Arrived at the Liebls’ house to find they’d set up a British-versus-natives colonial game. All seemed ordinary, until the Brits placed a fantasy steam-driven tank on the field, together with a sort of wind-up 3-man mechanical motorized vehicle, and a couple of armored cars.
The table size measured 12 feet long by 6 feet wide. The Brits entered on one of the shorter 6-foot edges, and had to make their way to the opposite base line, which was quite a long journey, considering they’d have to halt to battle natives and rough terrain, moving at 12 inches per turn.
But the sequence provided a means of accelerating troop movement. This was a Liebl “bead game”. Beads were used as markers for the actions to be taken by your units. For example, my own command consisted of 5 native units. At the beginning of each turn, my force was assigned 7 beads. If N was the number of units in a force, then N+2 were the beads assigned.
The actual number of assigned beads varied with a die roll… there could be either more or less than the N+1 number.
When my native units were activated, I could give one of my beads to a musket unit of 12 men and have it advance 14 inches. Then I could assign it another 2 beads for a second move action, and it could move up another 14 inches. In doing so, however, I’d be taking beads away from my other units, restricting their movement (remember, I only had 7 in all).
In fact, I’d be penalizing my own units even more, for further on in the sequence, there was a native fire phase, and here, too, beads were required to be assigned to each unit firing. If you used all your beads for moving, then, tough!… you couldn’t fire.
Not a bad system for sequencing your troops, as the commanders had to decide (with a limited number of resources… beads) if their priorities should center on movement or firing.
My units were set up on the far edge of the field, the one the Brits were making for. In effect, therefore, I had little to do but observe the game, which was fine with me.
Running along the long dimension of the table, straight toward my table edge, was a river, and the Brits had a flotilla of boats zipping up the river at 18 inches per bead. British troops were aboard the boats, and the flotilla commander was tossing double beads at his boats, wanting them to move 36 inches per turn. But the movement table stated that if you really pushed your boats, they’d break down, and so, half-way up the field, the entire flotilla came to a halt.
One of my musketeer units was setup facing the river, waiting for the boats to arrive, ready to fire at the on-board troops. It appeared that there were no British units nearby, and that I had nothing to worry about. But Bob Liebl had a British cavalry unit some ways off… and he gave it 2 beads. On the first bead, it advanced 18 inches, and on the second bead, it charged another 24 inches, a total of 42 inches in all, a whopper of a move.
And the 42 inch charge smacked into the flank of my musketeers, who were facing the wrong way.
Not to worry, thought I. Right after British movement in the sequence was the native firing phase, and I had saved a number of beads, hoping to pot the troops aboard the boats.
And so I asked Bob “Can my units respond to the flank charge?” “No!” he replied.
“But the British had an emergency response mode, and they could use their beads to form up against a native charge!" ”No!” said Bob
“But these mounted horsemen charged a distance of around 10 miles across the field before contacting my boys! Surely, I could use a single bead to have my troops respond by turning to face?” “No!” said Bob.
“But I’ve got lots of beads left. Can’t I use any of ‘em?” “No!” said Bob.
It appeared my men hadn’t taken Emergency Response 101, and they were doomed.
For the melee resolution, the British cavalry added a +5 to a 10-sided die roll, my boys added nothing. With a bias in favor of the cavalry of +5, their total easily capped mine. Half of my 12 man unit was removed, and the other 6 fled, routing.
Melees were fought in rounds, the units staying in combat, turn after turn, until one of them lost enough men to go into a routing mode. My musketeers only needed a loss of 4 men to route, and lost more than enough on the very first round of combat to send ‘em running off.
Some time ago, when the Liebl rules were first presented, the large movement distances allowed units to make a “sleazy move”.
For example, with a British unit having a move distance of 12 inches on its first bead, assigning it another 2 beads gave it a total move distance of 24 inches. And if the British unit was, say, 8 inches in front of an enemy unit, the 24 inch move allowed it to run completely around the enemy and come in from the rear, crying “Flank attack! Rear attack! Plus 5! Plus 6!” and so on.
Bob’s answer to this was, apparently, to eliminate flanks. Even if you made a sleazy move, you’d get no flank advantage. At least, there were no such modifiers on my copy of the rules.
Another change for the better from the original rules was that the scope of melee switched from a man-to-man combat to a unit-on-unit combat. Originally, only the men in contact were deemed to be engaged. This permitted the active side, the charging side, to gang up on the poor, immobile defenders.
But here, I noted, with a unit-on-unit resolution taking place , there could be no ganging up… a vast improvement.
In my own rules sets, I always try to use the same system of combat for both firing and melee. If you know the Simon firing procedures, you know the melee procedures. I’ve always wondered why more authors don’t do this, but have two completely different sets of procedures.
For melee, as I’ve described above, the sides tossed a 10-sider and modified it and the winner of a round was the higher total. The firing procedures here, however, were totally different, based on a chart of probabilities.
Each firing figure, depending upon range, was given a Probability of Hit (POH)
Comparing my muskets to the British rifles, we get
| Weapon | Short range | Medium range | Long range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Muskets | up to 4 inches 20% per man | up to 8 inches 10% per man | up to 12 inches 3% per man |
| Rifles | up to 8 inches 30% per man | up to 16 inches 20% per man | up to 24 inches 10% per man |
Having gotten the appropriate POH from the above table, you now go to a fire chart. Along the top is number of men firing… and you look along the row which contains your POH factor. I’ve reproduced a portion of the chart:
| Note | 1 man | 2 men | 3 men | 4 men | 5 men | 6 men | 7 men |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| - | .01 | .02 | .03 | .04 | .05 | .06 | .07 |
| ** | .02 | .04 | .06 | .08 | .10 | .12 | .14 |
| - | .03 | .06 | .09 | .12 | .15 | .18 | .21 |
| - | .05 | .10 | .15 | .20 | .25 | .30 | .35 |
| * | .10 | .20 | .30 | .40 | .50 | .60 | .70 |
| - | .15 | .30 | .45 | .60 | .75 | .90 | 1.05 |
Assume I have 7 of my musketeers firing at medium range… their POH per man is 10 percent. That means we should enter the chart on the row labeled .10. I’ve marked this row with an asterisk. But this 10 percent factor is modified… for example, there’s a -3 if the target is under hard cover. To implement the negative factor, we go “up the chart” by three rows to the row starting at a POH of .02, as marked with two asterisks.
Then we look along the row until we come to the column labeled for 7 men firing, and get a POH of .14. That means that my 7 men have a 14 percent chance of knocking off an enemy trooper.
What’s interesting to me is the non-linear effect of the modifiers. Note that from the chart, if the target was not in cover, the 7 men would have had a 70 percent chance of winging the enemy. By going up the rows, the final percentage was vastly reduced to 1`4 percent.
When the battle began, it looked like it would turn into a Class AA Abomination, as men, when hit, were simply toppled over on their sides and left on the field. After a couple of turns, however, things looked much better… the dead men were being carted off the field. But just as I was mentally giving the visual aspect a big check mark… BOOM!… casualty caps appeared, and the game reverted to an even lower status than the original… it became a Class AAA Abomination.
During the game, a couple of the players were discussing WARRIOR, the soon-to-be-released version of WRG 7th by Scott Holder and company. The comments were to the effect that WARRIOR seemed to follow the WRG 7th trend and that few changes were being made. I thought one of the guys, a true “historical wargamer”, said that by rewriting a bad set of rules, you only made them less historical. “What does this have to do with history?” I asked.
The answer was: “If history had nothing to do with the games I played, I wouldn’t play them!”
I refrained from pointing out to him the British fantasy steam-driven tank on the field.
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© Copyright 2001 Wally Simon
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