The English Civil War has always fascinated me. Over the years, I have studied it, wargamed it, reenacted and latterly designed figures for it. During this time, I have written three sets of ECW wargames rules. Why three? Surely one is enough for any sane man? What I want to do in this piece is to describe why I have done this and to look at the different design philosophies that I employed. FORLORN HOPE THE BIG BATTLES! When I started wargaming, everyone, but everyone used 25mm, and there seemed a universal acceptance across different rules and periods that one figure represented twenty men. The rules were all hardware driven. That is, you defined units in great detail right down to the colour of their issue underwear. The piles were also casualty driven, in that a unit could expect to have great lumps torn out of it, and the rate at which damage was inflicted/received was the main decider on the events of the action. The calculation that decided this damage compared things like armour weight, the type of fire being used, training, weapon handling skills and as many other tweaks as the designer could throw in to make their rules seem more 'accurate' and 'authentic'. The end results were: Big units. Especially foot regiments that could be 50 or 60 figures in strength. These were incredibly clumsy things to move and took up a lot of table space. Small Battles - The size of the units and the complexity of the rules meant that you were really limited to small games with three or four regiments a side - you needed a lot of figures and lot of room to do something the size of even a medium sized engagement. Slow Games - The brain numbing calculation of cross referencing armour thickness against heavy/medium/light small arms firing by rotation/salvee with a weapons skill of 2/3/4.5 on a moderately warm/hot day in September/October etc. took forever. And......Games that just did not seem right. ECW wargares always seemed to consist of getting your pikes careering into his shot. Pike formations were always far too deep. Casualty rates were HUGE compared to historical rates. The scale of action seemed wrong. Why should a General be telling artillerymen which ammunition to shoot or musketeers which firing to use? The emphasis on hardware-driven mechanics meant that the actions seemed to hinge around physical rather than morale based aspects. Contemporary battle accounts never told of great victories won because the other's better class of armour overcame one side's resolute status! So, 'Forlorn Hope' came into being. Working with Ben Wilkins, we set about having a go at the ECW from a different approach. We were very happy with the end results, and judging by the number of reprints the first and second edition went through so were many others. Why is Forlorn Hope different? A figure scale of 1:33 and recognition that historical units were a great deal smaller than their nominal strength means that you can play BIG battles with these. They are truly Big Battle rules as opposed to ones coping with a few regiments a side. The mechanisms are quick. The heart of the system is a series of simple morale checks that, and after a couple of games, players hardly need to look at the charts.  The definitions are simple. I can't tell you whether a soldier from the Oxford Army of 1643 had more or less muscle tone than his equivalent in Essex's army. In fact, no one can, so why bother? All definitions in Forlorn Hope are very simple. For example, Foot can be Raw, Trained or Veteran and armour is irrelevant. A regiment/battalion of Foot is treated as a SINGLE unit. Its battlefield performance depends upon its ratio of Musket to Pike. Engagements are treated as being with the whole formation, so none of this complex and totally historically dubious 'interplay of pike and shot'. No irrelevant clutter. Regimental officers are treated as being clever enough to decide on small level tactics such as firings. No need to worry about whether a unit has Swedish feathers or musket rests. In a battle the size of Marston Moor these things are just irrelevant. Casualty rates are comparatively small - until a unit runs away.... So having got the mechanisms to where we wanted them, the next job was the army lists. It appears that every other set of ECW rules seems to think that the entire period 1642 -1660, fought across the entire British Isles by very different forces can be summed up by just five sets of army lists; Early Parliament, Royalist, New Model Army, Scots Covenarters and Scots Royalists. We begged to differ. There were huge differences between die Oxford Army of Edgehill and Naseby, never mind between tire armies of Hopton and Newcastle. Not every Royalist cavalryman charged round the field like a madman, and not every Roundhead horsemen had forgotten how to gallop! From the start, our army lists sought to highlight the difference in the various armies, and to try and dispel the myths that had grown around the combatants. Cornish Pikemen do not leap buildings with a single bound, nor do Irish Foot carry a small armoury round with them. Accurate, well-considered lists were therefore air integral part of Forlorn Hope from the start. Allied to this was our wish to get away from a 'Points' system. The ECW was not 'balanced'. There were no auditors checking off each side's forces to make sure that neither had cheated. As a field commander you certainly could not afford to discard troops because they did not fit with your ideal of what an anny should consist of. You fought with what you were given. We devised a system whereby each side could throw dice to establish the composition and nature of their army. In all probability you should get a fair reflection of what your historical counterpart had to hand - but we all know the cruel tricks that dice can play on you... This creates a whole new challenging dimension to die game, and breaks away from the old, sterile 1500 points a side game. There is a points system if you really MUST have one, but once you have tried the alternative you won't want to go back. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST COUNTRY The Little Skirmishes I was invited to play an ECW skirmish game at the local club. In three hours we played four turns. The rules were hideously complex, the figures ridiculously over-defined - and the mechanics of the game sluggish. Once again die curse of 'The Rule Writer Who Knows Too Much' came into play. It may seem like a good exhibition of period 'knowledge' to have different ranges aid hit effects for a matchlock, flintlock and wheellock musket, but in practice they are all actually the same. It's only the firing mechanism that is different. Such irrelevancies were claimed to add period 'flavour' - all they did was slow the game down and had no real historical validity. I had been staging and playing western gunfights games for many years with the Late, Great, Ian Beck and set about taking apart our stripped-down fast play rules and rebuilding them for the ECW. With the addition of morale checks and some simple period specific rules, Once Upon A Time In The West Country were born. From the start they played really well, with one person being able to manage a force of 12 figures quite comfortably. If you want a rip-snorting, bodice-ripping and hugely entertaining game, that doesn't tax the brain cells and can still be understood after the fifth pint of beer then these are for you. I used figures from my 25mm Forlorn Hope army for these skirmishes. Since my conversion to the One True Path of 6mm, my ECW skirmish force remains as the only 25mms that I will give house room to. The main points of these mules are: Fun. Some of my most enjoyable ECW games have been played with these rules, as the unexpected will always happen. The murderous musketeer being savaged by a herd of sheep, or the officer of Horse of being beaten up by a Milkmaid with Attitude! Easy to set up. You can use your existing figures and terrain, although we eventually built more specialized forces and buildings. Flexible. They mechanics are very simple but the addition of two rules - the 50% throw and the infamous Improbable Action Attempt, they can and do cope with the most ridiculous situations. And for all their simplicity, they give reasonably historical results. FILE LEADER! :For the Bits Inbetween So why would anyone in their right minds write THREE sets of rules for the same period? Actually, I've probably answered that in the first part of the question, but here's my excuse for number three.. Forlorn Hope allows you to fight battles between large forces historically numbering in the thousands. The tactical unit is a regiment/battalia of say 500-800 men. At the other end of the scale there is OUATUIWC, where one figure represents one man. Great for doing skirmishes involving up to fifty a side. But there were a large number of actions fought that neither set could accommodate. For example the actions at Powick Bridge and Chalgrove Field. Both are famous in their own right, but the tactical unit in both cases was the Troop of Horse/Dragoons or Company of Foot. Too small for FH and too big for OUATITWC And do, File Leader! Cane into being... Unlike my two previous sets, they were not written as a reaction to the failings of other sets. I was trying to write a set for a scale of action that had been completely ignored. Following my usual aversion to making hardware the driving mechanism of the rules, I decided to keep this side very simple indeed. The two main factors in FL are unit morale, and importantly the influence, or lack of it, of the officers. In effect, the units carrot do anything unless there is an officer able to direct them. To liven this up, I took the view that individual officers, were always liable to a myriad of external influences that could affect their performance. These might range from the good, such as performing an heroic act in front of their command thus raising their personal performance in figures, to tire bad, such as standing in front of a roundshot as it hurtled toward them. In our first play test, one of the players managed to get two commands wiped out under him, with his personal figure being tine only survivor in both cases. The officer in question emerged unscathed and with his personal reputation enhanced. I knew we were on to something! File Leader! rules can be sunuued up as follows: A figure scale with 25mm or 15mm of approximately one figure = ten men. A Company of Foot will contain six figures, a Troop of Horse three. FAST play. A passion of mine. Fun. Another passion of mine. You need an advanced sense of the absurd to survive in games of FL. As one long-time player has put it, you spend time making plans up that you know will never actually work! I can remember one gainer setting up a huge cavalry force ready to sweep down on to his opponents, only to have all three of his officers incapacitated in' the same move, rendering them, and all their command, useless. Easy to set up. You can use your existing figures and terrain. Figures are placed on movement trays. You can use 25mm, 15111111 and especially 6mm. The sensible tatter action means that you can actually fight games at 1:1 figure scale Never a dull moment. The officer casualties and incidents table sees to that.  Strangely enough they also give surprisingly good historical results. You soon see why at this scale of operation, the ECW was a war fought by Horse and Musketeers. Dragoons also cone into their own, and pikemen are inevitably seen heading for the nearest pub. So now you know why I have wirtten three sets of rules for the sane period. Although it was never my intention at the outset, there is enough continuity between them in terms of definitions and game philosophy for Partizan Press (the publishers), to market them as a games 'system'. You can certainly use the same figures for all three games. Both FL and OUATITWC have spawned variants for other periods, but ny first choice in all is for the English Civil War. All three piles are available from Caliver Books, and I hope shortly from myself. There is a nascent discussion group for the system on Yahoo e-groups, http://groups.yahoo.con/group/forlornhope and I would prefer any queries about the rules or design philosophy posted there. If you have a question, chances are that others will too, and a public posting means that I need theoretically answer it only once. Back to MWAN #119 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2002 Hal Thinglum 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