The other day, under the self-deluded guise I was actually doing "research" (and you can bet I saved the receipt for Uncle Sam) I rented a few "war" movies from the local Shlockbuster, a place that always reminds me of Yogi Berra's comment, "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded." One of the selections was the 20-year old "Cromwell", which I vaguely remembered seeing on the big screen when it first came out. "Cromwell" proved to be a fairly interesting movie, although not for the reason I had rented it. Great "costumes" and much atmosphere with a veddy British cast (not including the over-indulgent Richard Harris in the title role, chewing scenery and reduced to hoarse yelling and manic depressive stares by movie's end). The movie covers most of the English Civil War and is essentially divided into two sections: The War and The Trial. The former is represented by two battles: Edgehill (wherein Timothy Dalton is perfect as Rupert) and Nasby. Visually, the two look like good stuff; lots of clanking noises, cavalry scurrying to and fro, lines of pikemen digging in, huge cannon being hauled by 3 guys (uh huh) and floating pennants and blaring trumpets. Unfortunately, this is one of those "That Was Great, But it Ain't Nasby" flicks. The movie's rendition of Nasby was as close to that battle as it was to Poltova. It did get the hedge in, though. On the other hand, "Cromwell" is a must-see, if only to watch Alec Guiness as Charles I. In a portfolio of masterpieces by Sir Alec, his performance as the doomed Stuart king is so uncanny, so on-the-mark that he looks as if he either just stepped out of the Van Dyke portrait or he WAS Charles I. He captures all the gestures, the body language and the conflicting complexities of this ambiguous man. By film's end his sense of dignity and pathos (but never bathos) is so affecting that you are actually rooting for him. In the words of George McDonald Fraser, the Roundheads are Right but Repulsive and the Royalists Wrong but Romantic. All of which serves to bring us to the task at hand, Rob Markham's Royalists & Roundheads III, which might easily be described, Fraser-like, as Wrong but Replayable. R&R III is the sixth (or seventh; I've lost count) effort in his "If at First You Don't Succeed …" series of games on the whole panorama of pre-modern warfare, and, like the others, it shows all the typical markings of a Markham game: interesting theories and systems ill-thought out and poorly developed, none of which detract overly much from the fact that the games are pretty high on the "Fun" meter. With R&R III Markham has attempted to drag the system closer to reality, with marginally fitful success. The basic system - which is sort of PRESTAGS with an intriguingly inappropriate Command/Order system tacked on - is still intact, but Rob has added some "advanced" rules in an attempt to appease the Accuracy Crowd. The first is a new set of combat tables which expand the dieroll modifiers attached to certain unit types and Orders and exchange a Morale dieroll for a Disruption. It's not so different from the original that it bears more scrutiny than to simply mention it. Not so with the other addition. Rob has now decided to drag his system, kicking and screaming, into the Chit Randomizer Sequence of Play Era, which effort does serve to make the game far more interesting and tense than before. Unfortunately, much of the tension arises from the rise in blood pressure that accompanies the players trying to figure out exactly how Rob wants you to use this system. One of the interesting facets about Markham is that he is often loaded with interesting design theories that don't seem to get more initial development than a quick Test Bite from his Seaman-Mulvihill Playtester Squadron. Rob had actually tinkered with using a Chit Randomizer system for our lamentable 1862 effort of several years back. I quickly dissuaded him from this radical idea; should have kept my mouth shut. Now, after watching design developments over the past year or so, Rob has resurrected it. But like so many items raised from the dead, it tends to lurch around the lot in rather zombie-like fashion. Much has been said recently about this use of "chits" to randomize the play sequence, a dialogue started by the success of Eric Smith's Across 5 Aprils, which uses one of the weirder methodologies to produce a great "game" but a somewhat skewed historical effect. Several other games have tried Sequence randomizing with markers with little success and much vitriolic commentary from the Control Freak Peanut Gallery, who find it most "unrealistic". I suppose having to keep all of your army in place as if they were glued to stands while your opponent shuffles the entire deck in front of your eyes is the height of realism, but discussing such effects is like arguing religion with Hare Krishnites. The main problem with public acceptance is (a) new ideas rarely get accepted right off the bat; and (b) no one has yet plumbed the depths of subtlety to which chit-randomizing can succeed. And believe me, there is far more here than has greeted the eye to date. Essentially, the counter-mix provides Chits that are color-coded to the player and which say "Move" on one side and "Fire" on the other. When one is drawn, the player whose color it is may Move or Fire (and Melee) with any one command of his choice. That's about all the rules tell you. What they do NOT tell you is: How many chits you use in a given scenario. This is an issue, because Although it is (somewhat) clear that once a unit has "Moved" it may not move again, it is not stated whether that unit can Fire when another chit is picked. This is not an unimportant consideration. What it does produce, in conjunction with the Command/Orders system, is a more interesting use of the latter … mostly because units cannot immediately finish what they have started. As an example, a "brigade" of heavy cavalry charges across an open field, moving adjacent to enemy pikemen who are under, say, a Stand Order. (They should have spotted the cavalry "coming" and changed to Retreat beforehand, but let's assume such maneuver failed.) The cavalry, having moved, can do nothing else that phase. They have to wait - I think, and this is why the above two points are important - for the next turn to actually resolve the charge and hope that the player with the pike doesn't change his Command to Retreat. In terms of play, this all raises interesting possibilities, but it does so in such a herky-jerky fashion that it seems far more "gamey" than is warranted. And it is all vitiated by not knowing exactly what you can do with those chits. Need I mention, yet again, that that self-same Command system is still almost completely anachronistic to both the era and the level of command simulated by the system, as well as being fully capable of producing some truly off-the-wall effects because the individual commands are so inflexible. There are still too many Commands - four would suffice where Rob gives us six - and they're still far too dogmatic. It's is if each group of troops was lead by a robot programmed to do only certain things; there is not even a nod to lower-level command, which is really the level at which the game is functioning. What I did was to come up with a few house rules - I used a number of chits equal to the number of leaders +1, I said a unit could Move and Fire, but not both, by assigning two of the chits to that command, and I added a few rules about moving commands that didn't get to use a chit - and applied them to the battles of Tippermuir and Dunbar. One of the pluses of R&R III is that the battles are actually interesting to play, the lack of which interest was a drawback of some of the previous volumes. This may have been more a nod to the tension value of the randomized sequence than anything else, but I found both battles (the box also includes Preston and Worcester) good, relatively quick fun … if not overly incisive in terms of delving into what ECW tactics were all about. The R&R system still retains some remarkably goofy stuff, though. Rob gives his musketeers a range of 400-450 yards, and, at 400 yards, they are actually one-half as deadly as a cannon! Never mind that the effective range of an ECW flintlock was about 75 yards, that at 150 yards the ball lost most of its penetrating capability, and that at 300+ yards not only were the chances of a musketeer hitting anything at Lottery Level, but even if you were unfortunate enough to get hit the ball most likely simply bounced off your body. Yet 75 or so musketeer skirmishers firing at 400+ yards have about a 20% chance of Disrupting a large body of infantry! Some fine tuning - and a trip to RealityWorld - is in dire need here. Graphically, the game looks a great deal like the previous members of the series. Beth Queman's counters are fairly colorful but a mite too "dainty" for me. And do we have to see the same icon for each leader? (At least they retired Montrose.) The maps - there is actually only one map sheet, as each game uses a 17" x 22" mapfield and the sheet is backprinted - use off-reds and pastel green to such an extent you'd think they were done by a deeply depressed Marc Chagal rather than the talented Joe Youst. The boxcover has an interesting display of three Ospreyites, one of whom looks like he wandered in from Attack of the Killer Dwarves… or Grumpy Goes to War. Ultimately, R&R III is a recommended purchase for those of you who fondly remember PRESTAGS, are looking for a step up from those in terms of state-of-art and surface historicity, become nauseous when attempting a run-through of such as The Old Bag Quad but who have little time or taste for the demands of GMT's GBH series. Eventually - and if Rob doesn't run out of battles - he might actually get the entire system into working order. CAPSULE COMMENTS: Graphic Presentation: Very good, with some reservations about map color choice. Playability: Very accessible; randomized sequence needs some house rule clarification Replayability: High; battles are rather interesting and randomized sequence eliminates the "oh, this again" syndrome. Creativity: Typical Markham: interesting ideas that seem slightly off-key and under-baked. Historicity: Much surface, little insight. Acceptable, given complexity level. Comparisons: The Markham/R&R system is the best of the "simple" pre-modern games, such as The Old Bag Quad or PRESTAGS. It also contains enough color and detail to raise it above such as Men-at-Arms. Overall: Fun, marred by unnecessary holes and questions. They are, though, "games" and, like a movie, not to to be taken overly seriously. Once again, Damned with Faint Praise. from 3W Games One 22" x 33" mapsheet; 400 counters; Rules Book; Action Chart; boxed. From 3W, POB 155, Cambria CA 93428. $30. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. II # 11 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com