Brian Dewitt, in a moment of weakness, trotted out his copy of ROYALISTS AND ROUNDHEADS (RAR), a board game published in 1991 by a firm called 3W in California. The author is one Rob Markham, and I'm not sure why Mr. Markham wants his name associated with the game. Brian says that 3W has been publishing a slew of games of late, including RAR II, and, perhaps, RAR III. RAR contains four maps for four battles of the English Civil War; one of them is the encounter at Justice Mills of September 12, 1644, which we played because it appeared to encompass the smallest number of tokens and thus would require the least time for set-up. Each map measures 17 inches by 22 inches, and the first thing we noticed for Justice Mills was that the array of forces, both forces, was squinched into the very southeastern tip of the map. Why the map couldn't be centered on the actual locations of the forces, neither Brian nor I could puzzle out. But if Mr. Markham wanted 90 percent of the map to remain unused, so be it. RAR's sequence uses that of Rich Hasenaeur's ACW rules set, FIRE AND FURY: Side A move Side B fire Side A fire Melee Note that in this sequence, both sides, attacker and defender, have the same firing frequency; they both fire twice per bound. One might think that in the ECW era, the moving, i.e., attacking, side, as it advanced, would have less opportunity to fire than a fixedin-place defender, due to the finite time required to load muskets. In my opinion, what Mr. Markham uses is not an "ECW sequence". Justice Mills is a small battle. I was in command of a Covenantor force, some 19 tokens, arraigned against an equal number of Brian's Royalist Montrose contingent. All the RAR battles looked fairly small in terms of the number of tokens one was required to push around on the hex field. The problem was that the hexes were teeny-weeny, about a half-inch in size, the tokens were just as teeny-weeny, were square and didn't quite fit in the hexes, and to make matters worse, RAR requires that each unit face a particular corner, not a face, on the hex contour. Tracking the facing requirements meant that we players were continually bent over the board, our noses some two inches above the field of half-inch hexes, trying to read each token to see if it was facing in the right direction. RAR seemed the victim of poor editing; on the firing table, for example, which gave range modifiers, there were only 7 values listed, and 2 of them were incorrect. Brian took out his copy of RAR II, and indicated that RAR II corrected all this... although why anyone, once exposed to RAR, would want to acquire RAR II, is beyond me. I can forgive Brian, however, for he had purchased his RAR II copy without really having fully playtested RAR itself. RAR had bows ranging out to 8 hexes, and muskets to 2 hexes. Evidently, Mr. Markham had second thoughts on this, for RAR II has both bows and muskets ranging out to 4 hexes. The game had a clever 4-step attrition scale for each unit token. The first time a unit was hit, it received a marker. The second time, the token was turned over - the combat values on the reverse side were half of the original ones. The third hit produced another marker, and the fourth hit removed the token completely. Consistent with the facing requirements, units that were attacked on the flank or rear were not allowed to strike back. Which meant that cavalry, which could move 8 hexes, could zip from in front of a unit to its rear and get in a free hack. There was partial relief in the fact that after the defending unit received its hack, it could, on the next half-bound, turn and face its opponent. Another questionable rule was that when a unit made contact with another, then unless one of them was of "skirmisher class", the opposing sides were locked in combat forever, and neither could voluntarily pull out. It was a fight to the death, or until one failed a morale test. I could understand this sort of rule applied to a pike unit, but to have it apply across-the-board to, say, a cavalry-versus-infantry encounter, seemed too all-inclusive. I'll have to give RAR a begrudging 1 on a scale of 1-to-10. I found not too much that was "ECWish" about the rules (other than the names of the scenarios), I thought the sequence was misplaced, and I thought the tokens and hexes were much too small for all the emphasis placed on unit facing. For example, the Justice Mills scenario took so little space, the field could easily have been blown up into manageable one-inch hexes with token sizes to match. In general, I thought RAR belongs on the huge, ever-growing list of games that are rushed to the printer prematurely, despite the fact they haven't been completely thought out, and are not really ready for publication. RAR so soured me that I have no interest in exploring RAR II or III or IV... Back to PW Review July/August 1993 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com