Bob Wiltrout hosted a PIQUET (PQ) game… he set out two beautifully painted 20mm armies for the Seven Years War (my French versus his Prussians), and we had at it. Each of us had: 3 infantry divisions Each division consisted of 3 brigades with each brigade made up of some 4 stands (12 stands in all for the division). The division also had an artillery battery of 2 stands. 1 cavalry division The division consisted of 3 cavalry brigades, each brigade of 4 stands. Here, too, the division had a battery of 2 stands attached. I’m not really a stranger to PQ. In all, ever since PQ appeared, I’ve participated in at least half-a-dozen games and sat and watched a half-dozen more, trying to understand why the rules caught on. There are only two PQ encampments… the “love it” people, and the “hate it” people… nothing in between. For the most part, I’d enroll in the “hate it” registry. This current game was one-on-one, quite different from the multiplayer games I had previously played in or witnessed. In those games, I had noted that the on-table action was few and far between. Forces faced each other, and only occasionally, would they be galvanized into action. This came about because of the mechanism governing the sequence. (a) First, the two sides would toss 20 sided dice. The side tossing the higher number would receive the difference, the delta, in ‘impulses’, and having been given the initiative, would proceed to draw cards from its action deck. But note that if one side continually, time after time, tossed higher than the opponent, it would continually get the initiative, continually draw action cards, and the poor opposing player or players would sit and twiddle their collective thumbs… nothing to do, nothing to move, nothing to command. (b) Second, after receiving the initiative, and commencing to draw cards, the active side would then look for the action cards it could use… cards saying “infantry move”, or “cavalry move” or “resolve melee” and the like. Cards that couldn’t be used were discarded. The action decks of the sides were composed of 30 cards each. In our game, in my 30-card deck, my French forces had 3 “infantry move” cards, and 3 “cavalry move” cards, a couple of “infantry deploy” cards, a couple of “reload muskets” cards, and so on. Items (a) and (b), above, caused me, in past articles on the system, to label the “action decks” as “inert decks”… there was so much “nothing” going on. At the outset of our battle, Bob Wiltrout stated that item (a) above, had been partially cured. If a side won the initiative three times in a row with his 20-sided die toss, he’d then, for the fourth die toss, roll a 12-sided die against the opponent’s 20-sider, reducing the probability that he’d win the initiative again. Some time ago, I had spoken to Bob Jones, the author of PQ, about this issue, and he had defended the original scheme, described in (a)... he wanted no changes to the system. Which told me that the Bob Wiltrout modification was a sort of improvised, unauthorized, house-rules change. Begin We began our battle, tossed our 20-siders, and… sunuvagun!… I won the first toss, drew my cards, I won the second toss, drew my cards, and I won the third toss and drew my cards. My French army was on the move, and the Prussians could only watch! I think that on the fourth toss, when I threw a 12-sider, Bob won and drew a couple of cards, but after that, I again won the next three, and the next three and so on... partially cured? Since this was a one-on-one game, both of us were interested in the outcome of every toss, every draw of the cards… we laughed when I won the initiative, we giggled when I couldn’t find an “infantry move” card, we chortled when a “deploy” card failed to appear and I couldn’t deploy my advancing troops from march column to line, and we chuckled when my troops fired and couldn’t reload their muskets because a “reload muskets” card wasn’t drawn. And were we having fun? Were we enjoying ourselves? Well, this wasn’t really “fun” fun, it was a PQ type of fun, for which you’ll permit me to coin a term… “phun”… yes, this was phun for the two of us. Whether or not it would have been phun if there were other players involved, I can’t say… it depends upon how many thumbs they would have had to twiddle. Aside from the phun aspect, was this truly a battle of the Seven Years War? The battle occurred two days ago, and my memory already fails me, but I think I was informed something along the following lines: The French force was an assault force, it wanted to get into hand-to-hand combat, and for this purpose, it had 3 “resolve melee” cards in its deck (3 out of 30). The Prussians had only 2 “resolve melee” cards in their deck. The Prussians wanted to fire, and not to engage in combat. The Prussian deck had 3 “reload muskets” cards in their deck (3 out of 30), while the French only had 2. There were only two permitted formations… line and column of march. Later, Bob checked the rules book and discovered that a third formation was possible… infantry could form square. I forget if there were any other “national attributes” or SYW ploys in the game. Prior to the battle, each side was given a number of “morale chips” (MC). Each MC, when played, permitted a unit to fire when its side was active. The kicker, of course, was that, once having fired, the elusive “reload muskets” card had to appear to recharge the weapons, and these didn’t appear too frequently (I think that my French action deck had 3 “reload” cards in the 30 card deck) . Artillery could also fire with the play of an MC, and the artillery had its own “reload” cards in the deck. MC were lost when a unit fired, when a melee was lost, when a unit routed… MC were continually decreasing. My French force started with 27 MC, and went down to zero, despite my superior generalship, far too fast. Since I kept winning the initiative, and kept drawing cards, while the Prussians were wonderfully immobile, it appeared that I could advance upfield, deploy, and run the buggers right off the field. Alas! ‘Twas not to be. Wiltrout’s Prussians drew a couple of timely “deploy” cards, and formed firing line… the play of a few MC chips, and my boys crumbled. In particular, one of the uses to which an MC could be put, was to force an opposing unit to take a morale test, and after I had lost a couple of stands to Prussian fire, Bob would play an MC, my unit would test, and it would take off. PQ uses all the dice in the wargaming inventory… 20-siders and 12 siders and 10’s and 8’s and 6’s and 4’s. The modifiers in the firing and melee and morale routines are all built-in by raising or lowering the type of dice used. When firing, a unit would toss its die and compare it to the roll of a 6-sided die, used as a reference. For example, one of my better French line units fired by tossing a 10-sided die. If the target was in skirmish formation, the 10-sider would be decreased to an 8-sider… at very long range, it would be decreased even further. I’d toss my particular die and the target would toss a 6-sider… the difference was the number of casualties on the target unit. Occasionally, due to restrictions placed on the types of dice available, the tables would “top out”. By this I mean that if my unit fired with a 10-sided die, and fired at point blank range (less than 2 inches), its die would be increased to a 12-sider. But if an elite unit of Grenadiers started out with a 12-sider and fired point blank, the game ran out of dice, and the bonus appeared by still using the 12-sider but adding a ‘plus 1’ or a ‘plus 2’ to its roll. I’m a percentage dice man, and to me, the business of “groping for dice” is rather silly, when you’ve got dice around that, on a single toss, give you 1 percent gradations in the combat modifiers. Back to PW Review December 2001 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 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