1 . I expected about five or six PW members for our club meeting on Friday night, and instead, got eight. The object of the game, of course, was to keep the players busy for a couple of hours. What I decided to do, therefore, partly as a challenge to me, was to set up a 'different' type of game, a true 'toy soldier' type of game. On the table-top was my gridded green cloth of 2-inch squares. The figures were all singly-mounted, with only one man, one figure, permitted per square. Due to the gridded map layout, movement was restricted...people could move horizontally or vertically, and there were special provisions for'side-stepping' and changing face and formation. I set the game in the American Revolutionary War era. The American forces were set up on the table... their job was to hold some 7 towns, while the British army, initially located off-board, could show up anywhere on its baseline. The sequence for the half-bound was fairly simple. (a) It leads off with what I term "opportunity fire" by the Active Side (AS). He dices to see how many of his units already on the field may fire before he moves. There are only a limited number of units eligible to fire. In the game, on the initial turn, with all of the British units off-table, they had to forego their first 'opportunity fire'. (b) The AS then moves his troops, and this is followed by (c) An across-the-table firing phase of all of the Non-Active Side's (NAS) units. (d) A melee resolution phase follows (e) During the previous fire phases of (a) and (c), and the melee phase of (d), units accumulated casualty figures, and it was on this phase (e), that the actual effect of the casualties were determined. On Turn #1, we got all the way up to phase (b), the second phase of the first half of the first bound, and I was in trouble already. Bob Liebl commanded the British side, and his comment was to the effect: "I move my troops onto the table, phase (b), and the other guys fire and kill me (phase c). Why can't I fire?" Bob was unhappy with the fact that (a) he had to skip his own first 'opportunity fire' phase, and (b), that the American forces were already in place and could blast away at him as soon as he showed up. I've noted before that Bob does not like his people to be fired upon without returning fire. There are lots of gamers who agree with him... "when one fires, all fire!". NAPOLEON'S BATTLES is typical of this... all units fire twice each bound (first, the non-phasing side's units, then the phasing side's units)... and FIRE AND FURY follows this procedure. I had no quick-fix for Bob in this game, but I promised him that in all of my future games, I would insert in the sequence four special Bob Liebl Fire Phases. I also heard bad things about the ubiquitous Rally Zone. In the game, the probabilities-of-hit (POH) were around 60 percent, and so there was a 60 percent chance that, when a unit fired, a man was placed in the zone. Once in the zone, he had a 75 percent chance to reappear. Looking at the statistics, to kill a man, first you had to hit him (60%) and then he had to fail his test to reappear (25%)... so that the 'true' casualty rate per figure was .6 x .25, or 15 percent. Another way of stating this is that you had to shoot a guy over 6 times before he finally fell down. I goofed on this... I should have increased the 'true' casualty rate per figure to around 50 percent, i.e.. shoot him twice before he's gone. Fall In 2. Went to FALL IN at Gettysburg in November. Many, many dealers, and lots and lots of book sellers and board-game sellers in the flea market. I didn't think the flea market was as wonderful as in past years... I kept my purchases to a minimum. It seemed to me that the place was empty... in the gaming area on Saturday afternoon, I counted around 21 empty tables with another slightly larger number of games going on. The layout of the Gettysburg HMGS convention is awkward, and it's hard to get a handle on the number of attendees. The flea market and a small number of games are held at the main hotel, while the dealers' and gaming areas are about a half-mile away, accessible via a shuttle bus that continually makes the round trip every ten minutes. The front desk indicated that the number of pre-registrations was well over 500, and that they had received another 500 walk-in registrations on Saturday. I had pre-registered for the price of $10, while Fred Haub, who accompanied me to the convention, hadn't pre-registered, so he was tagged at the door for $20. I thought this was fairly outrageous! Renaissance Warfare 3. Jeff Wiltrout dropped by. He had been appointed an 'official play tester for Terry Gore's rules RENAISSANCE WARFARE (RW). About a year ago, at one of the HMGS conventions, I sat in on one of the first run-throughs of RW. This was presented in a room with very poor lighting, which didn't help matters any. A huge chart of the RW modifiers and parameters had been set up at one end of the table, but since you couldn't see the chart, you couldn't read it. And the host wasn't too certain about the rules... all in all, a bad beginning. Jeff guided me through the RW procedures for a couple of hours. RW is a throwback to the days of 15-to-20 years ago. Terry Gore has resurrected the old-fashioned, detailed troop listings so beloved by WRG fans. For example, there are nine different types of units for movement purposes... armored infantry, close order infantry, loose order infantry, skirmish infantry... each has its own movement rate. Just as all the old rules sets listed, in great detail, a huge chart of 'figures versus factors' to obtain casualties, in effect, so does RW. Here, for example, in melee, one goes down several lists: (a) First, the status of your own unit. There are 6 possible categories... elite, veteran, etc....each yielding a point value from +2 to -2 toward your total. (b) Then you look at the enemy unit's armor classification (6 categories... full plate is -2, while unarmoured is +2) (c) Then, your own weapon factor (8 possibilities). And these values change from melee round to melee round, as the units are supposed to discard their initial weapon of contact (for example, knights toss their first-round lances away and whip out their swords). (d) Then there are a bunch of miscellaneous modifiers (16 of them) which must be selected (pikes get an additional "+" against charging cavalry, and 'frenzied troops in first round of combat' get a +3, and you get a +1 for stand overlaps, and so on, and so on). (e) Having finished adding up all the modifiers, which can total, say, around 6 points, then multiply 'em by the number of stands in contact, say, two... this gives you a factor of 12, which is translated to mean one casualty plus 20 percent chance of a second. The result of all this hocus-pocus is to come out with one or two hits on each unit in combat per round. The critical moment occurs when sufficient casualties are caused for a stand to be lost... here, a morale check is mandated. I thought that this was much ado about nothing. If we're only going to knock off one or two casualties per-round, why go through all the agonizing and detailed modifier listings each round? Of interest is that missile casualties started out by a simple procedure... 10-sided dice were thrown for each stand and, depending upon weapon range, you had to toss an 8 or a 6, etc, to cause a casualty. But even here, there was no escaping it... a listing of 23 possible modifiers had to be looked at... target type, target in cover, enemy armor type, did your firers move, firing unit has 'defend orders', target is uphill, firing unit is levy, firing unit not moving and has second rank... and on and on and on. Jeff was the poor fella who, round after round, had to go through the appropriate modifiers for both firing and melee. I merely sat there and tried to stay awake. I've always had difficulty with the relative assessment of combat values set up by the authors. In RW, for example, if your opponent has 'full plate armor', that deducts a -2 from your melee value. If he is only 'armoured', that's a -1 to your points, and if the poor man is merely 'mailed', that doesn't affect you at all. Pike get a +2 against any foot, but this is only for the first round... in subsequent rounds, their weapon value is zero. 'Edged weapons' get a +1 in the first round, and a +2 in subsequent rounds. Why go through all this needless pseudo-accu racy? If heavily armored knights smash up against opposing foot... let 'em go WHOMP! and score a few casualties. If they chose the wrong opponents, say a contingent of pike, then let the pike go WHOMP!... and have the cavalry back off. It's almost always fairly easy to tell which side has an advantage in a given combat, but when you try to tie particular values to all the parameters involved, and quantify the factors in nitty-gritty fashion, that's when you run into trouble. In short, I wasn't truly impressed with RW for this run-through. Back to PW Review October 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