At a recent HMGS convention, I picked up a small rules booklet by a fellow named Chris Engle. Chris is the creator of the ‘Matrix Game’, a talky-type of table-top game which I never fully understood. At one time, Chris had a subscription to the REVIEW, but chose not to renew… perhaps he was too busy with his Matrix Game. There’s a Matrix Game site on MAGWEB, and, on occasion, I try to read about what’s going on, the concept still escapes me. The booklet I bought was titled FUSILIER a diceless battle for the horse and musket era. For brevity, I’ll refer to it as Chris’ Fusilier (CF). CF was published in 1997, evidently with Chris’ own money… It’s got 24 pages in it, with a lot of hand-drawn sketches as illustrations. In the introduction, the author states: In most games, it is pretty obvious who is going to win a fight before the first die is rolled. If the situation is right, even the weakest man can beat Goliath. Since this is so, why not make a list of those critical situations and use that to figure out who wins a fight without rolling a die. I began experimenting and found it works! Not only that, but it produces a very fun game that has all the subtleties of chess while looking as pretty as a wargame. What Chris was looking for was a simple set of rules which could be used with a campaign effort that he’d present at a convention. He hoped to play a small battle in five minutes, and a large one in fifteen to twenty minutes. He found that the fastest game he could gin up, using dice and charts, took at least a half-hour. Too long. CF was the result. The scale was indeterminate… Infantry could advance a distance of 1-stand length, cavalry could advance 2-stand lengths. Muskets fired for 3 stand lengths, artillery for 4 stand lengths. Note that Chris didn’t want the table to be cluttered with rulers or dice. The length of a stand was the governing factor for fire and movement. At first glance, CF looks like a DBA clone… a single stand is a combat element, stands are combined in groups for movement, and a force consists of 10 to 20 elements. But the system it uses is very distinct from DBA and its clones. Since CF is oriented toward the horse and musket period, it lists combat outcomes for such troop types as artillery, arquebusiers, bows, cavalry, knights, pike, swordsmen (called blades), and so on. Even elephants. And the rules booklet contains a huge chart in which Chris has listed all of the possible pair-ups of which he could think between the various troop types. For example, Listing #16 states: “All types of troops defeat exhausted troops in frontal attacks”, while Listing #40 states: "Pikes defeat knights, cavalry and dragoons in frontal attacks," and Listing #15 states: "Infantry defending the edge of a terrain feature can not be defeated in frontal attacks”" The thought is that you simply go down the list until you come to the appropriate situation, read off the result, and that’s it. There are 48 listings, 48 troop match-ups. They specifically describe which units in which situations can be defeated, and which cannot be defeated. A defeated stand will reverse facing and retreat 1 or 2 stand lengths, depending upon the weight of the troops. If the defending stand cannot be defeated (according to the list), the two engaged stands sit there in inconclusive combat, and they continue to face each other, until one decides to pull back. CF contains optional rules for this inconclusive situation… the booklet suggests that a stand that has engaged in 3 inconclusive combats will be defeated, and fall back. Another suggested rule is to term a stand ‘exhausted’ after a combat… then, if the opponent can immediately attack it again, Listing #16, which I quoted above, will apply and the exhausted stand will be defeated. I thought that CF’s contents were well thought out, and I devised a variation of the system for the American Revolutionary War using my 30mm troops, which are mounted on stands measuring 2-inches by 2-inches. Placing the game in the ARW era simplifies the listings… all I needed to list were situations for four types of troops: infantry, skirmishers, artillery and cavalry. Of course, I went further than necessary… My motto is "Even if it isn’t broken, fix it anyway!" One thing I wanted to change was the result of an inconclusive combat. I couldn’t see two stands engaging in combat, continually facing each other, with no effect on their fighting capabilities. And so my listings always contained some sort of negative effect on a defending stand, regardless of the type of attacking stand... stands did not just face each other and remain unaffected. This, however, required a wee bit of paperwork. With only 7 to 10 stands per force, I thought this was quite palatable, and, for each stand, the players had to track two parameters. Exhaustion Level (EL). Each stand had 6 ELs, and when they were all crossed out, the stand was removed. Once lost, an EL could not be recovered. Disorder Level (DL). This was a translation of CF’s inconclusive combat. Here, the combat listing required that a defending stand be given a casualty figure. There was no limit to the number of casualty figures a stand could tote around, but when it had 2 or more casualty figures on it, it was defined to be ‘disordered’, and would be instantly defeated if attacked again. In effect, this meant that, regardless of the combat situation, there would always be an impact on the defending stand. In implementing the above, I wanted to do away with the non-sensical DBA/DBM approach of having a stand engaging in combat over and over and over again, with no diminution of its fighting abilities. And so, in the Simon listings, something ‘bad’ always happened to a defending stand, regardless of the type of attack. Attacks In accordance with these guidelines, I defined three types of attacks: First, those that would defeat the opposing stand and force it back. Keep in mind that all combat is stand-on-stand. When defeated, the defending stand would fall back 5 inches, lose 1 EL, and receive a casualty figure. Second, attacks that would exhaust the opponent. Here, the defending stand would hold position, but it would lose 1 EL. Third, attacks that would cause an opponent to become disordered. The defending stand would hold position, but receive a casualty figure, indicating disorder. And accumulation of 3 casualty figures resulted in another EL being lost. All the above sounds good, but did it really work out on the ping pong table? Alas! I have to admit the answer was “No!”. I set up an ARW game at a PW meeting, a British attack on an American-held position. Each side had 4 brigades of around 9 stands each… and I had mandated that records were to be kept for every stand in every brigade. By the end of the third bound, the major faults in my system presented themselves rather clearly. First, I defined a unit, call it a brigade, as having 7 to 10 stands, average of around 9. Each stand had to have a record, first, of its Exhaustion Levels, and second, of its Disorder Levels. Way, way too much bookkeeping. Especially so when, due to the combat procedures, the brigade stands each went their own way as they charged forward and then fell back in the various combat phases. Stands from different brigades were intermingled and it was torture to sort out the units. For example, two of the attacking American brigades were composed of 8 stands each. By the time the fourth bound came, this total of 16 stands was so intermixed and out of position and intermingled that it became almost impossible to tell which stand belonged to which brigade. Second, and most important, there were catcalls about how I had graded the effect on a unit as the result of combat. I had a complete page of listings of unit-on-unit combats (infantry vs infantry in cover, cavalry vs infantry, infantry vs artillery, etc.) and their results. But my listings were, in some cases, off. For example, in some instances, I had listed the results of an attack on a unit in cover as being more horrendous than if it would have been if the unit had been in the open. In another instance, I permitted a weeny skirmish stand to hold its own when charged by cavalry. And so the Game Fell Flat on its Face In essence, I stretched the rules far beyond what Chris’ rulesbook called for. He specified that the procedures, as he had written them, could handle a quickie battle between two fairly small forces, each of 10 to 20 stands. In contrast, I had placed on the table, two sides, each with a total of around 36 to 40 stands, which produced chaos. And to rub salt in the wound, each of the stands on the field had its own data sheet, making the entire affair almost unmanageable. To my mind, I think the CF outline would, as the author initially indicated, prove effective for a low key, small scale (in terms of the number of stands involved) game, rather than the large scale, multi-player presentation that I had set out. A game in which the forces would consist of a couple of groups, or bands, of no more than 5 or 6 stands. But I would still like to see unit data being tracked. Not, as in the game I presented, of each separate stand having a data sheet, but a single data sheet for each multi-stand unit, on which would be recorded the group’s Exhaustion Levels, and Disorder Levels. The most interesting part of the procedures, to me, is the diceless combat determination. On the unit-versus-unit listing, you’d instantly know beforehand what the effect of your attack would be, and so you could decide, on the spot, to proceed or not. Back to PW Review December 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon 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