Hooptedoodle #147 - Not the Same at All

This doesn't help much

I recently had a pleasant exchange of emails with a very nice fellow from New Mexico, during which he asked me if I could help clear up an argument he had been having with some friends, who were convinced that the unpleasantness between the noble houses of York and Lancaster was, or was somehow part of, the English Civil War.

Anyone calling on my historical expertise is in trouble anyway, but I pointed out that the conflict which later became known as the Wars of the Roses was some two centuries earlier than the ECW, and – though some of the family alignments may still have had an effect all those years later – the scripts were separate and different.

I have noticed a certain element of confusion in this area before – notably in the dark folds of TMP. I have also been accused before of attempting to take a poke at Americans, but nothing could be further from the truth – I have a good number of American friends, and I have a great deal of respect for their country. I do feel, though, that in some respects their collective understanding of the world outside the USA is sometimes patchy, which still surprises me a little, since just about all of them are descended from peoples who came from other parts of the globe.

In 1987 I made the first of a number of visits to California to play with an Edinburgh-based group at the Sacramento Jazz Festival (which, at that time at least, was a very big deal indeed). During the first break of our first set, a bearded gentleman of about 60 came up and said, in a booming voice,

“So you guys are Irish? – so am I – I wonder if we are related?”

We shook his hand and explained that no, in fact we were Scottish.

“Same thing,” boomed the bearded one, “read your history, pal! Don’t they teach history any more? – have the English put a stop to that?”

We protested, gently, that, though the countries had certain tribal connections, they were in fact separated by both culture and geography. We also suggested that confusing the two was not unlike mistaking California and Mexico. This didn’t go down well at all.

“Different thing altogether! – obviously you guys never went to school!” and he stomped off back to the beer tent. Once again we had made our faultless contribution to international friendship. I've met a number of fellows like this since - the history gets a bit smudged; I had a good-going discussion in a bar in Auburn once with a guy who claimed to be an Irish republican, but whose view of the history was diverse enough to include odd incidents such as the Glencoe Massacre if it was too good an excuse for a fight to ignore.

It’s taken me a few years, but I have eventually come to understand that none of the actions at Brandywine, Plattsburgh, Little Big Horn or the Alamo are considered part of the ACW, but then it would be hard for me to escape the truth – American history is all-pervasive, it dominates the Internet – look up English Civil War or Spanish Civil War on Google or on the Amazon site, and see how the ACW swamps the lists produced.

I am aware that the USA is a relatively young nation, and has worked hard on it’s identity – belonging has been important, conforming to a national ideal essential. Americans are encouraged to cherish their immigrant heritage, but also to put it in the background. That is all admirable. When I used to visit, which I did regularly until 1998, I was intrigued by the world as presented by the TV networks. In Sacramento, for example, local news might be a report on the Christian Mothers’ fund-raising musical show in Rio Linda, national news was what was going on in the California state capitol, world news was events in the rest of the USA. Only the occasional glimmer of anything in the outside world sneaked through, and then only if there were Americans involved, or if it had political implications for the USA. I was in Los Angeles when the US Navy accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner, which made it on to the TV news, but otherwise I had to phone home to see what was happening.

Not that the English Civil War is solid ground for forming comparisons - we could get into all sorts of debates about more-politically-correct titles - The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (which seems to discriminate rather against the heavily committed Welsh) and so on. Personally I get bored with this topic pretty quickly, but I have a (sort of) friend who gets almost violent if someone refers to the English Civil War (singular), but there again he is capable of starting a fight in an empty room. Whatever - if I say "ECW", and then duck quickly, you have a good idea what I'm talking about, and the Plantagenets do not figure at all.

Fair enough, but give us a break, guys – Wars of Roses; English Civil War; different. I guess you might just about glue the ECW onto the end of the Thirty Years War, but that would require a lot of explanation and a lot of beer, and life is too short, really. Just carry on – thanks.

1809 Spaniards – Daft Project #215b

JM Bueno plate of the light horse grenadiers - an odd concept,
but an interesting potential addition to the light cavalry

It’s strange what one finds in the spares box – I guess it’s because there are not so many collectors of figures in the scales, periods, nations and makes that I am looking for, and – ultimately – it’s a small world.

I’ve recently taken delivery of the second of my Spanish line Cazadores a Caballo units for the 1809 army. The Spanish army only had two such units, the Cazadores de Olivencia (red facings) and the Voluntarios de España (sky blue facings), so there’s no scope for adding any more.

The troopers in the more recently-arrived of these units consist of a Hinton Hunt conversion which is obviously specially done for the purpose, and very distinctive – braided chasseur-type jacket, and shako with side plume. All very good, but you may imagine my astonishment when I checked in my spares box, and found that I have 7 unpainted examples of exactly this same converted figure. In some strange way, I have received examples of this unique figure – which is definitely a subject of very limited and specialised interest – from two completely independent sources. Even more strangely, it has taken me until now to realise this. Of course, I could now say, “Gosh, that’s a bit of a surprise!”, or – being me – I might think, “Hmmm – if I added 3 command figures to these 7 figures, I could produce a complete new light cavalry unit for my 1809 Spaniards”. I have a bunch of (I think) Alberken hussar-type horses which would fit them admirably, so I’m off to a flying start if I wish to go that way.

All I need, then, is a suitable historical unit to base them on, and I have found one. The Granaderos a Caballo de Fernando VII were – contrary to what you might expect – a unit of light horse, uniformed in the style of the line Cazadores. They were raised in 1809 by the Conde de Fernan-Nuñez, who became their colonel. In 1811 they were renamed the Husares de Fernando VII, pelisses were added, and a Bueno plate I have of them from that later date looks very attractive, and far smarter, I’m sure, than the reality must have been. It is their earlier form and garb which interests me, though.

I also found these self-same Granaderos a Caballo among the illustrations of the Histoire et Collections volume on the Battle of Ocaña – these are taken from plates by Peter Bunde. The uniform is pretty much the same as the chap in the picture at the top of this post, except that Bunde has the troopers with epaulettes, which I think is unlikely. My intention would be to have the troopers as the plate at the top, but wearing side-plumed, cazador-style shakos, with white cording, and have the officers in colpacks, with silver epaulettes. In fact, an alternative might be to have the officers in full hussar style, in recognition of the hussar-style pretensions of the regiment. Whatever, we are talking of further conversions here.

I approached Peter at BB Wargames, and he sees no problem – just send the figures along – so it seems this might well go ahead. The last thing I need is someone to encourage me, normally, but this is OK. You will hear more of this, I have no doubt.

To give a bit of historical background, here’s an extract from Col JJ Sañudos’ wonderful database of the Spanish army in the Guerra de la Independencia, giving some details of the service of the unit.

Hooptedoodle #146 – Archie

Wow, Archie. I hadn’t really thought about Archie for some years – I think I may actually have avoided thinking about him – but recently he cropped up in conversation with my wife, and not long ago I threw out some old papers, in which I found an invitation to Archie’s retirement dinner, which was certainly not yesterday.

Archie and I both worked for the same (very large) employer for many years, though we never met and knew nothing of each other for almost all of that time. He spent his time in the sales organization, managing branch offices in different parts of the UK, and my world was of mathematics and computers, at boring old Head Office. Since we were roughly the same age, we eventually met up – collected together like fluff in a corner – when we had both become senior enough and old enough to become something of an embarrassment.

I can’t claim to be an expert on working careers, since I only ever had one, but there are some characteristics which seem far clearer to me now than they were at the time. If you are successful (and Archie and I were both pretty successful, I suppose, by any commonsense standards) then the ingredients will be a rough mixture of hard work, talent, luck, personal contacts and what we might call “politics”. Strangely, we tend not to notice much except the talent and the hard work on the way up, but when the momentum starts to run out we become painfully aware of the rest, especially the politics. It is pathetically easy to blame our ultimate humbling on conspiracies, or bad breaks, but the reality is that we must have benefited from exactly those same elements when we were doing well, but we chose not to see it. Eventually, old senior managers become too expensive, too risk-averse and too much of an obstruction to the promotion of the next lot of hot-shots, and they have to go. Nobody explains this at the time.

Anyway, Archie and I came together, late on, on the steering committee of some no-hope project that nobody cared about, and we got on very well. We used to meet up for lunch, to discuss important stuff like football and music, share uproarious tales of our memories of our working lives and the stupidity of the useless and pointless jobs we had now been pushed into (to make room for the hot-shots), and generally to enjoy each other’s company, though I fear that much of the chat was heavily negative.

Archie had been through a very traumatic divorce (he explained, quite cheerfully, that his wife eventually couldn’t stand him any more) and had moved back to the town of his birth – a small place not far from Glasgow – a town where the railings of the public park were painted red, white and blue and the Council had never, ever employed a Catholic, as far as anyone knew. As the lunches continued, I became rather less comfortable in Archie’s company; there was something about him – he burned too brightly – he was always too jovial, or too intense, or too angry, or too something-or-other. He also had a disquieting habit of supporting the points he made in conversation by trotting out biblical quotations, complete with chapter and verse numbers. In what I hope was a good-natured way, I asked him not to do this, since these quotes only served any purpose if:

1. The listener knew the passage, and thus could identify it as genuine.

2. The listener accepted the intended interpretation of these words in this particular translation.

3. The listener was otherwise convinced that these words carried some form of authority because of their inclusion in the Bible.

In all three of which departments this particular listener was a bad target.

We agreed that Archie would calm this down – the tacit understanding, I think, being one of joint acceptance of my inadequacy. On one occasion, when there were four of us for lunch, two being business contacts whom we did not know at all, Archie very kindly took it upon himself to say grace before we ate, which seemed a bit presumptuous in the circumstances, and we subsequently agreed that he would not repeat this, either.

And then, bit by bit, over a few months of lunches, we got to the horror story. Archie seemed to have a need to tell it to someone, but it came out slowly, in hints and fragments, until one day it became the subject for discussion for today. It had all happened years before.

Archie’s father was a devout member of some pretty extreme Protestant faction, and he brought his kids up as he thought best. Archie’s sister was a rather nervous, quiet girl, and she went away to teachers’ training college in Glasgow, where she became involved with a man who was a Catholic. There was a lot of trouble at home – a lot of tears and screaming, and eventually things reached the point where the father and daughter became irreconcilable, she was banished from the family, and she went away to live with her new partner. Her father even took legal steps to remove her from his will – this was a situation from which there could be no return.

Sadly, the girl’s relationship did not go well, for whatever reason; she suffered serious depression and was hospitalized for mental illness for a while, and she made contact with her father, to ask if she could come back to live with him. I am not sure where Archie stood on all this, but the father refused to answer her letters – he had no daughter – in God’s name he had no daughter. Some months later she committed suicide.

Now, of course, I have no idea how these things stack up – was she unstable enough to have committed suicide anyway, was her extreme upbringing part of the cause – who knows? It is tempting to assemble what I remember of what Archie chose to tell me into a novella of any style you choose – you choose Bronte and I’ll choose the Woman’s Realm. It’s also none of my business, anyway, but it was certainly Archie’s. I asked him – since it seemed appropriate – how he felt about it all now.

Archie had a habit of avoiding eye contact when he made his biblical quotes, and he stared into space very carefully now. He told me that his father and he had been devastated, of course, but eventually they were glad that God had sent them this trial as a test of their faith, and that they had come through it together. They were stronger in Jesus as a result, he said. The tragedy to Archie’s sister appeared to be incidental, and there was certainly no suggestion of guilt, or even regret.

I am sorry to say that I had a lot of trouble with Archie’s story – I was profoundly spooked by it. We met less often, and shortly after that he retired and our paths rarely, if ever, crossed. For a while he sent me emails (as part of a large circular distribution) drawing my attention to ranting letters he had had published in the Glasgow Herald – usually about the mismanagement of his former employer by the new hot-shots – and then later he sent out some pretty appalling racist and anti-Islamic materials, and I got him classified as SPAM, and I haven’t heard from him since.

Archie.

That’s it.

More 1809 Spaniards

This week I received a small package of finished figures from BB Wargames. These are always interesting - conversions using Hinton Hunt castings (mostly). Here we have a pleasingly scruffy unit of foot artillery and also a welcome addition to the light cavalry brigade - these are the Cazadores d'Olivencia, who will join my other mounted Cazadores regiment, the (so called) Voluntarios d'Espana.

The cazadores do not yet have their flag, as you see. I know what it looked like, but it will get printed along with a number of other Spanish flags, once I have set them up on PaintShop and once I have got around to buying some decent printer paper for the job. I now have a good supply of cravats and finials, so there are no excuses left apart from procrastination.

Hinton Hunt enthusiasts may enjoy identifying the donor figures - there's a few Austrians in the artillery, I think, and the cavalry officer was definitely Lord Uxbridge in a former life. The cazadores really did wear that scary green colour, by the way.

I have a unit of Kennington hussars to paint (figures kindly supplied by Mr Kinch, of blog fame) and there are another two battalions of line infantry at Lee's prestigious painting factory, so things are moving along nicely.

It would be tedious to complain yet again about Royal Mail, but the Next Day Special Delivery package in which these chaps arrived appears to have been fired from a howitzer to get it here quickly from Norfolk. Damage to the figures was not extensive - one broken ramrod and some paint chips and grazes, but the packaging was top class, so a Next Day Special Effort must have gone into abusing the parcel. It did have FRAGILE written all over it, but FRAGILE is a very long word to read when you are in a hurry, and is in any case sometimes regarded as a challenge. Never mind - as long as the shareholders aren't affected.

250,000 hits and still waffling

I observe that my total of hits on the blog has reached 250,000 - my humble thanks go to everyone who has read my ramblings over the last 4 years and entered into the spirit of the proceedings. I've learned a lot, made some excellent friends and indulged myself shamelessly - thank you all, ever so much.

Since this has always been principally a Napoleonic blog (though sometimes I forget), it seemed appropriate to come up with some truly stirring music, as befits such a glorious moment in my life. I hope you enjoy this, and that you find it as moving as I did:



To follow this, in what was originally intended to be a short season of celebratory pieces, I was hoping tomorrow to provide a link to the legendary (and record breaking) performance of Selections from Carmen, by the senior members' choir of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Wavertree, performed underwater in the deep end of Picton Road public baths, but, alas, the clip has been removed from YouTube.

Thus we shall have to make do with William Marx's definitive live performance of John Cage's  4'33" at the McCallum Theatre, Palm Desert, in 1973, followed by the whole of the 2nd season of Strictly Come Dancing.

It should be fantastic.

Tweakle Tweakle Little Star (4) – Leaders, for Goodness Sake

There's one...

One of the characteristics of Commands & Colors: Napoleonics that we have discussed a bit is that the Leaders (generals) don’t do a great deal. Once again, I am happy to accept that this is the way the game has been designed, and have no problem leaving the rules as they are, but I have also spent some time thinking about what could be done in the way of some options to liven the Leaders up a bit.

As the rules are published, the role of the Leader is to enable combat units to ignore “retreat flag” results on the special combat dice and to keep himself alive (since he counts as a full Victory Banner/Point, same as a combat unit, if he is lost), and Leaders may also be given orders generated by Command Cards; they are specifically mentioned in just two of the tactical cards – Leadership (for which they are the source of activation, and provide a combat bonus) and Force March (for which they can provide a movement bonus for infantry to which they are attached).

I believe that a forthcoming expansion to C&CN – Marshals & Generals(?) - will bring more focus on Leaders, so any tweaks suggested here must keep that in mind. What follows is what I am proposing to try out in some test games within a few weeks; some of the ideas here have been suggested by, and discussed with, Lee and Iain, among others, and I may well have borrowed things from Lee’s own Leader tweaks for his developing AWI variant, and I have certainly tried a couple of these things already in my own ECW variant game. This package of changes is intended to be simple, to fit closely with standard C&CN, and to address a couple of small logical holes in the game (or things which appear so to me).

Here goes – if there’s bits you like better than others, then try those – if you reject the idea of making any changes at all to C&CN then that’s fine as well, and I have a lot of sympathy with your view:

The army will have a command structure. Generals are fielded at C-in-C, Divisional and Brigade levels – I already use colour-coded borders to the figure bases to distinguish rank. Predictably, an army will consist of Divisions, which will consist of brigades. A brigade should have a maximum size – for me, this is likely to be six units, which may include attached divisional artillery.

To aid recognition, unit bases/sabots will carry coloured beads to show which brigade they belong to. It will become a good idea to keep brigades together, and to keep generals with their own areas of command.

A Leader may be physically attached to any combat unit, as in standard C&CN, but will only have an effect for units which form part of his command. A relevant Leader (i.e. one attached to a unit which is in his own chain of command) will allow them to ignore a retreat flag result, as in standard C&CN, but will also gain them an extra combat die in ranged or melee combat.

In addition, if a “Section”-type Command Card is used to order a Leader who is attached to a unit in his own chain of command, then the unit and any other contiguous units of the same brigade are ordered as well. Thus, a Scout Left card (activate one Leader or unit on the left flank) might be applied to order a Leader who is attached to a unit in his own brigade on the left flank, and it would activate the unit, plus any other units from the same brigade which form an unbroken group or chain from the unit with the Leader. Any units which are physically apart from the contiguous group, or which belong to a different brigade, will require to be activated separately.

A brigadier may perform this role with his own brigade, a division commander with any of his brigades (though only one at a time – the one to which he is physically attached), and a C-in-C with any of the brigades in his army (again, one at a time). The Leader only provides combat bonuses and relief from retreat flags for the actual unit he is attached to, as in standard C&CN.

The downside is that any Leader who motivates his unit by putting his neck on the line in this way will have more chance of being killed; the test for a Leader casualty with a unit suffering loss becomes a roll of a single combat die – crossed sabres and he’s lost (the standard test is 2 sabres symbols on 2 combat dice). I have no ideas yet for succession planning – if he’s gone, he’s gone for the day – but Leaders below Division level do not count as a Victory Banner if lost.

When I first discussed this with the Professor, we felt that this facility for bulk activation of up to a single brigade as though it were one unit was a huge advantage, and should be restricted to movement – i.e. combat orders could not be made at brigade level, but eventually we agreed that it is simpler if we do not apply that restriction; if the attacking brigade can all fight on a single card, maybe the answer for the defenders is to organize themselves so they can do the same. I’ll have to run some trials – if I find that unnatural geometric formations or peculiar strategies result, then it’s back to the drawing board, but it is potentially an interesting add-on – it addresses a number of holes in a single step: introduces the concept of army structure, gives the Leaders a more positive role in combat and provides a means of speeding up movement by activating a brigade as a single entity. A couple of footnotes, before I end:

A brigade can only carry out one order at a time, so having the brigadier and division commander both attached wouldn’t produce a double order.

If a unit becomes separated from its brigade, then it doesn’t get to take part in a brigade order, but that unit may be separately activated and manoeuvred to join up again.

You may attach a Leader to a unit with which he has no relationship (for example, if he is forced to take shelter with them), but he will offer no benefit for them, in either combat bonus or retreat relief, and he is still at risk if they take casualties.

I’m sure there’s a need for more subclauses, but I’ve tried to keep it straightforward and tried to keep it like C&CN – suggestions, abuse and muted applause will all be gratefully received…

If there seems a need for it, I might write a post about coloured beads some time.

* * * * *

Late addition: 

As part of my ongoing effort to complete my siege warfare rules, I've been looking for rules for a miniatures game called Festung Krieg, published around 1988 as part of a suite of SYW games by Freikorps. Not only have I had no success, it's very difficult to find out anything at all about it; it's as if the thing never existed, though the very small number of owner votes on Boardgamegeek give it a high score.

Anyone own this game, or have access to a copy, or know anything at all about it? If you do, I'd be delighted if you would email me through the address in my profile.

Tweakle Tweakle Little Star (3) – Hot Spots and Standing Orders

Mostly waiting

Preliminary Waffle: Partly, this comes from a description of a battlefield which I heard not long ago in a re-run of the classic Thames Television World at War series about WW2. An eye-witness described a large area in which mostly nothing was happening – a great quantity of men and equipment, waiting and watching while, in isolated pockets, it was apparent that a relative few were fighting desperately for their lives. The eye-witness said that it seemed strange afterwards, when people asked him was he present at the battle of such-and-such, because often it had not felt like a battle at the time.

With that in mind, around January time I was walking through the park in a nearby village while a class from the primary school were playing football (soccer) on the public pitch there. This was obviously timetabled school games rather than a formal match or a get-together of enthusiasts, and they must have been 7-year-olds or thereabout. There is something distinctive about matches involving 7-year-olds, especially if the players are conscripts rather than a collection of those who wish to be there or those who are chosen on merit.

Often you can’t see the ball – you can see where it must be, because there is a knot of players which travels around the field, like a very small, brightly coloured tornado, and sometimes the ball pops out of it for a moment, before a group charge swallows it up again. The overriding impression is of a speeded-up movie. Out near the edges of the playing field, placed there by personal choice or for purposes of damage limitation, you will find the less committed members of the teams – those who make up the numbers – the weedy, the unco-ordinated and the exercise haters – chatting to each other or making solitary daisy chains. On occasions the ball will bounce out of the frenzied knot, heading toward some bespectacled dreamer on the touchline, and a shout of “your ball, Ainslie” will wake him, far too late, from his reverie, in time only for him to trot away to fetch the ball from the rhododendron bushes and back into play.

Hot Spots, and Threat Ranges: I wrote of my observations in the park to the Professor, and mentioned that it had occurred to me that there was some kind of activation system at work here. It is recognisably specific to football as played by 7-year-olds – proper, grown-up football is not like this. By contrast, senior players are coached to run into space, manoeuvring off the ball, to arrive at places where it is expected to be soon, if things go to plan; that version of the game is much more like a military action, with an overlay of strategy, than it is like the 7-year-olds’ bar-room brawl. Of course, in a battle (or a wargame) there could be more than one “ball” on the field at any moment – more than one “hot spot” (as the Professor called the focus of activity) around which the action was taking place; the instruction to the winger to be up there, on the left flank, in time to co-ordinate with other players in a manner which they have practiced on the training ground, has very obvious military parallels.

De Vries’s idea was that any wargame unit which was close to a hot spot would be automatically activated. We debated what “close” meant in this context, and it was suggested that it meant within their own “threat range” of the enemy, which – again – we defined as being within the greater of their own weapon range or charge distance – basically, the maximum distance at which they could take some offensive action. Thus anyone who was within range could fire at the enemy, or move, without a specific order. It took us longer than it should to realize that this would not be sufficient in itself – any unit outside their own threat range would remain inactive indefinitely unless the rest of the action moved close to them; the foot artillery battery which was 6 hexes from the enemy (maximum range being 5) would be unable to move any closer unless we allowed some additional activation. Thus we needed some extra system – dice based or whatever – which would allow some unengaged units to be deployed (this, presumably, would handle the daisy-chain makers). We also realized that the unfortunate infantry boys who are currently being fired on by artillery would be stuck there, to stand and take it, if they were outside their own musket range – maybe the extra activation slots could rescue them, or maybe being themselves within the threat range of an enemy is a trigger for activation in itself. At this point we felt there were too many threads developing, and that the two general groupings of “those within their own threat range” and “a few other activation slots” would suffice – the second category can be used for bringing up reserves, shifting the guys who are taking a battering etc.

That’s as far as I’ve got with that one. The basic idea is that activation sort of ripples around the hot spots, with additional measures being taken to switch on outlying or remote units.

Standing Orders: This is different again, but seems worth consideration. Iain contributed some thoughts on this – his particular point was that artillery would be easier to utilize, and maybe less of a consumer of available order slots, if it were possible to nominate a target and leave them to get on with bombarding it until further notice. His original note says:

Guns would be given a target in real life, and tasked to destroy/suppress/reduce [it]. What if an order given to an artillery battery in CCN specified a target, and allowed the battery to continue to fire each move until that target either moved out of range, or was destroyed? Then a new order would be needed to direct the fire against a new target.

In passing, this also would potentially allow a battery to continue to fire upon a target which moved but stayed within range.

The concept of standing orders has come to my notice previously in the rules of White Mountain, a 30 Years War period game, heavily based on CCA, which is the work of Anubis Studios. I reproduce here the relevant section from the White Mountain rules – it is set in the context of a card-driven system similar to CCA, and it stipulates that only one such order is permitted at any one time, but it should serve to give an idea how it might work:

ISSUING STANDING ORDERS

A standing order is an order for a nominated group of units who will continue to carry out that order, turn after turn, in addition to any other orders you perform elsewhere.

You may only have one standing order in play at any time.

Units operating under a standing order may remain in place or may move only toward the objective marker. If any unit affected by the card makes a move away from the objective marker for any reason the standing order is broken and the Command card is removed from play.

You may also cancel a standing order by removing the Command card without acting on it, and then take a normal turn instead.

To issue a standing order:

1 Play a Command card on the table in the nominated zone (left, centre or right). This is the order that you want to units to act on automatically in future turns.

2 Mark each unit affected by the order with a [blue] token.

3 Place an objective marker anywhere ahead of the affected units in the same zone. This is the point where the units, if they move, must move toward.

4 The units may now be moved or otherwise acted on in accordance with the Command card played.

5 Draw a card to replace the one just played. Your turn now ends.

6 On your next and all subsequent turns until the standing order is broken, you may act with the nominated units as if you just played the standing Command card.

In addition to this continual order, you may play Command cards elsewhere and act with other units as usual.