You see, the problem was that I was bored. After 30+ years of wargaming, I just wasn't getting any charge out of the rule systems anymore. They were all so, well, inevitable. I still enjoyed the research and painting the toys, but playing the games was a drag. Then along comes Bob Jones with his Piquet thing and WOW!!!, it was fun again! There was suspense, excitement, surprise, chaos, all the things I was missing in gaming. But perhaps the best thing was that it was an exciting new design perspective.
Bob's concept is exciting in the flexibility it gives to the designer to take different approaches while maintaining the Piquet philosophy. As a result I have developed numerous rule sets, each a little different, just to see what would happen. One of these, a very tactical Napoleonic set, was published by Bob as CdePK. Several others I have used at various conventions. The set that follows in this issue of MWAN is one of those. It's called Piquet Regimental, because it uses Piquet concepts and has the regiment as the basic playing piece while you may not like the rules, you at least can't complain about the title being misleading!
There were several motivations for this game. Duke Seifried and I have for some time been working on a regimental concept for Napoleonic gaming. We both had reached the conclusion that brigades were too big a playing piece that sacrificed the romance of the regimental histories and traditions; and that battalions as used in Empire was just too complicated because you inevitably drug too much petty, tactical detail into the game. Our solution was to do two games - a really tactical game (like CdePK), and a regimental based game that allowed a good corps sized action to be played with 2 or 3 guys to a side.
Another motivation arose out of one of the Piquet internet flame wars, ooops, I mean discussions! Somewhere in one of those interminable exchanges I was ballyhooing the flexibility of the Piquet approach and it occurred to me that Piquet could provide the basis for a truly simultaneous movement game. This method of game sequence has been popular for a long time, but always had the problem that in the real world nothing is really simultaneous, something always happens first, or last, and only rarely at the same time. Trying to work this fact into a wargame sequence presented great problems that were met with many ingenious and occasionally weird mechanics, Usually these included a fixed sequence of steps to be executed during each turn of the game. This was one of the things that to me produced the inevitability and lack of suspense that was driving me nuts with gaming. I thought I saw an opportunity to develop what should probably be called a continuous play game because there is no real break in the action, no fixed sequence of turn phases - and as it turned out, no predefined interval to go to the j ohn either!
So with the help of Duke, Roger Gallagher with whom I have been gaming for decades, and Larry Zalewski, my stepson, the result of all this is Piquet Regimental. It is short in length, it plays quickly, is suspenseful and exciting. And it is fun!
While the focus of the game is Napoleonic, the straightforwardness of the approach will allow you too modify it for any horse and musket period. Likewise the scales used in the game could easily be modified to use physically smaller regimental formations in order to gain more geography on the tabletop. The scales defined in the game were selected for their aesthetic values (it had to meet Duke's criteria of "looking like what it was supposed to be") and for ease of memorization, thus the Engagement range for heavy artillery, assumed to be twelve pounders, is 12".
I hope that you may get some interesting ideas that may help your own designs and that you might even give the game a try! I would be interested in your experiences and suggestions. You can reach me through the Piquet group on Yahoo! Groups.
Acknowledgements
Piquet is used with the permission of Piquet Incorporated. Piquet Regimental is being published by MWAN with the permission of the author who retains full copyright to the work. MWAN readers may reproduce the text of the rules for personal use but may not redistribute the material without prior consent of the author.
Piquet Regimental Horse and Musket Period
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© Copyright 2002 Hal Thinglum
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