I recently played in a 25mm American Civil War game using the rules BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER (BAB). About 2 years ago, I wrote an article about BAB, which was published in WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED, panning the rules. Duncan Macfarlane, publisher and editor of WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED, had given me a copy of BAB and requested a review. I played nearly a dozen games of BAB to ensure I got my facts straight, and the result was the unfavorable article. I think Duncan was rather surprised at the tone of my article, but he bravely published it (he’s a very good friend of the BAB author). BAB uses squads of 10 men, singly mounted. In the recent game, I commanded 4 such squads, 40 figures. Each squad is listed on a card, the cards are shuffled into a single deck, and two of them are drawn. These 2 squads then perform their functions simultaneously (fire, reload muskets, move, etc.). Here’s one of my sorepoints. If two squads on the same side are called upon... ain’t no problem. But if the cards refer to units on opposite sides, who has priority? The text offers no help on the subject, and I’ve seen about a half-dozen methods to solve the simultaneity problem, but it’s always bothered me that the authors offered no help on such a simple issue. The two guys hosting the game were very familiar with the BAB rules, but I noticed that, familiar as they were, they were still nose-deep in the rulebook, trying to decipher what the author wanted to say. And both guys indicated that it was their intent to virtually rewrite the book to get it into shape. The second set of rules I sampled was Easy Eight’s BATTLEGROUND (BG), dealing with WW2 skirmishes. A squad is composed of 10 men, each armed with his special weapon, and every turn, when the squad is called on, the charts (many charts) have to be referenced to determine the fire effect. Each squad is listed on a card, as in BAB, but unlike BAB, only one card from the single deck is drawn at a time. The game I witnessed called for three basic dice tosses when a man fired his weapon. First, he referred to the ‘sighting chart’... did he see the target?. Second, to the ‘to-hit chart’... did he hit the target? And third, to the ‘injury chart’... what happened to the target? I never could grasp when a target had previously been sighted, and the sighting die toss could be ignored. Another point of interest was that even though the target was ‘hit’, you had a small chance that the target suffered no injury at all (example... with a rifle firing at 16 inches, and the target in soft cover, there was still a 30 percent chance of ‘missing' on the injury chart even though you had just 'hit’ it on the ‘to hit’ chart). Which says that a ‘hit’ doesn’t really mean a ‘hit’. In truth, the awkward way in which the charts were set out actually made sense when studied in detail, but the operational term is "awkward", resulting in a slow, slow game. To my mind, there must be a better way. I’ll try to stay away from BAB and BF. Back to PW Review May 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