From the edge of the clearing some 12 inches from the settlement, three Alcohonka braves looked at the nearest house. There was Man Who Can Spit, Bald Head, and Clear Eyes. Fred Haub and I shared the duties of ordering the Indians around; Tony Figlia was in command of the settlers. Tony had six settlers to begin with, but at the start of every bound he diced to see if another colonial showed up. We who ran the Indians had eight Alcohonka braves; we'd receive no reinforcements. Each man had his own data sheet; on it were recorded his Efficiency This ran from about 80% on down, and was used both as a gauge of the man's strength in melee, and his rally level. Musket Status Loaded or unloaded Orders Each turn, the man was given one of five one-word orders: Move, Fire, Contact, Rally, or Delay. Each one of these was designated on a card in the Order Deck. On Turn #1, I gave all the Alcohonkas under my control a Move order. My intent was to rush the house, owned by Farmer Brown. After each man had been given his orders, we drew from the Order Deck to see which order was to be implemented first. The actual sequence was: a. Draw an Order Deck card for Move/Fire/Contact/Rally. b. Dice to see which side's men (Side A) carried out the order first. Then Side B's men would act. C. Then dice to see if another round of that particular order occurred. There was a 20 percent chance that it wouldn't. Which meant that most of the time, we had two rounds for each order, enabling a man to move twice, or to fire on the first round, and reload on the second, etc. d. Note that under (a) above, there are only four cards in the Order Deck; after all four cards had been drawn, the Delay order was activated, and those men who had waited patiently were now free to act. If a man had a Delay order, he had the option of firing (hastily), or moving, or reloading his weapon. My three Alcohonkas ran up to the window of the Brown house, and on Turn #3, I gave them orders to "Contact". This order meant that any man within 3 inches of an enemy could strike out at the opponent, i.e., start a melee. My boys were right outside the windows of the house, and as soon as my Contact order card appeared, they'd force their way in through the window (70 percent chance of doing so), and whup the colonials. But on Turn #3, the Fire order card appeared before the Contact card, and I discovered that inside Brown house, three stalwart colonials were waiting with muskets loaded. BANG! BLASTO! WHAMMO! and two of my men were wounded. They immediately took a morale test to see if they would flee. In this test, each man started out with an "intrinsic" Morale Factor of 70%. He could call on a friend to assist; the friend would add another 15%, but the distance between the two men would be subtracted from the total. Take Bald Head, for example. He took his intrinsic 70%, added the 15% provided by Man Who Can Spit (70 + 15 85), and subtracted the 4- inch distance between the two (85 - 4 81). Bald Head then tossed percentage dice... and a 92(!) appeared. Bald Head just couldn't hack it and off he ran. In practice, Bald Head ran to the Rally Zone, a sort of off-board limbo-land from which held have to rally to show up again on the field. Bald Head's data sheet showed his Efficiency points were down to 75, and so on the next turn, when I gave Bald Head a Rally order, and the Rally card showed up, he diced, attempting to toss under 75. Not for Bald Head. He failed, and lost yet another Efficiency box In fact, Bald Head failed about six rally tosses in six consecutive turns, each time reducing his Efficiency, each time reducing the percentage chance that held return to the field. In fact, he never reappeared on the field, and his company commander, Swift Hands, had a lot of paper work to fill out when the Alcohonkas finally reported back into the Indian encampment. But meanwhile... back at the window... Man Who Can Spit was one of those who had been wounded, but he (a) passed his morale test, and (b) when the Contact card was drawn, forced his way in through the window (70 percent), and (c) struck one of the colonials, Richard Monmouth, in the house. Having been wounded, Richard took a morale test, and whiz! , he took to his feet and fled into the Rally Zone. Sometime later, however, unlike Bald Head, Richard reappeared, having successfully rallied. In both the firing and melee procedures, a 10-sided die was tossed, and a hit on the opponent occurred with rolls of 7, 8, 9, or 10. Appropriate modifiers were used... 'for example, firing with a rested weapon added +1 to the die roll, hence a 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 produced a hit. Around Turn #5, with Alcohonkas crawling all over the place, only one colonial fighter, a grizzled veteran of the Indian Wars named Epson Saltz, plus a young lass named Desdemona, remained in Brown house to face three Indians. The rules allowed for a maximum of 3-on-1 in melee, and if we Alcohonkas could get a Contact card, we vowed that Epson would not soon forget us. With Epson facing odds of 3-to-1, Tony gave Epson a Move order, while we gave our Indians Contact orders. As luck would have it, the Move order card appeared before the Contact card, and Epson grabbed Desdemona's hand and successfully dashed out of the house and made his across the field to the second house, Farmer Grey's house, where the bulk of his friends were gathered. This left the Indians in command of Brown house. I had mentioned before that, on each turn, Tony would dice (20 percent chance) to see if other colonials would show up. He was amazingly successful, for three others did appear. The result was that in Grey house, there were, I think, about nine colonials. We Alcohoncas were outnumbered. The initial Alcohonka force numbered eight, and two of our braves had consistently failed morale tests and were off the field, leaving six. This was obviously a bad day for the Alcohonkas and it appeared that it was time to cut our losses and fade into the woods. Reinforcing our decision to leave Brown house was the fact that on the next turn, Tony gave every one of his settlers Move orders, and when the Move card appeared, the whole mass surged out of Grey house, shouting and screaming and cursing and biting their shields. "Enough is enough" is an old Alcohonka saying, and off we went. Back to PW Review August 1995 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1995 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. 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