would not necessarily be a lot of fun in a competitive game, though it is fine for a solo effort. The artillery is not as effective as I expected, which is probably historically correct – I could have done more with sallies if the garrison had been stronger.

Next steps will be the start of the bombardment of the curtain wall, and I might say a bit about food supply – let’s see how it goes!