These TYW/ECW rules are interesting. They arrived in a black folder, unbound, with the pages printed on a mere 7 pages of heavy stock. I immediatley thought, "Where are the rules?" being used to large 25-45 pages of text. Upon looking through the pages, I was pleasantly surprised to find a concise, well-written and very workable rules system for the early gunpowder period of European history.

The rules reminded me a bit of DBA in so far as they are played with a fixed number of units; 24 units of troops, two of artillery and one general. The author claims that armies of 125 figures are usual, and the games run about two hours in length. The game is broken down into four 50-year periods, reflecting the differing ratios of pikemen to musketeers and the changing role of infantry.

Basing is 1 1/2" for 15mm and 3" for 25mm, with varying numbers of figures per base. The bases also contain different troops mixed together.

The sequence of play is straight forward: Rally/Attempt to Charge/Morale/Artillery fire/Musket fire/Move/Melee/Followup/Phase winner determination. Like ARMATI, the phasing player decides in which direction the melee will flow.

The main determinant of victory is which side becomes demoralized first. This determination is done by way of a "morale clock", which each side has. You start out with a morale of 9, but for each turn you are calculated to have lost, you lose one point of morale. Individual units also become demoralized because of losses, leadership problems and poor army morale. Once the army morale reaches four, 1/4 of the army becomes further demoralized. Once a unit has taken a certain number of demoraliztion markers, it is destroyed.

You can attempt to restore up to three points of your lost morale by sacrificing your CiC! A rather drastic move which might or might not work. . .an interesting rule.

Victory goes to the player who has the most points at game's end, which is reached as soon as one side's morale clock reaches zero.

As a final touch, there are two pages of examples of play, diagrams, combat, move and fire tables as well as simplified army lists with national characteristics and various non-European enemies including Aztecs, Japanese and Ming Chinese! All in all, a nice job and an affordable set at $8.95 from Chipco, 616 Spar Drive, Redwood City, CA 94065. - T.L. GORE.

This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com