Tony Figlia set out his 15mm ECW figures, and prepared to guide us through the rules book of FOR GOD, KING AND COUNTRY (FG), published in 1998 by the Canadian Wargamers Group. The author is Bruce McFarlane. Bruce is fairly prolific... his immediate titles that come to mind are HABITANTS & HIGHLANDERS (Seven Years War), ROCKETS RED GLARE (War of 1812), THE WHITES OF THEIR EYES (American Revolution), and GREAT BATTLES OF WW II... Volumes I and II (Canadians in Europe). I believe there's also a medieval rules set, and there may be others. The FG booklet has 66 pages in it, and of these 66, 6 are devoted to the rules themselves. Thereby hangs a tale. Six of us were at tableside, and there was a unanimous feeling that the FG rules were incomplete. One of our group noted that Bruce McFarlane's efforts are exemplary in that all of his works each contain around ten or so scenarios, lots of historical information, but that whenever he, the gamer, had tried out a set, there always seemed to be lot of unanswered questions. Bruce is an advocate of card systems, which automatically places me in his comer of the ring. When active, a side draws a card, on which is noted the actions the side will have in moving. In his various rules sets, he's experimented with different approaches in his use of the cards. For example, in one rules set, when a side advanced into combat, if it made contact before it had used all of its actions, it received a free strike at the opposing unit. Then, when the opposing side drew a card, it struck back, one strike for each action on its card. And then, when the original side drew a card, it was its time to strike again. Note that this differs greatly from the ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill melee system used in wargaming, in which, when contact is made, the sides get simultaneous hacks at each other. In short, I'm a McFarlane advocate, but I must admit that for FG, I was disappointed. Early in the battle, when the Royalists drew an action card, a 3-stand unit of Royalist cavalry contacted a 6-stand unit of Parliamentary musketeers. The 3 cavalry stands bumped up against 3 stands of the musketeers, and the remaining 3 musketeer stands stood by. The rules book states: Every stand may expend actions meleeing enemy units in contact with its base. A stand can only melee one opposing stand per action... A close reading of this indicates that only stands in contact engage in the combat. An even closer reading indicates that a stand gets to strike for every one of its actions. And so in the first round of combat, since the Royalists had drawn a 3-action card, each of the 3 cavalry stands struck at the opposing musketeers 3 times, and vice versa. Each unit then took a morale test, and both passed. Now it was Parliament's half-turn, a 2-action card was drawn, and the melee continued. But the question immediately popped up... what do we do with the 3 musketeer stands not in contact? Can they "fold over' and attack the cavalry's flank? If so, do we assign one additional musketeer stand to each cavalry stand... or do they all charge in on one stand... there are lots of ways of doing this. But the rule book, even though it apparently anticipates multiple-round melees, is silent on the matter of bringing additional stands into combat.. The Royalist heavy cavalry started out with a Combat Value of 5 per stand. A modifer of -2 was deducted from this Combat Value, since the cavalry were "frontally attacking infantry". This brought the cavalry's Combat Value down to 3. A 10-sided die roll was tossed for each stand of horsemen... and tosses below the modified Combat Value produced losses to the enemy. A toss of 3 produced 3 casualties, a toss of 2 produced 2 casualties, a toss of 1 produced 1 casualty. In similar fashion, each stand of musketeers had a Combat Value of 1 ... a toss of 1 would produce 1 casualty on the cavalry. I noted that a unit of 'high quality' pikes had a Combat Value of 4. When it tossed its 10-sided die, it could produce 1, or 2, or 3, or 4 casualties on attacking horsemen. If attacked by heavy cavalry, the cavalry's Combat Value was reduced from 5 to 3, as in the previous example. There was no additional negative modifier for the cavalry attacking pike. In other words, the modifier for "frontally attacking infantry" was the same if the cavalry charged into musketeers or tried to impale themselves on pikes. It seemed to me that the pike were getting short-changed... and, perhaps, the musketeers were getting "over-changed". Somehow, the combat values seemed a wee bit skewed. One item that we all noted was that when the active side drew its action card, its stands fired and moved and went directly into contact with the enemy. There was no provision for defensive fire in the rules. After some 4 bounds, we gave up on FG... too much like a board-game... perhaps it was a board-game. Musket range was 6 inches, and the slowest cavalry, moving at 5 inches per action, could swoop in from beyond musket range, directly into contact, no defensive fire allowed. This swooping capability sort of reminded me of that other superior set of rules VOLLEY AND BAYONET. But now, what to do with all the figures on the table? The solution... Brian Dewitt was present, and he quickly pulled out his ECW set of 'chip rules'. This is a bidding game... the sides select a bunch of chips, and the side with the greater number goes. Green chips let your units move and fire, white lets 'em rally, blue lets 'em change formation, red lets 'em melee, and so on. But I must quickly announce that Brian's game, because of the chips, is, to me, a Class C Abomination. Class C Abominations are those games which clutter the table with paraphenalia like order chitties, or colored pipe cleaners, or toothpicks, or Brian's chips, or whatever, to denote unit actions. Brian's chips, each about an inch-and-a-half in diameter (the size of the units on which they were placed), were hard to ignore. Brian's chip game is also a data-sheet game, which is fine with me. When a unit takes and records its sixth hit, it's no more... it simply disintegrates. One of these days, I'll take a second and more careful look at FG. I refuse to believe that Bruce McFarlane left so many holes in his rules... it just doesn't sound like the man... Back to PW Review July 1999 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 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