I heard some good things... in fact, some excellent things... about PIQUET (PT), and then I heard some not-so-good things... and so I thought it was time I tried the rules myself. PT is a card-driven system, and, in theory, it should warm the cockles of my heart. In truth, my sole interest in PT centers on the card-procedures of action and movement... the remainder of the system, i.e., firing, morale, melee, etc., to me, are all secondary. 1. WHAT WE DID DO. I did use the PT action decks. There are some 30 cards per side, drawn altemately, and each card denotes a permissible action of one, or more, units. The sequence govemed by these cards is unique: a. Each side tosses a 20-sided die (D20). The higher toss is given the difference, called "impulse points (IP)", of the 2 tosses. Assume Side A is high, and has 12 IP. b. Side A now tums up a card... this costs him 1 IP. If he wants to do what's on the card, and move a unit, or a number of coordinated units under a command group, it costs him another IP. Each separated unit, i.e., uncoordinated, costs an IP on its own. Firing has no card of its ovvn.. it appears that you can fire on any card, but it costs 1 IP for each individual unit to fire. c. After Side A expends all his IP, the sides roll a D20 again. Again the high toss is given the initiabve IP's for this second series of actions are now limited, however. There are only 20 IP per bound. Hence in the example given above, the high side's maximum IP are now 8, since 12 IP were already used up. d. After the full 20 IP are used up, the decks are shuffled and a new turn begins. 2. WHAT WE DID NOT DO. PT employs different dice to do different things. The author, Bob Jones, has gone dice-happy. Each unit is diced for... it will have a base-die of either a D4, or a D6, or a D8, or a D10, or a D12. a. PT has a series of tables... you may, depending upon your army and its era, adjust your type of die up for its weaponry. Then you adjust again, up or down, for the type of troops... militia, regulars, elites, etc. Call this final die value DV. b. Now you move. In difficult terrain, you adjust your DV, and compare it with a D8... if your adjusted DV toss is not higher, you don't move. c. Now you fire. Depending upon the terrain, you may have to adjust your DV down, giving you another qpe of die. Then you toss your adjusted DV, and compare it with a D6. The difference is the number of hits on the target. d. Now you enter melee. Again, your type of DV may go up or down, as does your opponent's Each side tosses its adjusted DV, and high toss causes casualties to the lower. e. Now you test morale. This time, depending upon the number of hits on your unit, you toss your DV, comparing it against a reference die toss... the reference ranges from a D4 to a D12, depending upon casualties. f. Now all the above, to my mind, is downright silly! I call this a 'groping-for-dice' game. The same results could have been obbined using, as normal people do, percentage dice. 9. CHAINMAIL, I think, was the first set of nules to use different dice types. I've played other similar sets, each time becoming confused because I had no idea of what type of die to pick up and toss. Instead of an array of different dice, a simple set of corrections could have been applied to percentage dice tosses, since all Jones is really doing is adjusting, in an awkward way, the percentages involved. For example, look at this table: If I toss a... and you toss a... then my chance of winning is... D8 D6 64% D10 D6 72% D10 D8 61% h. There's no groping for different dice. Firing at a unit under cover? Instead of reducing my die type, subtract 10 percent from my basic hit-percentage. i. What I'm leading up to is that we did not employ all of PT's multiple-dice-type system in the play test. For the most part, I went back to the ol' percentage dice procedure. The 'groping-for-dice' game procedure is simply the glik, the gilt, the gloss, the glitter, applied to the nules to show they're different from the other guy's. In my opinion, it adds nothing at all to the way the game plays. j. For some of the procedures, however, such as firing, we followed the regular PIQUET procedures, tossing two different kinds of dice. And so, having described what I didn't do, and what I did do, on vvith the game. On the table were my ACW 30mm figures. This first familiarization had two small forces facing each other. Both Confederates and Yankees each had 3 brigades of infantry, one brigade of cavalry, and 2 artillery battenes. An infantry brigade consisted of three regiments. There were another two regiments in the cavalry brigade, plus 2 batteries. Add 'em all up and we had a total of 11 regiments plus 2 guns on each side... 13 'units' on the field. PIQUET gives each side an action deck of some 30 cards. In addition to the 30, we were pemmitted to draw others... the number we drew vvas 1/3 of the number of our 'units', which came out to be 4 additional cards. One of the Yankee additional cards turned out to be a flank- marching card... one 3-regiment brigade, if your dice toss was good enough, would come in on the left flank of the Rebels. One of the additional Confederate cards gave their cavalry a "plus" when testing morale. The additional cards, therefore, were special in nature, unlike the general content of the other cards, which had such standard actions as "Mover, or Deploy, or Resolve melee.. Jeff Wiltrout was Yankee commander, and won, for the first series of Impulse Points (IP), a total of 15 IP. He commenced to draw his cards, with each draw costing him 1 IP. He drew a "Move" card, and decided to move his 3 infantry brigades. Each brigade, with all the regiments in it acting in unison, was a 'command group', hence it took only 1 IP to move the entire brigade. After moving all his brigades, 3 in number, for a total of 4 IP (1 IP to draw a card, and 1 for every command group that acted), he had 11 points left. He continued to draw cards, expending points, and having done all he wanted to do, "banked" a couple of IP to use for opportunity fire later in the battle. The Confederate commander, Fred Haub, was pemmitted to bank 5 IP for opportunity fire. One of Jeff's additional special card draws gave him an extra point to be banked... he was allowed a total of 6 IP in the bank. Haub was extremely unlucky in his card draws. He had a continual run of such items as "Deploy" (once you've deployed all your units, any additional "Deploy" cards are a waste of IP), or "Dress your line" which permits your force to do absolutely nothing. One note on the "Dress your line" cards. Here, in our ACW game, each side had 5 of these delaying, do-nothing cards out of 30 in the deck, and they seemed to pop up interminably. In the Napoleonic version of PIQUET, the Spanish army has a total of 11 "Dress your line" cards out of 28. If offered the chance to command the Spanish army, I would definitely decline the offer.. I hope you would, too... There are 2 "Deploy" cards in the ACW deck, and it took some time for all the units in the field to move into position and deploy themselves for battle. There are no "Fire" cards...if a regiment's muskets are loaded (there are 2 "Load" cards), it can fire on its own active phase, but each regiment that fires costs 1 IP. And after your unit fires, you wait and wait and wait for the "Load" card. Your units can also fire during the opponent's active phase... here's where you use up your "banked" IP... opportunity hre costs 1 IP per firing regiment. 10 Years Ago I have mentioned before that the PIQUET action system reminds me of a card system that we, at the Simon ping-pong table, tried and discarded over 10 years ago. Why?? Because the resultant unit actions were so 'choppy' that we lost patience in trying to coordinate and follow through with the units under our command. In part, PIQUET has solved the coordination problem... by moving an entire command group, and having every unit in the group perform the same function, you can save IP and get several units to work in unison. But there still remains the 'choppy' factor. For example, one of Fred Haub's Confederate regiments, on a "Move" card, ran up and bonked heads with a Wiltrout Yankee unit garrisoning a town. And there, the action stopped, with the units just about touching, facing each other, each waiting to get their hands on the opponents' collective necks. The wait occurred because melee doesn't start unffl a ~Melee resolution. card appears in the deck. As cards were drawn, therefore, the units would fire, hope for a "Reloadn card, fire again, etc., but no melee. Now, in truth, I see nothing too wrong with this... I like the pre-melee 'firefight' aspect of this type of action. It can be explained that the units refused to close, and prefer to pot at each other. Sounds good to me. But let me tell you a story. In the mid-'80's, I set up a Napoleonic encounter at one of the HMGS conventions. I brought my 20mm collection to the convention, and had the Brits and French go at each other. And I used a card system of movement. During one bound, a unit of French Cuirassiers, on an action card, charged into a British line unit. No melee yet, said I, "You've got to wait until a "Melee" card is drawn." And so other cards were drawn, the British infantry unit occasionally firing at the Cuirassiers, the Cuirassiers standing there, while the commander of the Cuirassiers and the other French players got so angry, they began spitting teeth. "What a stupid sequence!," they shouted in unison. They didn't get around to Iynching me... but it was a close run thing. With that as background, I must ask the question... if it didn't go over in the mid-'80's, why would it go over now? In our ACW PIQUET game, the Haub Confederate regiment eventually got blown away before the "Resolve Melee" card was drawn. Yes. it was just like old times for me. On another topic, I should mention that I flubbed-the-dub as umpire... in particular, my error concerned firing results, and it probably skewed the entire course of the battle. No, not 'probably'... it did skew the battle. In the finng procedure, the firing unit tosses a die, the target tosses a reference die, and if the fires die is greater than the reference, the number of hits scored equals the difference in scores. Example: the firer tosses a 5, the reference die is a 3, hence 2 hits are inflicted on the target. Each regiment had 4 stands, and I read somewhere in the PIQUET text that 3 hits on the regiment destroyed a stand. We used casualty figures, and when a regiment accumulated 3 figures, I mandated that we take off a stand. Alas! This was the height of disinformation! I should have read further. What the text actually said was that, in essence, hits were not cumulative: "If fewer hits are scored than those necessary to remove a stand, they are ignored." This would have given the Haubian Rebel troops a second life, because, by the time I discovered this interesting sidelight, about half the Confederate army had been removed from the table. CORRECTIONS (from April 1998 isse) Note: I'm repeating the editorial from April 98 PW since it addresses issues raised in this article.--RL 2. In response to last month's article on PIQUET, Brent Oman, a PIQUET fan, dropped me a polite letter, pointing out, in polite fashion, all the flaws in the article, and showing me, in a very polite manner, where it was I had gone wrong. A very polite fellow Brent indicated that one of my major misinterpretations was that I failed to distinguish between a phase within the turn, and the turn itself. Each side has its action card deck of some 30 cards. The players toss a 20-sided die, and the high roll wins the initiative, and is given the difference between the tosses in points for his actions or impulses. When he uses up his impulses, dice are tossed again, and again high roller goes, getting the difference in the tosses. The limiting factor here is that the total number of impulses per phase is 20. In other words, if the first initiative player received 12 impulses, then, on the second comparative die toss, the maximum number of impulses the second initiative player would receive would be 8. This is repeated until 20 impulses are reached, at which time, a new phase of 20 impulses starts again. The players still draw from their decks without reshuffling. Phases continue until one player has completely gone through his 30-card sequence deck... that's when a new turn begins. Both sides then reshuffle their decks. There's another way for a new tum to start... that happens if the initiative rolls of both sides equal each other. In all, it appears I'm due for additional exposure to PIQUET to ensure I understand what I'm talking about. This, of course, has never stopped me before. Back to PW Review February 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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