I recently attended a battle of the ECW which was, purportedly, derived from the FIRE AND FURY (FF) rules. There were ‘special changes’ in the rules system to shift the focus of attention from the period of the American Civil War to that some 200 years earlier. And what were these changes? The basic change was the melee table, which broke out the different types of pair-offs to be found in the ECW, instead of the simple infantry and cavalry match-ups of the ACW. All else was pretty much the same as FF… morale tests didn’t exist, disorder markers abounded, firing followed the original FF outline, and the sequence exactly mirrored that of FF. Oh, yes, the title was changed to FIRE AND FURY FOR THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR. And I sez to myself.. surely I can come up with an original set of playable rules which includes some of the attributes of the ECW period… Something which is different in scope but at least tells the gamers they’re dealing with the ECW and not the Franco-Prussian War or WW2. And so I presented my creation to the PW crowd at one of our monthly get-togethers. Usually, at these games, Jim Butters and Stephan Patajek are my severest critics… They both sit side by side, and I continually hear whispered comments like: "This is just another of Simon’s silly games, and so the procedures make no sense!" And occasionally, I hear loud cries of protest: "I’ve never seen such a ridiculous game! I have absolutely no idea of what’s going on!" With this in mind, the game started with Stephan table-side. Jim was out-of-town for the month, and Stephan handled the right flank of the Royalist forces, a division of some 9 units. The center was commanded by Cleo Liebl, and the left flank was under the firm hand of Bob Liebl. There were three players for Parliament… I was on the Parliamentarian right flank… and we were perched defensively on a ridge running across the field. Our task was to hold the ridge… the Royalists outnumbered us, and all we had to do was to stand fast. This was definitely a "new, all new" presentation. First of all, the casualty procedures bore no resemblance to anything any of the players (even me!) had ever experienced. Each of the divisions on the field was commanded by a General Officer (GO), and had some 9 or 10 units, composed of around 4 stands each. During the sequence, when a unit took hits, we did the following: a. Instead of recording the hits on each unit’s separate data sheet, we recorded it on the GO’s sheet. b. Each GO had a "Loss Threshold" (LT) of around 12 points (we diced for the LT early in the battle). c. As the GO’s hits mounted during the firing and melee phases, they eventually exceeded his LT. d. At this time, the sequence provided for an "administration phase", during which, for every point the GO exceeded his LT, there was a 50 percent chance one of his units would flee the field. e. Whenever a unit broke and ran off, the owning player could choose the particular unit to flee. Bob Liebl pointed out that he could pound away at a particular unit time after time, and that the unit itself would remain undamaged. Which meant that even though the division’s GO would accumulate points, when it came time to select a fleeing unit, the owning player could pick on another of his units, instead of zeroing in on the unit that caused the GO to exceed his loss threshold. Did this make sense? Certainly not! But as a gaming ploy, it did put pressure on the player who had to chose which of his units was to be sacrificed. He had to make an instant tactical decision… if someone had to go, was this pike more valuable than that musketeer unit? Or was the medium cavalry less valuable than his artillery? My division commander, General Yesse, had to face the music sometime around the 5th bound. When the battle began, and I diced for General Yesse’s LT Loss Threshold, it turned out to be 10 (the worst possible value, since the highest value was 14), which meant that the 11th hit on Yesse’s division was critical… from this point on, there was a good possibility that Yesse’s units would start to desert. Over the first 4 bounds, Bob Liebl’s advancing force attacked Yesse’s division with enough ferocity to cause Yesse to accumulate a total of 23 LT points at the time Yesse made his first series of "who’s going to desert?" tests. Since General Yesse had exceeded his LT by 13 points (23 -10), Yesse had to make 13 tests. For each point exceeding the threshold, there was a 50 percent chance a unit would desert. And so I tossed 13 10-sided dice, looking for (or, perhaps, a better expression is ‘NOT looking for’) results of 1-through-5. Alas! Of the 13 dice, Yesse instantly lost 6 units, about half his force. Statistically speaking, 6 out of 13 (at 50 percent chance each) is not too improbable, but it was rather disconcerting. And so, out of the initial total of 10 units, I selected a couple of musket units, a couple of sword-and-buckler units, and so on, trying to preserve my pike and cavalry. I should note that not only did firing successfully on a unit cause a division GO to suffer, but there were other sources of pain and aggravation: a. First, of course, were the firing procedures. The probabilities of hit were around 50 percent for both artillery and muskets, and so loss points accumulated rapidly on the GO’s sheet. b. Second, if a unit took a morale test and failed, this, too, showed up on the General’s ledger as a 1-point loss. c. Third, losing a melee was extremely bad news for the General… here, he lost a total of 3 points. d. And fourth, every unit that deserted, gave the General another loss point. It was around Bound #6 that the unfortunate General Yesse gave up the ghost… all his men had fled, and Bob Liebl’s Royalist division, now unopposed, could turn to its right and start to eat up the remaining Parliamentarian divisions which were still opposed to their fronts by other Royalist forces. Bob’s division, commanded by General Rock, was not entirely untouched… it had lost 4 units, but it still had 3 pike, 2 cavalry and a couple of musketeers. General Rock had sacrificed his artillery in order to keep his other units on the field. At this point, I asked the other participants if they wanted to call the game. My thought was that since Parliament had lost its right flank (me!), it was only a question of time before Bob’s Royalist forces completed their turn to the right and ganged up on the remaining Parliament units. But Glory Be and Hallejulah! It was Stephan himself who shouted "No! Let’s keep going!" He was backed up by the other guys and so we continued to play. I took this as a vote of confidence in the rules system, thinking that perhaps I had come across a veritable winner. Har! Har! Har! Alas! Several minutes later, I heard a cry from Stephan: "The melee factors assigned to the units are inconsequential, and the melee outcomes are solely decided by a dice throw!" And thereby hangs a tale. A tale of the melee procedures. Sometime before, I had been in Kaymart and seen several decks of "war cards" on the shelves in the toy department. Each deck had 36 cards in it, with four "1’s", four "2’s", four "3’s", and so on, up to four "9’s". I bought about five of the decks, thinking that they’d eventually come into use. "Eventually" was now. When two units came into contact, each received several cards: Regardless of unit type, each started out by receiving 4 cards 2 more cards if a support was present 2 more cards if the unit had more stands in it than the opposing unit 2 more cards if the opposing unit was a pushover (pike vs cavalry, cavalry vs infantry, sword-and-buckler vs pike, etc.) Battle Board There were a couple of other sources of cards, and each player wound up with a total of around 10 cards. And now we went to the Battle Board! Each side received 4 tokens, and each token was placed in one of the top 4 boxes labeled "Start", with each having an initial value of 3. Now the card playing begins. 1. The attacking player, A, goes first, and selects and plays a card. 2. The defending player, D, selects one of his cards to defend. 3. If A’s card tops D’s, one of D’s tokens is moved down one level. 4. Now it’s D’s turn to play a card and strike, and A’s turn to defend. Both play a card, and the appropriate token moved down. 5. If the cards are of equal value, nothing happens, it’s a stand-off. 6. Alternate strikes continue until all cards have been played. 7. The side with remaining, unopposed cards, gets "freebee" strikes. 8. At this time, both sides will have tokens at various levels on the Battle Board. 9. Each side sums up its token values and multiplies by 5. 10. Each side then adds a percentage dice throw, and high total wins. Now tell me if this isn’t the quintessential essence of ECW warfare! You get cards for the relative strength of your unit in combat, and you get to make a tactical decision concerning when to play them… Do you save your high cards for striking, or do you use them in defense? Remember that losing a melee is not inconsequential… For the division’s General adds 3 loss points to his tally, bringing him closer to destruction. What caused Stephan to cry out in agony was the procedure in Step 9, above, where the token values are multiplied by a factor of 5. Here, it turned out that, in most melees, the points of the product of each side were fairly close to one another, and so the deciding factor was not the number of points, but the percentage dice throw itself. Immediately, on the spot, a command decision was made… instead of a multiplying factor of 5, we were going to use a factor of 7. This seemed to work out a wee bit better, but I think the factor still needs a little tuning. In truth, prior to the battle, I had been afraid, not of the numbers involved, but that the card playing, gin-rummy type of melee resolution would be too time consuming and would hold up the game. But all at table-side took it in stride, and caught on to the system rapidly. Special Effects As in other Simon games, I included a couple of "special effects" in the sequence. Each side was given ‘Efficiency Points’ (a couple of green tokens), which they played during the firing phase. The firing side diced for the firing efficiency of its units according to the following chart: 01 to 33 All units fire with a probability of hit (POH) of 70 percent 34 to 66 All units fire with a POH of 50 percent 67 to 100 All units fire with a POH of 30 percent Each green token that was played reduced the dice throw by 10 points, bringing the resultant total down… and since low numbers are ‘good’ on the above chart, the more green tokens you devote, the better should be the POH. But the Efficiency Points were used for other than merely firing. The greenies could be tossed in to help out a unit when it took a morale test, and in melee, each token played produced 2 cards for your unit. In essence, the greenies were valuable, and the supply had to be managed carefully. Each side received additional greenies during the bound, but there were never enough. At battle’s end, when we were packing away the figures, I called for a vote on the system, a number from 1 to 10, where the low end of number 1 represented the absolute pits, and 10 stood for metaphysical perfection. Mike and Pat Byrne, father and son, always seem to down-rate my presentations. Son Pat, who’s around 11 years old, gave the game a 7, a little above average. Mike panned it at a 4, presumably because Mike is a "true" historical gamer, and, as even I must admit, the game had nothing to do with the ECW era, other than that we were playing with ECW figures. But I consoled myself with the thought that, in the same vein, NAPOLEON’S BATTLES has nothing to do with Napoleonics, nor does FIRE AND FURY have anything to do with the ACW, nor does DBM concern itself with ancients. Stephan was silent when the balloting occurred, but both Bob and Cleo Liebl gave it a 6. Back to PW Review February 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