1. In this issue, there are a couple of articles in which the sides, when active, toss dice on their phase in the sequence, and the dice tell them how many units can fire and how many can move. Over the years, I've looked at mechanisms that take control of a player's units away from him... and discovered that, for the most part, most gamers don't like this approach... they want a specific movement phase in which all their forces move, and then a fire phase in which all their forces fire, and so on. Way back in the early eighties, Larry Brom's THE SWORD AND THE FLAME made the first breakthrough, in terms of public acceptance, in presenting a sequence in which a player could not, during a turn, have one of his units move or fire when he wanted... he had to wait until an appropriate card was drawn. Then came the DBA/DBM rules, with their dreaded pip movement procedures, restricting a side, during a turn, from maneuvering all of its troops as desired, and, for some reason, these, too, were fully accepted. And from these two humble beginnings, others clambered on the bandwagon. AGE OF REASON uses a single deck of cards, on each of which is annotated one of the units on the field, activated when its card is drawn. The western gunfight rules DESPERADO seem to be in vogue, wherein there's one stack of cards (one or two cards per figure) assembled in one huge deck, and you wait until your man's card is drawn to move. But note here, for these two rules sets, that even though the wait may appear infinite, you will eventually get to move your units during the turn, since the entire deck is always run through. In contrast, PIQUET breaks new ground. Here, you've got the card deck, and the waiting, and you may never get to move anyone at all, should you be the victim of a series of unlucky activation dice throws. My own druthers focus on my audience. When I, myself, am the audience, and I engage in a solo game, it doesn't matter at all if a unit on one side or the other does or doesn't get to fire or move, as dictated by the sequence. In contrast, when the audience consists of 4 or 5 gamers gathered around my table, I'll try to ensure that everyone moves, and everyone fires... my fire tables may be unbalanced, and my melee tables out of kilter, but when Simon shouts "Move!"... everybody moves! 2. I spent over a week visiting Bob Hurst for a most enjoyable and relaxing flurry of wargames. I brought along my rules sets, we set up a series of scenarios using Bob's figures, and no matter what the era, what the terrain, what the scale of the figures, what the rules, Bob whomped me. He whomped me in medieval times, he smashed me in the American Civil War, he blasted me in the Franco-Prussian era, and he destroyed me in World War 2. At the end of my visit, the statistics were: Player WON LOST Hurst 9 1 Simon 1 9 I went home with a warm feeling in my heart. Back to PW Review November 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