Now we look at IRONSIDES, a set of 15mm rules for the English Civil War, written by Howard Whitehouse. Tony Figlia again brought the rules book over ... Tony seems to have an inexhaustible supply of these rules sets. Helas! IRONSIDES didn't even last as long as FIELDS OF HONOR. There were five of us at table side, and the rules required more discussion and interpretation than playing. I should note this was the second outing of IRONSIDES and we still had trouble with the text. Five of us, of course, meant there were five interpretations for every rule. IRONSIDES uses Leadership Points (LP) to move troops, and the LP's stem from the officers and the units themselves. Each commander was graded, each unit was graded and the different grades had to be referenced to a table to determine the available points. For example, to move a line of units straight ahead, with no deviation, cost a single LP point for the whole mass. If any unit decides to break out on its own, i.e., wheel, or change course, that particular unit requires the expenditure of additional LP. This is all well and good, except that every turn, every commander on the field, and every unit on the field had to dice for their LP for that turn. There is a unique handling of the morale procedures. All units have a Combat value (CV) of around 2 to 6. This CV sets the reference for the morale test. Here, units are given two 6-sided dice and there are different results depending upon whether or not each of two dice was lower than the CV, or one die was lower than the CV, or no dice were lower. In all, we lost patience with IRONSIDES due to our continually fighting with the rules ("Hey, Tony, read that section again and this time, more slowly!') We'll try IRONSIDES again, no doubt, as we will FIELDS OF HONOR. But let's just say, for now, they're not too high on our priority list. Back to PW Review July 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. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com