I don't know how many American wargamers out there are familiar with the weirdly-named Peter Pig miniatures company out of England but they have a wide range of 15nun miniature ranges plus many sets of rather novel rules for some of these ranges. Any 15mm fan should sample Peter Pig's figures and you can easily do so by phoning Brookhurst Hobbies in California - that place gives excellent mail order service! It is my humble opinion that Peter Pig stuff is about my favorite 15s on the market.
This summer at Historicon I purchased a set of rules from the Brookhurst booth (incidently manned by two very nice gentlemen whose names I do not know) called Ak 47 Republic. These axe rules for fighting African third world wars from the 1960s to 1990s. And anyone who follows either current African news ox reads up on recent African history can find more wars than you can shake a stick at.
Now these rules give tactical battles that are fast and furious without a lot of the usual micro-armor penetration tables and vehicle charts times a zillion. It definitely leans toward the philosophy - it's a game! But though quite short the rules work very well. We learned them quickly and actually made just a few adjustments to what was there (don't most wargamers?).
There is command control but it is handled very simply by defining how spread out your unit can be depending whether it is pro/regular/militia. The net effect is that militia bunch together to make easier targets.
Fixing of all weapons is done on one basic chart and only 6 sided dice are used. Don't get turned off by simplicity thought - it works! Tanks are harder to knock out, long range firing isn't so good, and cover makes a difference as does unit quality. Results are pinned or killed. Unlike some games, you can get pinned in this one over and over with no resulting kill. I actually like that.
Morale is clever and basically a unit will fight until it fails 3 morale tests then it is removed.
Again fast and furious. But morale grades make a difference.
There are rules for RPGS, recoilless rifles, mortars, and air strikes. We have played several games now and everyone likes it a lot! And we aren't the easiest crowd to please either!
BUT what makes this rules set so different is all of the rules setting up the game itself - you pick a political/religious/government faction and roll up everything from a name to a flag prior to even selecting troops. You then buy your forces from limits and lists given. Militia are cheaper than pros and each faction has limits as to what it can buy.
Then you also spend points on Political warfare and this can be crucial. It can have a huge effect on the game. More on this later.
You divide up your forces into exactly 5 units and set them out next to the enemy 5 units - no secrets here. Then each side - attacker and defender - rolls dice to see who shows up at the beginning of the battle. Yeah, this messes with the best laid plans, gentlemen Those units that don't come on must then be rolled for individually after turn 4 and there is no guarantee they will ever show up (as I know by bitter experience)!
Once the fighting starts the defender rolls a D6 each turn and keeps track of the cumulative score - when the total reaches 33 the game is over and victory is assessed. This means it could last from 33 to 6 turns so that puts pressure on the attacker to attack!
As for reinforcements, the attacker units can come in on any corner of the battlefield and the defender units can come in on any middle of a board edge so the front is fluid - real fluid! The best way to explain Political Warfare is to show how it worked in our most recent game. Three of us were Dictatorship forces and three more were a rebel religious movement. The religious fanatics spent a lot more on political points besides getting lots of cheap militia infantry. Those political points helped them by making one of their units go up from regular to pro (a small armored unit) and forcing us to dice for desertion for one of our bigger units. We promptly rolled like crap and most of our infantry in that unit and its only armored car all deserted the cause - thus were removed immediately from the game.
Then to top it all off - the attackers rolled for their units and got 4 of 5 on the board immediately. We, the ill-starred defenders. rolled again like crap and got I unit to defend the whole table. Battles go fast and will seldom be the same even if you do the same factions all over again. Now I do plan on setting up longer bigger drawn out battles such as a long fight for a major city on occasion and even then I will use the tactical rules but I find these rules to be refreshing in their new concepts yet simple to use and would be most convention friendly. In fact, I plan on refereeing a game at next years Historicon if all works out.
Finally let me also say the Peter Pig African wars range is just fantastic with lots of differently garbed infantry from half-naked militia riflemen to beret-doffed professional looking chaps (maybe Belgian paratroops or French Foreign Legion?). They have excellent tanks that are easy to put together and they have other vehicles even the famous Toyota trucks so often used in Africa as weapon platforms. They have character packs for leaders like a fat bernedaled dictator, a religious holy man, and a hardbitten mercenary leader. They even have a pack of boy soldiers - since so many African factions regularly deploy children as young as 11 to 15 on the battlefield. More stuff is being made all the time.
Let so many people rave over Wargames Foundry 25mm figures (excellent but pricy) - I am a devoted disciple of Peter Pig.
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© Copyright 1997 Hal Thinglum
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