I was recently invited to a "birth-of-a-rules-set" session, involving a British colonial wargame, circa 1850, essentially a horse-and-musket wargame. This was a first cut at a colonial game, which the author was testing for eventual presentation at a convention for, perhaps, 8 participants. For the test set-up, there were 12 or so Pathan units (regiments?), each of 12 figures, pitted against an equal assortment of British troops, also around 12 men each. I commanded the center of the Pathan troop deployment... I had 4 units. These were a 'fanatical' cavalry regiment, a musketeer regiment, a jezail regiment, and a regiment of swordsman. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to exercise my fanatics, since they were destroyed by British fire power even before they blinked. Activation of these units was done via a series of 'order chits', which were assigned at the beginning of the turn. I diced for the total number of chits I received, which could range from a minimum of 3 to a maximum of 6. A chit assigned to a particular regiment allowed it to move or to fire, or to change formation, etc. Another 2 chits assigned to a unit permitted a second action. Units couldn't be assigned an unrestricted number of chits, however. Three chits per unit were the maximum permissible allowed to be assigned. In my case, of course, since I had a total of 4 units, if I assigned 3 chits to a regiment to perform two functions, i.e., more than a single chit to a unit, that would deny one or more of my other units their ability to act. The function of "chitty assigment" each turn, therefore, had to be looked at extensively by the opposing commanders. The table measured 4 feet in depth, and my troops were all initially set up on my baseline. On Bound #1, there appeared, directly across from my units, on the British baseline, a 4-pound gun, and nothing else. The British battery fired, and took out a couple of my cavalry. When firing, the gun first looked up a number of Fire Factors, such as +2 for short range, -2 for long range, +2 for British fire, -1 for soft cover, and so on. Then the total Fire Factors (FF) were referenced to a chart, along the top of which were the FF, and along the side of which were the number of figures firing. Here, the British gun got its +2 for being British, a +1 for firing at cavalry, and a -1 for the fact that the cavalry were in open order, a total FF of 2. The gun was defined to have the effect of 4 figures firing, and so I referenced, on the chart, FF (2) versus figures (4), and discovered that the result was "2.96"... which meant that my mounted troopers suffered an automatic loss of 2 men and had a 96 percent chance of a third. With a 96 percent chance, it was hard for the British player to miss. Three men down. To rub salt in the wound, the British commander expended an additional 2 order chitties on the gun, and had it fire again. BOOM! and 3 more men were down. And then yet another British unit fired, this one infantry, and 1 more cavalryman bit the dust. This was the very first firing phase, the very first British volley, and 7 of my 9-man fanatical cavalry regiment were gone! The horrific results of the firing chart were discovered early in the game. I remember that another British unit fired, added up its Fire Factors, FF, looked at the chart with 12 men firing, and the 12 good men wiped out 10 other good men in the target unit. All this without the need to expend another 2 chits for a second volley! Comments Many, many comments concerning how to incorporate a reduced fire power effect were offered to the author, who we shall call "Mr. Z" for anonymity. Z accepted them all, indicating that the chart would, indeed, be changed. Of interest to me was the fact that Z decided to stick with the fire chart for the entire game, instead of changing it on the spot, The result, of course, was ordained... British guns easily completely cleared the field of those pesky Pathans. The same chart of factors-versus-figures for determining casualties was used for both firing and hand-to-hand, and it therefore affected the entire game. It was noted that not only was the chart off kilter, but one or two of the chart modifiers were askew. For example, for the melee procedures, when a pursuing victorious unit contacted a unit it had just routed, the routing unit fought back just as well as it had prior to routing... there were no plus and minus routing modifiers. Another problem showed itself in how the rules treated the units on the table... sometimes the approach was that of a single figure (man-on-man) skirmish game, and at other times, the approach was that of unit-on-unit. For example, located on the field was a "house", a small structure about 6 inches by 6 inches. Into this "house" rushed a regiment of 12 men, after making their normal infantry move of 9 inches. This movement treated the regiment as an entire unit. Individual movement distances were not measured. And all 12 men in the regiment had to be either "in" the house, or "out" of the house... no halfway measures were permitted. In truth, of course, the "house" was not truly a "house"... it represented a small village, with the capability of holding an entire regiment of, perhaps, 200 'real' men. Once in the village, the 12 men in the unit readied themselves for the firing phase. One wall of the structure had 3 portals... 2 "windows" and I "door". Only 2 men, 2 figures, could fire out of each portal, which meant that not all of the 12 men could fire out of the village. In this instance, by restricting fire, the game reverted back to a single figure action, with each of the 12 men in the regiment treated as a skirmish figure. Another instance of this difference in treatment was seen in melee... the second rank of men in a unit couldn't participate, so here we essentially had a man-on-man affair... only those men in contact would fight. In firing, however, the entire second rank could add their Fire Factors in to the volley, and the unit was thus treated as a single entity. The sequence was a simple one, with the basic phases as: Native move British fire Resolve melee British move Native fire Resolve melee. Note that during the bound, both sides get to fire, full effect. An advancing unit gets to fire just as much as a stationary one. To my mind, this approach for the horse-and-musket era, which doesn't give a defending, stationary force more fire power than a moving force, is off base. During the time defined by a bound, the stationary force would be able to expend more time devoted to loading and firing weapons than the moving force, which would have to expend its time in advancing, and not in loading weapons. To me, therefore, in a rules set for this era, the sequence should provide for giving a static defense a wee bit more fire power than an advancing offensive force. In the past, I've commented on this problem when discussing Rich Hasenaeur's ACW rules, FIRE AND FURY, since Rich also gives both sides equal firing opportunities, regardless of whether or not one side or the other is stationary. And note when I say a "problem"... it seems to be a problem only in my eyes, since no one else, since the rules were first published, has ever commented on it. Another item of note is that in this circa-1850 game, the total number of units set out on the table for both sides was pretty much equal. About half of the native units had no missiles to fire... they were solely "melee" units, and had to rely on their hand-to-hand capability to give the native forces any chance of breaking even. This gave the Brits, with their tremendous firepower, a huge advantage, since they could demolish the native forces well before contact was made. Even the presence of jezail-bearing units on the native side did little to even things up. Although the jezails had a longer range (36 inches) than did the British rifles (24 inches), the jezail-bearers could fire ony half the time, since their weapons were so much more difficult to load than the rifles. Overwhelming Firepower One way to resolve the problem of overwhelming firepower on the part of the British... and again, the term "problem" is referenced to reflect how the situation appeared to my own eyes... is to examine a game played with Larry Brom's colonial rules, THE SWORD AND THE FLAME (TSATF). TSATF gets around this 'uneveness' of fire power versus melee power, by assigning to the native force lots of melee units, so that some portion of the natives at least have a chance, even though several of their units get blown away, to close for combat. In the original version of the rules, Z used an assortment of dice... 6-sided, 8 sided, 10-sided, etc... which I termed a "groping for dice" game, as each unit had its own particular type of die to toss for fire and melee. In this current version, I saw percentage dice, and a couple of 20-sided dice, and a 6-sided die. A definite improvement. Despite the problem areas, I found the gaming session extremely interesting, in particular, in seeing how the players reacted to rules which sometimes weren't quite appropriate. Many times during my own rules development and gaming presentations, unexpected results occur, unanticipated .and unwanted events pop up because the charts and tables prove to be way out of whack. Most irritating to me is to see a published set of rules, wherein the author touts the accuracy and completeness of his rules set, which despite (perhaps because of?) pre-publishing play-testing still contains a number of errors. Back to PW Review June 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