Brian appeared at the house one Saturday and we set up an AWR battle to test his rules… he intended to present a game at HISTORICON and this was a first outing of the scenario. We used units (regiments?) composed of 2 stands, and tracked the hits each unit received. A total of 6 hits on a regiment removed a stand. I was the defending American commander… as you'll note on the map, my left flank, on the eastern half of the field, was anchored in the village of Riggles, and on my right flank, situated on Riggles Ridge, I posted my artillery and a couple of regiments to hold the high ground. Brian's rules haven't been named yet, so for ease of reference, I'll refer to it as AWI. AWI is a 'card game'… each side has lots of cards, which are played during particular parts of the sequence. The sequence for the half-bound consists of 5 phases: Phase 1 Side A draws his action cards. There are 3 types of cards… preemption cards, reaction cards, and general activity cards. The number of cards drawn is about equal to half the number of units in the force. There is a common deck, so you can't tell which type of cards you're drawing. Phase 2 Side B nows plays as many of his preemption and general activity cards as he can. These contain such orders as "2 units may fire", or "1 unit may move", or "reserve units may move up", or "add +20 to your unit's morale test", and so on. Nothing exciting here… just the normal run of activities performed by a force in the field. Phase 3 Back to Side A, who can now move or fire all of his units… his entire force. Infantry move is 8 inches, cavalry is 12. Muskets reach out to 12 inches, artillery to 40. Phase 4 It's Side B's phase, and here he plays his reaction cards and general activity cards. Reaction cards may state "2 units may contact the enemy", or "1 unit may fire", and so on. Phase 5 This is the melee phase, wherein all combat is resolved. Note at the beginning of each half-bound, one of the players draws new cards. He can turn in unusable cards, at a rate of 2 returns for one new one. An unusable card is one saying something like "one routing unit may attempt to rally"… if you've got no routing units, you may as well turn in this type of card in the hopes of getting something you can actually put into play. Due to the interspersed sequence, the sides exchange fire throughout the half-bound. On Phase 3, Side A gets to fire, whle on Phases 2 and 4, Side B gets to reply. Battle In our battle, my Regulars, on the eastern side of the field, near Riggles, did quite well against the oncoming British… so well, that after they drove the Brits back, I ordered a general advance in that half of the field. But on my right flank, on Riggles Ridge, I just couldn't stop the British. I had 2 militia units there, bolstered by one regular unit, and all three fell back. The Militia never looked back, once they were in motion. The other horrible event on the ridge was that, after one of my units had lost a melee and routed back, Brian played a card stating ""all enemy units within 12 inches of a routing unit must take a morale test". This affected some 6 of my regiments, including my 2 artillery batteries. The morale level for Regulars was 80 percent, the morale level for Militia units was 60 percent. Unfortunately, everyone, regardless of morale grade and status, seemed to run at once, including my artillery crewmen. I had placed my Headquarters on the ridge, and it looked like General Washington was about to be captured. Time to surrender. AWI's firing procedures are quite simple… units have a 60 percent chance of inflicting a hit on a target in the open, with a 42 percent chance if the target is under cover. In our battle, a total of 6 hits removed one stand of the 2-stand units. In Brian's regular presentation, he'll use 6-stand units instaed of the 2-stand units of our battle, so he'll have to juggle his hit percentages a wee bit. Back to PW Review March 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