The HMGS convention, COLD WARS, was held in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in mid-March. Attendance was over 1,000. Lots of space, lots of flea market tables, lots of dealers. I actually played a game or so, and sat down and observed a couple of others, and I noted that there seemed to be more naval games than I'd ever seen before. I sat in on NAPOLEONICS, A TO Z (NAZ), one of a series of A TO Z publications. A TO Z has put out a set on ship o' sail naval warfare, on ancients, and is currently working on an American Revlolution set. I've reported on their efforts before. NAZ is at the battalion level in 15mm. A battalion consists of 6 stands, each about an inch long. Musket range is 6 inches, and each stand tosses a 6-sided die… a result of a 6 causes one hit, and 3 casualties removes a stand. But the simple toss of a 6 is not sufficient, since it doesn't take into account the cover modifiers, unit status, etc. Firing, therefore, is a 2-step procedure. First toss your dice and look at the number of hits, i.e., 6's produced. Then go to another table, and toss another 6-sided die, this one modified by the appropriate parameters. The result will tell you if all of the initial 6's count or, if not, how many will actually register as as casualties. Each casualty was denoted by a little red block placed next to the target unit… this transformed the game into a Class B Abomination (casualty caps produce a Class A Abomination). Other little blocks of assorted colors denoted disorder, fatigue, etc. My Austrian brigade consisted of 4 infantry battalions, plus one battery. I was part of a larger force of Austrians attacking an intrenched French position on a ridge. When I moved my brigade, I was given 3 actions, each permitting a movement of 6 inches. I could assign all 3 actions to a single battalion, and have it move three times, or apportion the actions amongst the brigade's units. Note that I had 5 units (3 battalions plus one battery), so I couldn't 'energize' all my units at once. If my division commander was placed 'near' my brigade, I was given one additional action...still not enough to get everyone going at once. The firing phase was independent of the movement phase, with both sides firing simultaneously. Cannon tossed a number of dice equal to their poundage. The guns were killers... for example, an 8-pdr, tossing 8 dice, was a force to be reckoned with. In one melee, a defending French cavalry unit charged into an Austrian battalion, still in column of march. The Austrians were given a chance to form square and they failed, and the cavalry closed and tossed two 6-sided dice, and added another 2 for good measure, to determine the number of casualties. The result was a total of 9 casualties on the Austrian battalion. It started out with 6 stands, 3 figures per stand, for a total of 18 figures. Here, the French cavalry wiped out 9 of the figures and a 3-stand loss, and half the battalion was gone. NAZ was fairly fast paced in its simple alternative sequence. Even though you couldn't activate an entire brigade at a time, things flowed smoothly. Washington's Wars I sat in on a game of WASHINGTON'S WARS (WW). Here, in 25mm, a regiment was composed of 5 stands. To me, the most interesting item was the sequence. The host had a deck of 60 cards. 15 of them were annotated Phase1, 15 for Phase 2, 15 for Phase 3, and 15 for Phase 4. Each brigade of 4 units was given a number of cards, depending upon its status. Then the umpire would call out "Place your Phase 1 cards on your regiments." He then decided which side had the initiative and that side activated all of the units with a card on it and the unit could fire, move, etc. The opposing side would then go with its own Phase 1 units. After all Phase 1 units were energized, the Phase 2 cards were assigned. Again, the appropriate units were activated. A unit couldn't be assigned 2 cards in a phase, but it could be assigned cards in consecutive phases. This produced a choppy sort of sequence, which still went well. You might have been given few Phase 1 and Phase 2 cards, and you might, therefore, find yourself unable to respond to the enemy's Phases 1 and 2 actions and but that's the luck of the draw. It seemed to me that this sort of sequencing would better apply to a skirmish game, rather than one for a tactical small-unit game. 6-sided dice were used, and the author incorporated an old, old system of determining casualties. First you determined if your firing unit scored a hit by tossing a single die. Then if you were successful, another 2 dice were tossed. These 2 dice were the "combo dice" and the particular combination of numbers denoted the particular percent chance you had of scoring a second casualty. For example, if the percentage chance of a second casualty was 16 percent, you'd look for a toss of 7 and since 7 can be composed of the following pairs and 6,1 or 1,6, or 2,5 or 5,2 or 4,3 or 3,4 and these 6 chances out of 36 on the dice produce a 16 percent chance of hit. A rather arcane and ancient way of determining percentages, and I thought the author would have been better off to have simply used percentage dice. WW seemed to have too many occasions for morale tests and units were forever testing morale. Stellar Conflicts and Uprisings Next I wandered by a game of STELLAR CONFLICTS AND UPRISINGS, which looked like a simple 15mm tank-versus-tank battle. But these were tanks of the 30th mellenium. The rules book was huge, due to an enormous amount of nitty-gritty concerning the vehicles used. Each tank had several views in the book, along with its penetrability and armor factors. When firing, the procedures required a number of 20-sided dice tosses. First, see if your vehicle spotted the enemy vehicle. Second, another die to see if you had communicated with the other tanks in your squadron. Third, a "to hit" die roll. Fourth, if you scored a hit, go to the tank's charts in the huge book, toss a die to see where the impact was, and if it penetrated Fifth, a 'damage' die was tossed to determine the extent of damage. This was a wee bit much to me. Battle of Hubbardton 1777 On to THE BATTLE OF HUBBARDTON, 1777. I never did find out the name of the rules set, only the name of the battle. Firing was deterministic. You cross reference the distance to the target with the number of figures firing to to get the hits scored. Then divided by 3 if the target was in open order, divide by another factor if the target was in cover, and so on. Each regiment had a card in the deck and when the card was drawn, you could move or move-half and fire, and so on. HUBBARDTON didn't quite pan out, and I moved on. Brits vs. Dervishes The next battle was between Brits and dervishes. Something about VICTORIA'S BATTLES (I'm not quite sure). The dervishes had about 12 figures per unit, the Brits had around 8. In the pre-game briefng, the umpire kept shouting about important features that everyone ought to remember, but no one paid him any heed. Everyone was too busy talking about grand-strategic planning in the coming battle. The scenario was set up to present a huge dervish attack on a British square, so that, in truth, there wasn't that much grand-strategic planning to do. When a unit fired, it tossed a 10-sided die, and added certain modifiers. The target unit tossed a defensive die, and a hit was scored if the offensive total exceeded the defensive total. This method of opposing die rolls is employed in NAPOLEON'S BATTLES. But this game took that a step further. Instead of s ingle hit, if a hit was scored, a second chart was looked at to determine the 'fire effect'. I left VICTORIA and there were about 22 dervish units versus 14 Brits. The game started at 11:30 AM, and the umpire said it was quite rapidly paced, and that it should be over by around 1 PM. I never stayed to find out. Age of Bonaparte AGE OF BONAPARTE was next. 15mm Napoleonics. The umpire had a huge clock which he used to detrmine the turn number. "It's now the 8:15 AM turn", he would shout." On the French left flank, where I was sitting, there was a river across which the French were to cross. A ford was available with which the French could cross, but they were hampered because only one regiment of 3 stands could cross per 15-minute turn. This was truly slow-going, since there was an entire French brigade trying to make its way across. The umpire would shout "It's the 9 o'clock turn!", and the fella who was running the French brigade moved one regimental stand across the river and then sat back, waiting until the next turn to move his next unit. The scale was similar to that of NAPOLEON'S BATTLES, in that musket range was only 1-inch. Artillery fired out to 10 inches, and the French infantry that were crossing the river took it on the chin. AOB had too many charts for my liking. When the artillery fired, for example, you looked up the 'artillery strength' and compared it to the 'defender strength'. This gave the 'strength ratio' of the firing unit, which you then cross referenced with a 10-sided die roll, which, in turn, gave you the percentage hits on the target unit. The target also received a disorder marker. AOB wasn't quite to my liking, and I moved on. Piquet Bob Wiltrout hosted two PIQUET games. Both, he said, were a success, coming to a conclusion (with inexperienced players) in about two and half hours. I didn't witness his games, but I heard that one participant stated that I, W. Simon, Unca Wally himself, had taken all the ploys used in the PIQUET games and appropriated them for my own rules. Some years ago, at one of the conventions, someone hosted a 54mm WW II skirmish game, very, very, very similar to the ones I had written about in the '70's in WARGAMER'S DIGEST, and claimed it was all of his own making. He used the same action technique, same card system of movement, same 3-pose-per figure routine, same firing procedures. All I can say is that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I asked a couple of dealers about their sales, and they all stated that sales were satisfactory. Given the fact that just about every dealer in the hobby had a kiosk in the huge dealer's area, this was good news. Back to PW Review January 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