Played two solitaire games of Flowers of the Forest today. Quite interesting. Definitely liked the feel of not being able to control the armies except for the battel actually under my command. In both games the Scots were victorious! Basic reason was the same: the Admiral's entire battel turned tail and ran at the onset of the pikes! In the first game, Howard joined them in rout. For the Scots, Huntly and Argyle bit the big one, but the King then routed Surrey with another miracle pike fright roll to win going away. In the second game, the English approach stayed better organised (Constable decided to stop during the first game and never moved after turn one!). Home, against my orders by the way, attacked the Admiral and scared them from the field. Then Home and Huntley took to celebrating and never got moving again. Fortunately, Howard, on the now isolated English left flank, could also never get moving. Meanwhile, Stanley pressed on towards the Scots left held by Argyle, while Surrey advanced toward the Scots left centre between the King and Argyle. As the game neared its end, Stanley slammed Argyle, who decided to wait for him quietly, and Surrey hit the King's right. It was a near run thing, as they say. Argyle broke and the King suffered heavy losses in both his centre and right columns. The final attacks actually killed the king himself. But the morale rolls for both the right and centre broke no units and so the Scots won by points, just barely. Failure of the morale rolls (both with hefty modifiers) for the King's columns would have routed that unit and given the game to the English. Nicely done. After the Admiral routed right off the bat again, I almost restarted, but decided to see if the English could overcome that blow. Indeed they could have. In fact, if Dacre's Moss troopers hadn't decided not to charge the flank of a Scots unit (first Errol and then the King) on two separate occasions, things might have been quite different. Set up is a bit of a pain because of the need to separate all the bands, but play itself is quite fast, once you get the hang of things. Just a couple of questions. the errata about shot combat implied that both sides got to shoot when they first engage. But as I read the rules, there is no way any bow-armed units can both move and fire in the same turn. Is that correct or do attacking bow boys get a shot on the turn they enter the melee? Second, does the hexside of a hex containing part of a unit block LOS down its length (the traditional bugaboo). In particular, if two two-hex units are each in the other's extreme front hex on opposite flanks (so that say the right flank of my unit is adjacent to the enemy's left flank but my left flank is not adjacent to that enemy unit) can my left flank column fire down the hex spine of the hex containing my right flank to hit the enemy unit? (Did that make sense?) Any chance of getting you to e-mail me the rules to your Quatre Bras game? Given what you have done with Flodden I am most interested to see your approach to Napoleonics, especially as I have just finished reading Brent Nosworthy's interesting book on tactics. By the way, I hope to get your copy of TMAG into the mail this weekend, if the snow and ice here in DC allow me to get to the Post Office without high risk of disaster. Back to Perfidious Albion #94 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. 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