Fred Haub set up two battles while we were visiting Bob Hurst’s house. One for the Seven Years War era, one for the Franco-Prussian War. The rules were derived from a number of concepts first created by Brian Dewitt, and then much worked over by Fred.
The heart of the gaming procedures for both games lies in a deck of cards. There are some 30 cards in the deck, a number of them labeled ‘Pre-emptive’ (PE) actions and the rest plain old ‘Reactions’ (R). These are phased into the sequence by permitting the participants to play their cards during the half-bound:
- First, Side A draws 6 cards. He can hold a maximum of 9.
Second, Side B plays any and all of his PE cards as desired. These cards are annotated ‘Fire’, or ‘Maneuver’, or ‘Enemy unit test morale’ and so on. The cards are termed ‘pre-emptive’ since they are played before Side A moves out.
Third, Side A now moves and fires all of his units. This is a ‘freebee’ phase, since cards are not required.
Fourth, back to Side B, who now plays his R cards. With Side A having moved and fired in the third phase, Side B now can react by playing his own cards.
Fifth, all melee is resolved
On the sixth phase, the above phases are reversed… Side B now draws cards, and so on.
Note that this sequence permits Side A to move freely… his actions are sandwiched in between the restrictive card phases of Side B.
The first game, the SYW battle, was sort of test bed for the rules. It turned out that there were far too few PE cards, hence most of the action centered on the R cards played after the opposition moved and fired.
There are other cards in the deck, for example, some annotated: “Enemy unit cannot fire”, or “Morale test for enemy unit”. These cards may be played anytime during the game, regardless of the phase.
Digression
Brian Dewitt’s idea of the pre-emptive and reactive cards popped up some time ago. Brian derived rules sets for the ACW, for the Marlboroughian era, and for ancients.
For the most part, the card decks for our two games, SYW and Franco-Prussian, mirrored each other… there really wasn’t too much difference between them. It reminded me of the “one size fits all” card decks of the PIQUET series of games. PIQUET claims to cover all periods, all eras, with the same basic card-governed sequence… in each separate game the participants are each given around 30 cards. It’s hard to tell the difference in the decks between PIQUET’s ACW game and PIQUET’s Renaissance game and PIQUET’s Napoleonic game.
Each game uses the same dreaded ‘groping for dice’ system in firing and melee… first you grope for the 10-sided dice, then the 8-sided, then the 6-sided, and so on.
There are other “one size fits all” games… notably the DBA/DBM/DBR series. Here, the same PIP system of command is used, regardless of the era of interest, to move troops around the table. And the same firing system, and the same melee system.
Many people have attempted to expand the concepts used in FIRE AND FURY to other eras. The same holds true for ON TO RICHMOND. I have to give credit to the original authors of these two sets of rules… neither of them have attempted to foist a “one size fits all” on their audience.
And, hard to believe, but my own rules sets, in a sense, follow this trend… I become enamored of a certain ploy, a particular procedure, and I insert the same sub-system in a series of rules, whether it’s modern WW2, or Renaissance or science fiction. A current example of this is the Reaction Points ploy… read the recent REVIEWs (including this one), and you’ll see pages and pages devoted to Reaction Points.
End of digression
I was interested in comparing the capabilities of the different types of troops in our two games. In our SYW battle, for example, light troops were kind of wishy-washy. They could go into skirmish order, but in combat, they were overrun rather quickly by a formed unit. In contrast, in the Franco-Prussian battle, the light troops were true terrors. They ruled the woods. I tried to bring up the point of having a ‘formed unit’ traipsing around in the woods… once a ‘formed unit’ entered the woods… were they ‘formed’ anymore?… didn’t the woods automatically ‘dis-form’ them? I was ignored.
Fred had incorporated two different methods of combat resolution in the two games. The SYW battle used lots of 10-sided dice for firing and melee. Each stand tossed a 10-sided die, and depending upon the target, a toss of 1 or 2 or 3 was defined to be a hit, after which, the target took a morale test. The Franco-Prussian game used hit percentages, requiring the toss of percentage dice. Each man firing contributed 10 percent to the Probability of Hit (POH)… 6 men times 10 percent gave a percentage of 60 percent… a toss of 60 or under and the target took a hit.
Note that with 6 men tossing 6 dice in the SYW game, it was possible to come up with 6 hits on the target, while the same 6 men firing in the Franco-Prussian game could only come up with a single hit.
Melee resolution was the last phase of the half-bound. That’s when Bob and I discovered the ‘touching rule’. To assist in combat, a unit had to be directly in contact with the one leading the melee. At first, we were caught flat-footed, and failed to bring up side-by-side units, but we quickly caught on, and paired our advancing units together. Occasionally, we could play a card either in the pre-emption phase, or the reaction phase, to bring up paired units, but, for the most part, we relied on the phase during which we were permitted to move all our units.
One item I didn’t like in the SYW battle was that when a unit made contact with the enemy, it was immediately defined as being in contact, immediately in melee, and regardless of the phase, couldn’t be subsequently fired upon.
Note in the sequence listed on the first page, that melee resolution occurs on the fifth phase in the sequence… contact can be made in the second, third or fourth phases, and the “no firing” rule made the two opposing units ‘off limits’ for firing for an appreciable portion of the half-bound.
As I remember, this same type of rule was employed in the Napoleonic rules set COLUMN, LINE AND SQUARE (CLS). In the sequence of the bound, charges were declared first, followed by regular movement and firing. And so, units would charge out into contact, and then sit there for the remainder of the bound, immune to enemy fire, waiting until the phase for melee resolution occurred.
And the same sort of silliness occurs in IN THE GRAND MANNER (ITGM), the successor to CLS. Here, too, units charge out, bunk heads, and can do nothing, nor have anything done to them, until melee resolution occurs.
An interesting difference between the SYW and Franco-Prussian sets was the type of procedure for determining melee resolution.
Both sets had a base number for the involved unit… this was the number of stands engaged in the combat. And both sets had a list of modifiers to be applied in melee… elite units get +1, militia get -2, and so on. And both sets multiplied the base number by a 10-sided die roll to determine the outcome. The difference was how the modifiers were applied to the base number.
In the SYW set, the modifiers were applied to the die itself. Thus if 6 stands were in combat, and had a +1 because they were elite, the result would be:
- (Base of 6) times (Die roll plus +1 for eliteness)
In the Franco-Prussian set, the modifiers were applied to the base number, i.e., the number of engaged stands. Thus for the same 6 elite stands, we’d have
- (Base of 6 plus +1 for eliteness) times (Die roll)
Is there an appreciable difference between the two systems? In my own melee calculations, I use the second type formulation. Brian Dewitt opts for the first.
Dewitt evolved his method because in past games, we had huge modifiers to tack on to the base value. If, for any reason, in calculating the melee outcome the second way, the modifiers are so negative as to reduce the number in the first parenthesis to zero… then we’ve have a multiplier of zero… Brian didn’t like this.
And so, he decided to leave the base value alone, and modify the die roll. But even using the Dewitt method of calculation, you could still get into trouble with negative modifiers. Different strokes for different folks.
Let me sum up both of our games by saying that I like the use of pre-emption and reaction cards. Their use mirrors my own Reaction Point ploy in that it gives the participants a sort of out-of-sequence bonus to reply to the actions of the enemy, i.e., a ‘local reaction’ on the part of unit commanders when things get rough.
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© Copyright 2000 Wally Simon
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