Duncan Macfarlane, he who edits and publishes the British glossy WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED, came up to me at the HMGS convention FALL IN!, and presented me with a copy of BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER (BAB), stating: "How'd you like to review these rules?" "How'd I like...?" Certainly, I'd like... And so, at the November PW meeting, I brought in my ACW 54mm people, some trees, terrain, etc., enough to get started so as to roughly trek through the rules for familiarization purposes. BAB is authored by I. M. Janci; it was published in 1997 by H G Walls. I should note that this article was written after only one brief hour-long bout with BAB. There were three of us concerned with the scenario... I, as host and umpire, and two players who pushed troops for the opposing sides. We came away unanimously dissatisfied with the content of the rules. This may have been due to the manner in which I set up this first game, or, in part, to the rules content (or lack thereof) themselves. In any case, I intend giving BAB the full treatment... eventually laying out at least half-a-dozen scenarios before the final verdict is in. A beautifully laid-out soft-covered booklet, 8½ x 11 in size, BAB consists of 48 thick, glossy pages, well illustrated, with easily readable large text. This sounds good, but of the 48 pages, only 13 are devoted to the ACW rules... all else is advertisement and pretty colored photos. And of the 13 rules pages, half of each page contains a huge line drawing... the end result is that you get some 7 pages of ACW rules and procedures out of 48. Toward the back of the booklet, there are another 20 pages containing scenario ideas, and rules variations oriented toward the French And Indian War. BAB defines a squad as 10 men, i.e., 10 figures, singly mounted. In the introductory scenario, BAB suggests that each side be given 10 squads, i.e., 100 men per side. Hah! Not for my introductory game. Here is where I first departed from BAB's prescribed procedures. I gave the Rebs 4 squads, and the Union 3. And I further distorted this introductory run-through by limiting the size of the squads to 5 men each instead of 10. And so, for our ground-breaking epic, we had a total of 20 Southerners versus 15 Yanks. The key reason I wanted to limit the size of the encounter is that BAB, as a skirmish game, requires that each man on the field be tracked as to whether or not his musket is loaded or unloaded. All the men in a squad do not have to fire their weapons simultaneously... hence each man can load and fire independently of his fellow squad members. I had no desire to keep records on 100 men. In my 54mm ACW collection, I have two types of figures: first, there is what I term an 'action pose'... men in a running pose with musket held horizontally. Second, there is a 'loading' pose', wherein the man holds his musket vertically. And so, in our introductory BAB effort, whenever a man fired his weapon, we'd replace his figure with one in a 'load musket' pose. The BAB booklet suggests that you use a 'puff of smoke' to indicate whether or not a man fired his musket... too many times in the past, however, I've seen the field become cluttered with random puffs... it becomes impossible to determine who has a loaded weapon and who doesn't. Battle began The battle began. The Yanks and the Rebs came onto the field... each side immediately sought cover, and the game instantly deteriorated into a stagnant fire fight. No movement, just a lot of repetitious loading and firing... not the way to run a test game. And so I told the Reb commander that his objective was to capture Ruined House # 1 within a couple of turns. The field was dotted with woods, and assorted 'ruined houses'... #1 was situated on the Yankee side of the field, thus requiring the Southerners to mount an ever-moving attack against the position. Now we come to the first of 'Things I Don't Like' (TIDL) about BAB. In the sequencing system, each squad is given a card, all the cards are mixed in a single deck, and two are drawn at random... these two squads can move, fire, etc. The immediate question is: if cards are drawn for squads on opposing sides, what's the order of preference? Does firing come first? Should one dice to see who moves first? Alas! BAB gives absolutely no guidance on this matter. I noted that in our game, one fella was rather like me... he moved immediately... whereas the opposing commander was a wee bit more cautious... he waited to see what his opposite number would do before he acted. This, of course, is not the intent of a simultaneous movement procedure. In and of itself, the problem of simultaneity is rather easily solved... but that's not the point. It's disheartening when an author says "Pay me $20, please, for my rules book", and his glossy, large print text completely ignores so basic an issue. Movement Movement in BAB is nicely stylized. Toss two 10-sided dice for each squad, and the total is the distance to be moved. One takes the squad sergeant as a reference token, moves him the appropriate distance, and the men in his squad now move up, distributing themselves within 6 inches of the sergeant. This means that if the diced-for movement distance was 9 inches, then after the sergeant moves his 9 inches, the men in his squad can actually move 15 inches, as long as they stay within the 6-inch command radius. One of the things I liked about BAB is that it limits itself to the effect of four weapons: rifled musket, carbine, shotgun, and pistol. Unlike some of the current skirmish sets of wild, wild, west rules, wherein the author goes completely ape in listing 34 types of weapons (the Mannlicher .52, the Oppenheimer 8.45, the Ingram 7.62, the Glock 9mm, and so on, each with its oh-so-historically-accurate probability of hit), BAB is refreshing in its simplified approach to weaponry. For the rifled musket, for example, short range extends to 20 inches. Toss a 10-sided die, and there's a 40 percent chance of hitting a target in the open. The rifled musket actually reaches out to 40 inches... here, there's a 30 percent chance to hit. The scale is given at 5 yards to the inch... hence 40 inches gives the rifled musket a 200-yard range. Each time a squad's card is drawn, its members may complete one action... they may move or fire or load their weapons. Whenever a man is hit, he's removed from the battle... a kill... and the squad is given a marker to note that the next time its card is drawn, then before it does anything, it must pass a morale test. BAB furnishes a 16-card 'morale deck', from which a card is drawn at the appropriate time. The 16 results are divided into five categories... one is 'officer shot', one is 'sergeant shot', one is 'fall back', one is 'charge', and the other is 'test for desertion'. The test for desertion is most prevalent... it appears on 12 of the 16 morale deck cards. Now, here's the second item on my TIDL list. While each squad has its own sergeant, company officers also play a role... they command from three to six squads. If a morale card result of 'officer shot' is drawn, what does this have to do with the morale test of the squad actually undergoing the test? The officer may be way down the field, far from the testing unit. And if the result is 'sergeant shot', BAB has no words to indicate that, in place of the man we just removed from the squad (the man who was just hit, forcing the morale test), we substitute the sergeant as the actual casualty. Even if the author wanted to have the sergeant as a 'gratuitous', additional casualty, one would think the text would discuss the issue... at table-side, we definitely discussed the issue, devoting some 15 minutes to it. Last, but certainly not least, on my TIDL list are the melee procedures. a. Remember that two cards are drawn to indicate which squads are active. This means that the maximum number of squads that can be coordinated in a charge is two. This, of course, is a decision of the author... I assume he didn't want too much coordination at this low-level skirmish action. b. If you are lucky enough to draw the right squad card at the right time, and charge home, there's no provision for defensive fire. The substitute for this is that the attacker must immediately pull a 'morale test' card. c. The attacker, upon making contact, controls the actual contacts... he pairs off his men against the defender, a maximum of 2-men-on-1. But what happens if the defender has 'excess' men standing by? Can they engage? BAB has no words on this. d. The rules book states that a defending sergeant or officer can assist in melee... they "... receive a special modifier to their melee die throw." And what is this 'special modifier'? BAB is silent. e. The text seems to indicate that a 'defending' sergeant or officer may engage in melee... why only the defender? How about the attacker's sergeant or officer? BAB is silent. f. Once engaged, men are paired off; they each toss a 10-sided die, add modifiers (+2 for hard cover, etc.), and the low total is killed. Simple enough... but when does the melee end? What happens if two men tie? Is it a fight to the end? The text seems to indicate there's only one round of melee... but it's rather hazy. At table-side, we were all unhappy with the gaps in the BAB procedures we had uncovered in our simple 5-bound game. To me, this comes from devoting lots of space to advertisements and photos and scenarios, i.e., making the booklet look 'pretty', instead of directly addressing the rules themselves. Every one of the situations that cropped up in our game must have occurred during the pre-publication play-testing phases. The cover of the booklet states: 'Revised and Expanded Edition'... needless to say, we were not impressed. I can understand how the author, as he states in the introduction, wanted a set of rules "... to be fun, easy-to-learn, and be played in a few hours or so... (and that)... it could be learned by novices in five minutes." BAB meets all his criteria... it is a quick, easily-learned game... but unfortunately, because of the lack of explanatory test, the rules booklet itself is not quite ready for prime time. Brother Against Brother: Part 2 Another Look at Brother Against Brother Back to PW Review November 1997 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 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