Caper Conflicts

Sudan Battlegame 1880s-1890s

reviewed by Bob Beattie

A Miniature, Tabletop, Tactical Wargame Designed for Fast Action, Ease of Play (Victoria's Little Wars) Egypt & the Sudan - 1880s thru 1890s by John Cape, Caper Conflicts, 1990,46 pages, $12.00 (available from Pen- dragon Miniatures, 1549 Marview Drive, Westlake, OH 44145).

The title pretty much tells it all in so far as what the rules are to cover. There are some good points and some negative ones to be made.

The rules cover a very small geographical and small temporal area and thus may be very specific. The game calls for a small number of small units. A game may be played with 10-12 Europeans, the same number of allied trained natives, and 30-40 native peoples. Action is determined by a die roll - even roll-imperialists take an action, odd roll-native peoples do so.

Movement is by die roll, natives use 1 0-sided, others use 6. The number of dice to roll depends on the type of actions taken, for example, British movingwith no fire throw 3 dice, move and fire once - throw 2 dice. One of the very innovative aspects is a movement template. Distance is measured from the leader/officer of a unit to a new position; the officer is placed at the new position; the unit template placed on the table with the officer in the front center; and then the rest of the figures are placed within the template. Melee is cleverly handled by having each engaged figure roll a die to achieve a certain number; if both achieve the number, both are killed. Survivors can "pile-on" against inferior numbered opponents. All-in-all there are many very interesting innovations which can be applied to other rule systems or othertheaters of action. These are the type of rules you might want to try out for par- ticular historical episodes for which you did not want to acquire large numbers of figures.

One drawback, however, is that these rules cost $12.00. I feel the price is a bit steep for 45 pages of offset printing with no photographs. This is half the price of Tactica which has glossy pages and many color photos. There are too many typos, too, which leads one to worry about the accuracy of the total project. It is distracting to keep reading "route" for "rout". The text seems to be computer generated so spell checking should be easy. I also do not believe that these rules could be used by someone who is a battlegame beginner as the author suggests. There is hardly enough background information to start from scratch.

The Reviewing Stand

Back to Table of Contents -- Courier #55
To Courier List of Issues
To MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1991 by The Courier Publishing Company.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com