ECW Campaign – Skirmish at Hobden’s Mill - 19th March 1644

Lord Alwyn's brigade of Parliamentarian horse plods through woodland in
what passes for column of march in these rules...

As soon as he learned that Parliamentarian troops were at Ringrose House, Lord Porteous, the Royalist commandeer in North Lancashire, sent a fast galloper to Colonel Sir Roderick Broadhurst, stationed at Dransfield House with a cavalry outpost, with orders to bring his force back to Midlawton with all haste, to join the main Royalist army.

Broadhurst was a seasoned campaigner, a veteran of the wars in Germany, and was used to exercising his judgement to interpret the orders of his (very inexperienced) commanding officer in whatever way he thought was in the best interests of His Majesty. On this occasion, he considered that – since the estimates he had received of the Roundhead strength gave real cause for alarm – he should simply cut and run; take his entire garrison from Dransfield and head back east, as ordered.

He set off on the morning of 17^th March, with his own regiment of horse and that of Lord Clevedon, plus Major Dingle’s regiment of dragoons and a very small, almost a token, element of light artillery – a frame gun which added little to his firepower but slowed his march down a great deal (though, of course, it might have proved invaluable if he had been required to defend Dransfield House – a situation which seemed unlikely now). A total of some 1200 men.

Some miles to the south, a brigade of Parliamentary horse under Lord Alwyn were plodding towards him through the mud, under orders to hold a position in the area known as Boot Mills – near the site of the long-vanished medieval village of Boot – abandoned and burnt down following the plagues of two centuries earlier. This position would screen the left flank of the Parliamentarian advance and would cover the key fords over the River Arith at Patondale. Lord Alwyn had at his disposal three regiments of horse – those of Thomas Chetwynd, Richard Sudley and Lord Eastham – he had no dragoons, and no artillery presence – speed of movement was considered paramount by the Parliament command. By a complete coincidence, Alwyn also had about 1200 men.

Lord Alwyn knew that a very troublesome force of Royalist horse was present somewhere near Dransfield, but he had no information about its strength or location.

The Parliament forces marched up the road from the bottom; the
mill is the building about two-thirds up the map, beside the road

On the morning of the 19^th the two cavalry forces blundered into each other near a mill belonging to the Hobden family, close to the site of Boot village. Broadhurst’s scouts alerted him first, and he attempted to set a trap for the enemy column in the area of enclosures and hedgerows near the mill. Alwyn soon caught sight of the Royalist troopers in the fields next to the mill, and he halted his column and deployed his leading regiment into line.

There followed a quick and decisive melee between Alwyn’s right-hand unit and Broadhurst’s leftmost one, which resulted in the Parliamentarian horsemen being routed. In the period of confusion which followed, Alwyn’s leading support unit refused to advance, and Broadhurst quit the field leading his force away to the east, toward Patondale fords and the Royalist centre at Midlawton. The Royalists had almost no casualties at all – the Parliamentarian Lord Eastham’s Regiment of Horse suffered approximately 80 killed and missing, 115 wounded.

All units of horse are classed as raw “trotters”, Broadhurst is rated as “Competent” (rating 2) and Alwyn as “Poor” (1). I used my Arquebus rules, which are an adaptation of Clarence Harrison’s Victory without Quarter, quite simply because the action was too small and too tactical to suit the Commands & Colors variant I normally use.

[I would describe the experience of using these rules as “Death by Morale Tests” – there is a definite Old School feel to them, but this extends to a relentless series of traditional-style morale checks which proved, ultimately, to be laborious and dispiriting, considering the modest scale of the skirmish and the short duration. I am not filled with any great enthusiasm to use them again in this form…]

The photos should give a little more idea of the fighting. [Note to self: must encourage my son Nick to return to photography duties for these battles – his pictures are always more interesting than mine.]

Normal, full army returns for the end of Week 3 will follow in a few days.

Broadhurst marches his Royalist force on to the field

Having spotted the enemy approaching, Broadhurst sets an ambush at the
mill, and personally leads Lord Clevedon's Horse in a flanking manoeuvre

Broadhurst's remaining troops hurry into position for the ambush

No ambush - Lord Alwyn sees troopers moving in the fields, halts his
march and forms up, detaching Lord Eastham's regiment in a flanking move to the right...

Lord Alwyn, with his Welsh grandad's sword

Alwyn's boys, all formed up and with Lord Eastham's RoH steaming
ahead on the right flank...

...while the Royalists are also in position, with their flanking column moving up on the left...

Dragoons behind the hedge - I bet no-one expected that...

...while Broadhurst's own regiment take position behind the wall of a field, with
pistols at the ready

The frame gun - not a lot of help today. Maybe another time...

General view, from behind the Royalist position, as the first clash approaches

Lord Eastham's Roundheads, on this side, face up to Lord Clevedon's horse

First impact, Eastham's men are pushed back down the hill, suffering heavy
casualties and becoming shaken

And yet they rally, but do not have time to offer any kind of countercharge before Broadhurst
and Lord Clevedon's men are on them again

This time it's decisive - the Parliament regiment streams to the rear, broken, and Broadhurst
fails dismally in his attempt to halt the pursuit by the victors. Then it all becomes
very confused - the routing cavalry pass their colleagues in Thomas Chetwynd's regiment,
who are now the front line, and give them such a shock that they are shaken and refuse
to take orders from Lord Alwyn. Around the same moment, the pursuing Royalist
horse suddenly come upon Chetwynd's halted men, get a disastrous morale check
result and turn tail and rout. In the resultant confusion, Broadhurst gets his
army on the march, on their original route. There is no immediate prospect of Alwyn
organising any kind of pursuit for a while...

ECW – The Arquebus Rules

So what are the Arquebus Rules, then, Foy?

Well, since you asked, I’ll tell you.

They are a hybrid, and an incomplete hybrid at the moment. Arquebus was my working title for the framework of a computer program I wrote last year to manage solo ECW games played under a set-of-rules-yet-to-be-defined. Initially, as you may have read here before, the idea was that the underlying rules were to be Clarence Harrison’s Victory without Quarter, which I liked the look of for a number of reasons, and which I had tried out during a visit to the Kingdom of Old John last year.

Whatever your thoughts on computers in wargames, one spin-off of automating the game management is that you soon become aware of gaps in the game logic if you try to put a set of wargames rules into a computer program. So let’s see – if the melee winners fail this morale test to control the pursuit – what happens? – oh – look at that – it doesn’t say. So what exactly do artillery do if someone charges them? – well – gosh – it doesn’t say. Etc.

One big advantage of using someone else’s rules is that they have been playtested before, and you have a good idea in advance whether they work or not. VwQ is a bit different – there are people who have played them and use them and like them, but there is also a fund of recommendations for adding the missing bits – including some from The Bold Clarence himself, who has never pretended that the rules were complete or anything other than a work in progress.

So I set about redrafting VwQ for my own purposes, to plug some gaps and fix some things I wasn’t comfortable with and then – since I’d started doing it this way – I took the opportunity to simplify a couple of fiddly bits, and amend a couple of the tables to suit my own ideas. The final straw was that I eventually replaced VwQ’s trademark, card based Activation system with something else – I discussed this in an earlier post.

At this point, though the game still employs some of the mechanisms from VwQ which I have liked from the outset, much of it is changed. The overall package is definitely not VwQ, and I decided it made more sense to make a clean break, and call my evolving rule set Arquebus, if only to keep my head straight – same as the program. I acknowledge my debt to some other games, but it is a hybrid.

Briefly, I adopted an alternative Command and Activation system which I found in some of Mr Featherstone’s recently-published rules – which may or may not have close relatives in Warhammer, Blitzkrieg Commander and Bloody Barons. It ticked a lot of boxes – intuitively, it seemed reasonable, it hung together well from a completeness point of view, and it was cute enough to borrow without shame.

Well, I’ve now tried it out, and it was tedious. Clever or not, it required extra work, and I found it to be mostly irritating – slowed the game down far more than it improved it. So I’ve replaced it with a much simpler, dice-based system which has close relatives in the Portable Wargame family, and in at least one iteration of Ross’s Hearts of Tin, and even in some earlier ideas of my own (surely not?). Since this is now Arquebus we are talking about, and thus mine own, I may well replace it yet again next week – I’ll see how I feel. I am giddy with the possibilities…

The rewritten rules for Arquebus are beginning to stabilize – I have now reached a stage where I am polishing the wording, checking that I have covered everything. Once the game works, I will continue with the computer program, but make no mistake – Arquebus first has to perform tidily as a dice-&-rulers game without a computer in sight, or I shall keep working on it until it does [famous last words]. Thus there is a latest-version rule booklet (I believe I’m on Version 0.21 – which is the first amendments to the substantially changed 2^nd edition) and I was thinking that I might make it available if anyone is interested – I’m still not sure about this – it is a tweaked version of VwQ, though the tweaks now outweigh the VwQ bits, and it is not really designed to cope with anything more than the way I like to play my wargames. I’m thinking about it. The world is full of half-baked rulesets that don’t quite work – why add to the heap?

He's what? - he's redrafted Table 3? - bloody hell...

Once I’m comfortable that it works – at least a bit – I’m happy to provide copies to anyone who wants one. Hang on a bit. If someone feels moved to ask me why I don’t just be a sensible fellow and use Forlorn Hope or similar, please don’t – we’ve done that bit already.

Righto, Foy – so what happened to your Commands & Colors based ECW game?

Nothing – I have been using it and it works pretty well. As I mentioned before, I also need a more tactical game for small actions – where the Commanders can amuse themselves forming column of march and carrying out flank attacks and all that – this is where Arquebus should come in.

And it’s guaranteed hex-free, in case you care.

Activation – More Dithering

It often occurs to me that a blog can be kind of a mixed blessing. For example, if I really can’t make up my mind about some element of wargames rules, it would be more dignified – and I might well look a little less foolish – if I did my dithering and thinking aloud off-blog. On the other hand, I invariably get useful input via the Comments, and that more than makes up for the discomfort of being seen to blunder about in real time. People are very kind – maybe they take pity on me.

Having oscillated between hot and cold on the subject of the Victory without Quarter ECW rules for some time now, and having gone so far as to do a fair amount of amendment and rewriting of those rules, the announcement that once again I am not happy with some aspects of them might generate a range of reaction somewhere between mild eye-rolling and total indifference. So the fool can’t make up his mind – so what’s new? 

My concerns with VwQ are mainly about the activation rules. I’m really still not very happy with them – not even with my own revamped version – and they get a mixed press on TMP and elsewhere. Taking the core activation system out of VwQ might be likened to removing the nervous system from your favourite cat. The results are unpredictable. You might not like what you are left with. Might be better to think of something else to do instead.

As a last ditch effort to stop short of a completely fresh start, I’ve been doing a bit more reading about activation approaches, to see what else might just fit with the rest of VwQ. I have been revisiting all sorts of games. I liked the activation rules in the latest version of Ross’s Hearts of Tin rules, and these formed the basis of some further scribblings of my own, and I had an exchange of thoughts on this with Martin. As it happens, Martin recently purchased the John Curry reprint of Donald Featherstone’s Wargaming Pike and Shot (first published 1977), which is not the first place I would have thought of looking for ideas on activation. Martin’s enthusiasm encouraged me to buy my own copy, however. Well, well.

It's actually a pretty good book. The bulk of it consists of scenario descriptions of battles from the Renaissance and 30 Years' War period, but a new bit of this revised edition is a summary of some previously unpublished rules used by Don, and there is a discussion of turn sequences which uses a simple activation rule (or, as Don calls it, motivation – which I rather like) – it involves a fair amount of dice-rolling, so it might be a bit labour intensive for my taste, but it looks interesting. I haven’t tried it out yet. Naturally, I couldn’t just use it as published, so I’ve started by meddling with it and tweaking to fit with my own games better. What follows is not Don F’s rule, but it is influenced by it and is not unlike it.

Let's start with a slight detour. First thing you need for this is some easy way of identifying units which are part of the same formation, or which all report to the same commander. A while ago, when I was under the spell of Sam Mustafa’s Fast Play Grande Armée, I adopted a very handy idea of his, which was to put coloured markers on the bases of units which were brigaded together, so you could see the breadth of an individual general’s command at a single glance. Naturally, once again, I fiddled with the system until it looked like this:

This is a Napoleonic example – here you see some labels waiting to be cut out and attached to unit bases. This is a collection of leaders and units from Maucune’s Division, which you will see has the distinguishing colour of yellow. The brigades are identified by the colour of the inner square. Thus it is very easy to identify all Maucune’s units (yellow outer square), or all the units which report to General Montfort, who is one of Maucune’s brigade commanders (red within yellow). These labels are much smaller in reality than they appear here – I laminate them, cut them out and attach with a smear of BluTack. [OCD on the battlefield.]

Right, you may be thinking, this must be leading up to something. There is obviously some reason why we might wish to identify higher formations in this way. And you will be correct - at long last, we come to the ideas about activation.

1. A brigade should consist of between 3 and 8 units. If a higher level of organisation is suitable for your game, a division may comprise between 2 and 4 such brigades.

2. When the player takes his turn, he nominates one of his generals. In a big game, he may have a choice of nominating 1 of his division commanders or up to two of his brigade commanders – decide for yourself how this would work.

a. For the nominated general he now rolls 2D6 for each unit in that general’s command for which he wishes to issue an order – this is where the coloured labels come in handy, so you don’t miss any.

b. A natural roll of 9 or more activates the unit – give them a counter or something – they are under orders for this turn.

c. Otherwise, adjust the dice roll as follows:

i.          For a good general, add 1

ii.         For a poor general, deduct 1 – sort-of-OK generals require no adjustment

iii.        For a good unit, add 1

iv.        For a poor unit, or one with heavy losses (shaken, whatever...) deduct 1

v.         For each complete 6 inches (or whatever you fancy) that the unit is distant from the general, deduct 1 (for hexes, this would be “for each hex beyond the first...”)

d. If the result is 4 or more, the unit is under orders

e. This continues until all units under the general’s command are activated, or until one fails the test, in which case no more units are tested. This means that it is important to take care over the order in which units are tested for activation – go for the good guys who are near at hand first – one failure and that’s your lot for this general on this turn.

3. The activated units now move, fight and all that stuff, as you would expect. End of turn.

4. Then the opposing player nominates one (or maybe two) of his generals, and so on. And that’s it, really. It may involve too much dice throwing, I'm not sure, but it has a few ingredients which appeal:

a. It’s simple, and easy to understand

b. Restricting activation to a single general keeps the game focused and ensures a quick rotation of turns

c. The fact that you can choose the general gives more direct control – less of a random element than a card system, for example, but some bad luck with the dice can still make life difficult.

5. And, as an add-on, we propose that any general who is a casualty has to be replaced, but should be replaced by an officer who is one degree worse. 

                                                                     -ooOoo-

Re-reading this now, it seems to me that most of this is familiar anyway, and I’m not sure why it has taken Martin and me so much correspondence to get to this stage. I am not even sure that I shall go on to test it, though I have thoroughly enjoyed the development process. However, in a spirit of what I hope will charitably be taken as innocent enthusiasm, I offer it for your thoughts.

VwQ – Plus Point – Simple Treatment of Casualties

A running commentary on my growing collection of fixes and tweaks for the Victory without Quarter rules for ECW/30YW games may give the wrong overall impression of my opinion of them, so I thought I might offer a very brief moment of applause for a change, to balance things up.

In my previous post I made vague reference to a “list of likes and dislikes”, by which I judge wargames rules as they come along. One thing I am not fond of, my friends, is any form of separate, hand-written record of casualties – especially of the early WRG variety, where it is necessary to record losses as the fractional parts of a figure – i.e. in actual men. The great big chart tells you that 14 figures throwing bits of muck into the wind on a Thursday have disabled one twentieth of a figure. Result! - amend your roster sheet - where is it? - is that it over there? - no, on the bookcase, under your reading glasses?

Keep adding the bits up and – if you live long enough – in time this will accumulate to a complete figure, and you can remove him, and start to tally the fractions all over again. We shouldn’t make fun of this – it was (and may again become) the state of the art, but you can really see why WRG replaced it with the much preferable arrangement where a roll of 4 or a 5 might kill one figure (H) and a 6 might kill two (HH - YES!). Much more like the thing. More like a game, rather than a book-keeping exercise.

I do not care for anything which detracts from the immediacy of the wargame, or which takes the eye and the attention away from the action on the tabletop. I also very much dislike pieces of paper which clutter up the battlefield – why do we fight with miniatures if it is not for the spectacle? My late friend Alan Gallacher used to impose a spot fine of 1 non-staff figure – to be chosen by the opponent, for every offending piece of litter on the battlefield – you may regard this as extreme, but a good-humoured application of this house rule made a great difference once everyone got the hang of it. And litter, by the way, included reference sheets and rulers as well as plastic cups, beer mats, mobile phones and so on.

All this means that I really like the Victory without Quarter arrangement for calculating and tracking losses. A unit attacking another unit causes a number of “hits”, and 3 is the magic number. For every complete 3 hits caused in a single attack, the target is given one casualty marker, which they cart around with them thereafter. Any odd hits left over are ignored, insignificant, forgotten about and not carried forward. Which means that, quite often in VwQ, a sincere and wholeheartedly delivered attack may gain only one or two hits – nice try, but no marker. Perhaps next time? There is also a special rule for artillery - any hits by artillery, even if insignificant in the sense of not gaining a marker, will frighten the recipients sufficiently to require a morale check. Nasty stuff, artillery.

When the number of casualty markers for a unit becomes equal to the number of bases, the unit is eliminated. We do not care whether they are all dead, or disarmed or simply discouraged – they are no longer with us.

Just the sort of uncomplicated arrangement I like.

...so you lose eleven-twentieths of your bishop...

Topic B

On a completely different tack, I had a gentle rebuke from my new car yesterday. I am still getting the hang of what it will do. I recall that my relationship with my old truck was similar when it was new - I accumulated so many mental notes to sit down with the owner's manual and look up things that puzzled me that eventually I just did it, and I learned a lot. This was quite a good approach, I think, though "approach" might imply more formality than was really the case. If there had been any underlying reasoning - which I doubt - it might have included the following themes:

(1) Owner manuals are not the sort of thing you read right through for entertainment. Brain-death will certainly follow.

(2) The manual will often refer to a whole range of models, plus variants, and thus tends to be a bit on the generic side - after you have read the 25 pages on the optional in-car entertainment system you find that you don't actually have it.

(3) These cars are invented by clever people - they must be pretty intuitive to drive, right?

(4) ...right?

(5) Real men do not read instructions before they act. In the noble tradition of (I think) Bugs Bunny, it is not actually necessary to learn how to land your aeroplane until after you have taken off.

(6) Etc.

And so, encouraged by my previous success with this so-called approach, I have gone about things in the same way this time. I've had the new vehicle for some 4 months now, and I still don't know why the heater will suddenly blow hot air at me when the outside temperature is 25 deg C, or what that weird orange dashboard light that looks like a pineapple means, or why quite a lot of people flash their headlights at me at night. Must check that, I keep saying to myself.

One of the reasons I behave like this, I am beginning to suspect, is fear. A primitive, superstitious fear of something which is cleverer than I am, and which - unlike me - is getting cleverer every day. The new buggy is the first one I have owned which will automatically switch on lights or wipers when it thinks you need them. It's quite fun, actually - feels like something of a luxury - but my initial reaction, before I became accustomed to the idea and forgot about it, was to wonder what particular problem this was solving. It is not difficult to switch on your own lights, as I recall, though on occasions you might forget to do so. Is the sensor which now makes the decision on my behalf just one more thing to go wrong? What if I get used to having my lights look after themselves and one day drive a vehicle which doesn't do this? Ultimately, am I more or less of a potential danger on the road? Hmmm.

I'm still a bit dubious about cleverness for its own sake. I embrace the ancient urban legends about an automatic emergency brake which, allegedly, was fitted to Mercedes' E-Class, and would occasionally decide arbitrarily that someone was having an emergency when in fact he was driving at 110 kph along the autobahn, chatting to his wife about the neighbours' new gazebo. And then there was the nameless experimental audio system which was designed to turn up the volume when it sensed that the background noise in the car had increased, which - again, reputedly - in some of its early versions became dangerously confused when passengers began to shout to make themselves heard above the music, and cranked the level even higher...

Yesterday my car played a joke on me. I believe it has recognised my basic insecurity. As I was driving home from visiting my mother, enjoying a rare moment of fine weather, it suddenly began making a chiming noise at me - very like the noise you might sometimes hear at an old-fashioned railway crossing when the gates are closed. No warning lights, no apparent problems, just this noise - and, since these things are built by clever people, you just know that this is not likely to be good news. Has the oil pressure zeroed? Has something awful happened to the hydraulics? Has the lambda probe (or some other dread gizmo) gone faulty, and the engine is about to shut down to protect itself? How much is this going to cost? Does the warranty cover labour charges? Is there, in fact, a train coming?

I got home without incident, though with further intermittent chimes, and was sitting in the car, worrying about it, when my wife arrived. She knew instantly what the problem was - her Volkswagen does the same thing. The car had sensed the parcel I had placed on the passenger seat, and when I went around corners it complained that this passenger it had identified was not wearing a seat-belt.

So that's all right then - but it might have given me some visual clue, you would think. The point is made - I shall show more respect in future. It is watching me.

What?

   

Degrees of Abstraction

Proper Old School - the early pioneers were all different sizes, as you see

One of the characteristics of Old School wargaming, as we grew up with it, was that everything appeared on the table. You want skirmishers? – no problem – there they are (mind you, the rules don’t work too well for them, and it takes so much time to manoeuvre them that we normally ignore/forget them after Bound 4). You want a honking great model of La Haye Sainte on the battlefield? – there it is (yes – agreed – it takes up the same space as the city of Brussels on the tabletop, but just look at it, and you can get an entire Division in the farmyard, too).

As we all got more and more enthusiastic about reflecting every known (or suspected) aspect of warfare in the game (mostly Napoleonic in my case, and the words National Characteristics still cause me to shudder), so we found it harder and harder to finish any of our games. Speaking for myself, my growing interest in looking for new approaches and greater pragmatism came from my frustration at finding that the widely accepted, latest forms of my hobby didn’t actually work very well. I remember being embarrassingly close to tears trying to get to grips with the latest version of Halsall & Roth’s rules (as used in the national championships – I only bought the very best...). I realised that this was no longer fun – at least not to me. I became very interested in the reasons why board war games seemed to work better, without people coming to blows, or taking their troops home in disgust.

Many years later, after my wargaming sabbatical, I got myself involved with more modern rulesets, and a lot of what I read made a whole lot of sense. Dr Mustafa said that in a big wargame it was impracticable to fuss about with skirmishers, for example – it was a distraction, something which in any case would be beneath the attention of an army commander. In his Grande Armée rules, the idea was that, surrounding the main columns and other formations on the tabletop, there were invisible little clouds of light troops, scrapping away. They were abstracted – a new word for me in this context then – and only existed by implication. They appeared as adjustments in combat calculations, and as “SK” numbers associated with the parent units. This seemed a more businesslike approach, though I did have a few slight traditionalist pangs. Just a minute – I actually enjoy fiddling with skirmishers – and what about all those lovely voltigeurs and people I’ve painted and cherished? What are they going to do? There does seem to be a slight tension here – if we agree that a particular style of skirmishing was an important characteristic of the Napoleonic Era – something, in fact, which served to make it different from the Seven Years War – is it OK to remove Napoleonic skirmishers from the miniature battlefield?

Hmmm. This wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped.

Out of all the reading, scribbling and reconciling necessary compromises, I came to terms with the fact that I probably needed at least two sets of rules for each period. One was for big battles, where the emphasis was on speed of movement, simple-but-robust mechanisms and games which were capable of being played to a conclusion in a sensible amount of time. The other would be for smaller fights, where it was required to consider a more detailed level of tactical behaviour, where forming lines and wheeling and deploying skirmish troops were still appropriate, and even necessary.

My decision to start dallying with the English Civil War – something over a year ago – required a whole new dose of considering available rules. After a lot of reading and soliciting of advice, I plumped for Victory without Quarter as my main rules. The game scale and general philosophy fitted well with the list of personal likes and dislikes which I had built up over the years. Having reached the point of actually playing some games, I now find I have the familiar two-level situation – I have a home-brewed adaptation of Commands & Colors to handle the bigger battles, and I have VwQ for the smaller stuff – my proposed provincial, North-country ECW campaigns will certainly throw up games for which C&C is too blunt a tool, and for which it becomes necessary to worry about which direction units are facing, how they are formed up, the advantages of march columns on roads, the exact point in a charge where the defenders got off a volley and all that.

My relationship with VwQ is still evolving. The only time I have used the rules in anger (grrrr!) was when I visited Old John in North Wales last year. We found that the game was fun, but there were some chunks missing (dragoons didn’t work properly, no advantage for a flank or rear attack, no explanation of how artillery should be treated in a melee, for a start). Concentrating on positives, I spent some time adding extensions to the rules – suggestions came from various sources, including Harry Pearson, even some ideas from Clarence Harrison himself (the originator) - and I have reached a fairly robust version for playtesting.

The one area which still bothers me about this game is Activation. Broadly speaking, the game uses cards to activate units – there is a card for each, and there is also a card for each commander at brigade level or higher. Drawing an officer’s card allows orders to be given to any of his subordinate units which are within shouting distance, which allows some decent progress to be made when moving troops about. Last year, Old John and I found that – as often as not – drawing a card for a single unit would produce no effect at all, certainly no movement, since advancing a single unit without the rest of its brigade was usually not a great idea. I’m still tinkering with this, which remains the one weak spot. I have even given thought to having cards only for brigades and higher formations – single unit cards being dropped. John and I had certainly deduced that any group of units which was expected to move anywhere had to be provided with an on-table brigadier.

I hope I’m not anywhere close to going back to the research phase. VwQ is designed to support the smaller type of game which I expect to feature a lot in my campaigns – my commitment to these rules, albeit expanded and tweaked, is such that I have based my troops to suit (which is not a problem – whatever rules I use can handle these bases) and have even produced (and now tested, honest, Clive...) a computer-managed version to facilitate solo play. Maybe copious provision of generals is the answer, maybe the single-unit activation cards are a bad idea, but – whatever the answer might be – I have a faintly worrying recollection of our game in Wales, during which there were lengthy periods when some parts of the armies were left stranded by the original card drawing system.

Activation Systems - Again

Over the last few days, an exchange of emails with Prof De Vries has touched on the well-worn topic of Command and Activation in miniatures games. As usual, I had been banging on about some aspect of this at rather tedious length, when De Vries came back to me and said “you obviously didn’t think that two years ago”. Hey, what? - but I’ve always thought that.

So the Prof kindly directed me back to a post I put up here in October 2010, and I re-read it, and I have to say that I do appear to have changed my mind. It’s not that I have done a full volte-face, you understand, more that I have changed my ideas on the priorities.

During these two years, I have been introduced to two rulesets which I like very much, and which have re-coloured my views more than a little. These are Richard Borg’s Command & Colors (published as a whole suite of boxed boardgames by GMT, but also used with miniatures) and Victory without Quarter, for the ECW, developed by Clarence Harrison. One feature of both these games is that the Activation system is heavily restrictive. In Command & Colors (C&C), each player is dealt a hand of cards at the start, and on each turn he plays a single card, as a result of which he may “order” a number of units which is normally in the range 1-4 – occasionally more. In VwQ, each turn the game is driven by drawing the top card from a shared pack. The pack contains a small number of global orders – “Reload” being an example – but otherwise consists of one card for each unit, one for each commander or brigadier (which can activate any of his subordinate units which are within a certain distance), and a card which activates all artillery for both sides. The effect is even more haphazard than C&C, but it shares the “small moves” approach. The games both consists of short, focused turns, with a fast cycle time. In C&C there is strict alternation of sides (so that you may only do a small number of things, but it will be your turn again in just a minute or so), and the strategy comes from husbanding your hand, collecting useful cards and keeping them for use at the optimum moment. This is also sometimes described as “struggling to make the best of a bad deal”, which is maybe not a bad analogy for generalship anyway. The VwQ game is much more random – the cards may come up in any order at all, yet the game still seems to hang together logically.

Cards get a mixed press. I have become a big fan of late, despite early prejudices against their artificiality, and I think this is entirely down to the fact that the playability and entertainment value of these particular games is very much enhanced by their being card-driven. One thing neither game will allow you to do is march your entire army up and down the table every move. From my point of view this is a big advantage. I have wasted a lot of time over the years watching aimless countermarching. If I had some of that time back, I could use it to paint some of the backlog of figures, or to make some inroads on the “still to be read” shelf in the big bookcase! There was a day when the fact that a medium-sized miniatures battle took a huge amount of time to complete (if it was ever completed...) was somehow taken as a point of pride – a testament to the scholarly complexity and awesome realism of the noble wargame. It is also the reason why for some years I had serious doubts about whether the enjoyment gained from the games was worth the exhausting process of playing them. The thing that took up so much time, mostly (apart from arguments), was the freedom of the generals to move everything they had every turn. The proportion of the orders given that generated an interesting action was miniscule, players became fatigued and frequently forgot where they were up to.

I worried about this stuff for years – it is, after all, a First Degree Bummer when you are no longer convinced that you like your hobby very much, especially when you have committed so much time and money to it! The whole idea of Command rules seemed to be aimed to address this – to restrict this limitless ability of battlefield commanders to change everything in every single 5 minute turn. I became interested in a number of mechanisms – especially those from Mustafa’s Grande Armeé and its Fast-Play cousin. As I believe I have said before, for my taste these didn’t quite do the job – they introduced a little sanity and forced generals to prioritise, but the overhead introduced by the Command rules was too heavy in proportion to the benefit. Maybe I never gave them enough of a chance.

My approach at this time to Command and Activation was “introduce some inconveniences – you start off with the ability to order every single unit, but some will be too far from their commander, and  some of the subordinate commanders will have characteristics which get in the way, which will cut the scope down a bit”. The idea was good, but often it was too much work to carry out – the Universal Movement grunt had been partly replaced by the Command Tests grunt, but it was still a grunt. And it was a very particular grunt if the Command rules were a lot of work but only rarely affected the game.

I think I am getting close (at long last) to the point on which I have changed my mind. I have not changed my belief that Activation type rules are a good idea, but I have come to realise that they should be approached from the opposite end of the problem – i.e. start off with the assumption that no-one can do anything and then allow a small number of units to be activated to receive orders. It’s less work, the effort is expended on the parts of the battle where something is happening, and it produces a snappier game, with short turns, better focus and less waiting around. Yes, it is artificial, but no more so than the other approaches.

It works. It works easily and effectively, and I can approach games that work in this way in the safe knowledge that I am going to enjoy them. That is a pretty fair bonus.

I accept that a lot of people will disagree – maybe very strongly. If it wasn’t in Charge! then maybe it should be viewed with suspicion – and it has to admitted that there is a snag. C&C games are usually played around published scenarios in which the armies are ready deployed, all set to go. I very rarely use other people’s scenarios (scenarii?), published or not, and many of my battles are fought as part of a campaign. If the action requires an army, or a large part of an army, to march somewhere – on to the table, for example – the standard card-driven systems don’t handle it well. In reality, a simple march order would keep a whole Division marching until they were stopped – simulating this by shifting penny packets of 2 or 3 of the units in the right direction when (and if) suitable cards come up is unsatisfactory. The card systems require extra rules in this type of action to allow the units to march about the place – something, as you will have noted, which the old free-for-all rules would have coped with, with no difficulty at all!

So – card systems such as C&C work excellently for set-pieces, but we need something extra to cope with mass marching. Anubis Studio’s White Mountain 30 Years War rules are heavily based on the C&C Ancients game, but they also allow a Command Card to be played as a Standing Order for a particular unit (or group of units), and it will remain in force until it is cancelled. I need to read that up again, but maybe something along those lines is what I’m after.

Whatever – I believe I have maybe changed my mind, after all. Some expression about old dogs and new tricks comes to mind.