This post looks at the playing of the Sunken Lane introductory scenario from the Pickett’s Charge rule set written by Dave Brown and published by Reisswitz Press, using his rules.
This is a well known action that occurred during the Battle of Antietam. The scenario involves 17 Union regiments and 16 Confederate regiments, with each side also having a couple of artillery batteries.
The game was played with 12mm Kallistra figures in a space roughly 6’ x 4’. Units are regiments formed from two bases, giving a unit frontage of 80mm.
Please use the ‘read more’ tab for the rest of this post, which has an AAR and then a discussion on some of the aspects of the rules.
The scenario allows for a free set-up. The Confederate veterans under Rodes were placed on the left and for the Union, Morris had his large but green regiments on their left. The main Union attack was to come in the centre, with the approach concealed by high ground.
To reduce the length of this post, I have put together a short YouTube video that shows the battlefield and initial troop dispositions and schematic plan (as shown in the previous post), which we may as well use again here for those interested.
The Sunken Lane 1862 from B&W blog on Vimeo.
The scenario runs for 16 turns and for a Union win, they must capture enough of the Sunken lane that they end the game with more of their own units in the lane (or beyond) than the enemy have. So the Confederate plan is simply to hold on!Turn 1 - The Union advance ..... except Morris, with the green regiments on the left flank, who hesitates.
Turn 2 - Above - Union units in the centre pour over the hill. This is where the Union will make their strongest attack, intending to break the Confederate centre. They immediately come under fire from Confederate guns, which score 5 hits on 132nd Pennsylvania - they take a ‘See the Elephant’ test and hold their nerve. Artillery is not overly effective in this system, but good dice happened here!
Storyboard - despite the central hill looking like the main danger to the Confederates, the smoothbore armed units of Meagher’s Irish Brigade, cross the smaller hill and fire into Wright on the Confederate left, scoring 3 hits and forcing a ‘see the elephant test’. This excellent shooting was done on a dice roll of ‘12’, which causes the firer to then test on the ‘Serendipity Table’.
They get a ‘Hurrah’ result (the Confederates have a rebel yell version), which means their general now regards them as a superior unit, allowing them to add +1 to all future 2D6 rolls. The defending Confederate unit goes ‘Whipped’ and retires 30cm, leaving a gap in Wright’s line. Is this where the Union will break the enemy line?
Storyboard - despite the central hill looking like the main danger to the Confederates, the smoothbore armed units of Meagher’s Irish Brigade, cross the smaller hill and fire into Wright on the Confederate left, scoring 3 hits and forcing a ‘see the elephant test’. This excellent shooting was done on a dice roll of ‘12’, which causes the firer to then test on the ‘Serendipity Table’.
They get a ‘Hurrah’ result (the Confederates have a rebel yell version), which means their general now regards them as a superior unit, allowing them to add +1 to all future 2D6 rolls. The defending Confederate unit goes ‘Whipped’ and retires 30cm, leaving a gap in Wright’s line. Is this where the Union will break the enemy line?
Turn 3 - Above - The action hots up, though the Union left still refuses to move forwards. Their significant forces in the centre move up for the charge and while this looks a fearful sight to the grey clad soldiers, the Union front line is already unformed and chewed up from heavy fire, with one of the regiments from Kimball’s Brigade already turning and running back ‘whipped’.
Meagher’s smoothbores press on against a thin line of sharpshooters (treated as skirmishers in the rules and unable to change formation to close order during the game) in the lane.
Meagher’s smoothbores press on against a thin line of sharpshooters (treated as skirmishers in the rules and unable to change formation to close order during the game) in the lane.
Turn 4 - Above - Meagher clears the sharpshooters and breaches the Sunken Lane, but to the Union centre, the initial assault is repulsed with heavy casualties.
Turn 5 - Meagher charges again, to clear the next section of the lane, but this goes to bitter hand-to-hand fighting and results in both sides disengaging. Meagher losses possession of the lane, the lull in the action giving Wright a chance to breathe and partly recover his lost ground (below - Meagher ejected from the lane).
Turn 5 - Meagher charges again, to clear the next section of the lane, but this goes to bitter hand-to-hand fighting and results in both sides disengaging. Meagher losses possession of the lane, the lull in the action giving Wright a chance to breathe and partly recover his lost ground (below - Meagher ejected from the lane).
Turn 6 - below - The Union centre, despite harsh handling, continues to relentlessly press the Confederate line. Their fire sees Anderson’s 14th North Carolina break and rout, leaving a gap. Though Confederate losses are starting to mount, Union losses in the centre by comparison have been horrendous and they are losing their offensive capability.
Meagher is stalling, with his 3rd New York dispersing (leaving the table) and 69th New York dangerously close to a similar fate.
“Reserves ..... give me reserves”! The Union simply do not have a reserve in the vicinity of the centre that can exploit the situation.
On the Confederate left, Rodes’ veterans have not done much (my fault perhaps) and are taking persistent fire from enemy sharpshooters. On the Union left, their large but green regiments under Morris, continue a very tardy performance with a rather meek approach on the Confederate positions, but they are at least pinning Colquitt’s 5 regiments.
Turn 7 - The turn opens with Meagher (Union) and Anderson (Confederate) faltering. Both need command spending on them to assist their return to ‘obeying orders’. This is done and both sides roll well for the two brigades, so a moment of crisis is averted for both sides, though the Confederates rolled very poorly for their command (ADC’s) allowance and are now left without ADC support for the rest of the division.
Storyboard - 5th / 6th Alabama (combined), veterans from Rodes Brigade on the Confederate left are provoked into action following their casualties from enemy fire. They seize the moment to charge at 61st / 64th New York (combined), from Caldwell’s Brigade, who have pushed too far forwards without support.
“Reserves ..... give me reserves”! The Union simply do not have a reserve in the vicinity of the centre that can exploit the situation.
On the Confederate left, Rodes’ veterans have not done much (my fault perhaps) and are taking persistent fire from enemy sharpshooters. On the Union left, their large but green regiments under Morris, continue a very tardy performance with a rather meek approach on the Confederate positions, but they are at least pinning Colquitt’s 5 regiments.
Turn 7 - The turn opens with Meagher (Union) and Anderson (Confederate) faltering. Both need command spending on them to assist their return to ‘obeying orders’. This is done and both sides roll well for the two brigades, so a moment of crisis is averted for both sides, though the Confederates rolled very poorly for their command (ADC’s) allowance and are now left without ADC support for the rest of the division.
Storyboard - 5th / 6th Alabama (combined), veterans from Rodes Brigade on the Confederate left are provoked into action following their casualties from enemy fire. They seize the moment to charge at 61st / 64th New York (combined), from Caldwell’s Brigade, who have pushed too far forwards without support.
As the charge goes in, they are met with a devastating volley, giving them 4 more casualties to add to the 6 they already have and as a small regiment, this takes them to their ‘Dispersal’ value and they are removed from play.
Rodes is given a ‘Falter’ marker for the brigade, while the New York rolled so well, they get to roll on the Serendipity Table and get Hurrah status. Caldwell however is presently a ‘Hesitant’ brigade, so they cannot immediately exploit this success, which is the only saving grace for Rodes, who will almost certainly come under significant pressure over the next hour.
Storyboard - The Union centre, exhausted by casualties, throw their last fresh unit, supported by 5th Maryland into a charge against the Sunken lane. They break Anderson’s 30th North Caroliners, who rout to the rear. As they run, they pass through 14th North Carolina, who are just recovering from their own earlier rout and cause renewed panic, sweeping 14th away. The loss of the regiment puts Anderson back to ‘Faltering status’.
Anderson looks to be in great peril, but the Union centre is hugely frustrated that their own force is pretty much spent and they simply don’t have enough fresh units on hand to push the Confederates over the edge ....... matters worsen as Kimball loses 7th West Virginia to the Confederate guns.
Turn 8 - On both flanks, the regiments finally come into proper close range of each other.
One of Wright’s regiments gets bold and leaves the Sunken lane, jumping the fence to push into Meagher’s left flank, who responds by falling back to the small hill.
Rodes is given a ‘Falter’ marker for the brigade, while the New York rolled so well, they get to roll on the Serendipity Table and get Hurrah status. Caldwell however is presently a ‘Hesitant’ brigade, so they cannot immediately exploit this success, which is the only saving grace for Rodes, who will almost certainly come under significant pressure over the next hour.
Storyboard - The Union centre, exhausted by casualties, throw their last fresh unit, supported by 5th Maryland into a charge against the Sunken lane. They break Anderson’s 30th North Caroliners, who rout to the rear. As they run, they pass through 14th North Carolina, who are just recovering from their own earlier rout and cause renewed panic, sweeping 14th away. The loss of the regiment puts Anderson back to ‘Faltering status’.
Anderson looks to be in great peril, but the Union centre is hugely frustrated that their own force is pretty much spent and they simply don’t have enough fresh units on hand to push the Confederates over the edge ....... matters worsen as Kimball loses 7th West Virginia to the Confederate guns.
Turn 8 - On both flanks, the regiments finally come into proper close range of each other.
One of Wright’s regiments gets bold and leaves the Sunken lane, jumping the fence to push into Meagher’s left flank, who responds by falling back to the small hill.
Turn 9 - above - from the lane, Kimball charges the Confederate right hand artillery battery ...... who roll a 12 in their defensive fire! Kimball is lucky in getting away with a retire result, but his regiment still collects 5 casualties in the process. This looks to be the turning point against the Union ..... further impacted as Morris’ green troops on the Union left assault Colquitt, but each of his three regiments take a load of hurt, one retires, another is whipped and the third routs!
Enthused, Colquitt’s whole brigade advances, including two regiment’s jumping the fence and leaving the sunken road - the brigade advance on the retreating Morris and the deployed Union artillery battery.
Now, all along the line, the Union are falling back, the exception being in the centre, where Weber alone presses on, believing that the Confederate centre is about to break. On the Confederate left, Rodes loses his second regiment, leaving him with just sharp-shooters to cover the wing, he is in serious peril ..... and likely done for!
Turn 10 - On the Confederate right, Colquitt’s men break into a spontaneous charge, attacking both Morris and the deployed Union guns, but it doesn’t end well for them, especially for the two regiments charging the 3” artillery battery! they are repulsed and the brigade falls back to lick their wounds and resume a defensive stance.
Anderson in the Confederate centre at 50% losses is ‘tuckered out’, making it much more likely that they will hesitate, rather than obey orders in the Command Phase, while Weber, opposite him, is pulling his hair out, he has put his Union troops back into the lane, and he believes the Confederate defence is about to fall, but with the rest of the Union army retreating, leaving him isolated, he has little choice other than to abandon his plans for attack and he follows suit.
Both sides are getting too exhausted to do anything else, but for the Confederates it doesn’t really matter, as all they have to do is hold on to the lane, which they have.
Their artillery has worked well through-out the game and has been responsible for both blunting the enemy charges and covering the increasing gaps in the the line due to friendly infantry regiments breaking.
The Confederate veterans on the left under Rodes are smashed, but elsewhere, with the enemy falling back, the Confederates will claim a victory. The game ends at this point because there is no prospect of the Union effectively returning to the fray to get anything close to a victory.
Conclusion
That gave a good game. The scenario is surprisingly large for an introductory scenario, though obviously it does its job in touching on all elements of the rules.
Some elements of the system become second nature very quickly, the more quirky stuff needed quite a bit of rule referencing during play, but was well within the bounds of what would be normal for trying out a new, fairly meaty system and at no time did I come across anything I didn’t understand or that conflicted with other rule sections. Plus the two play aid cards are superb and complete.
During play some strong characteristics of the rules were quickly showing themselves and they were things that I liked. The first comes from the charge process, which uses opposed dice, 2D6 per side. You just roll and compare, the difference in the score being the advantage that the winner takes to the Results Table, which is differential based.
Now, the first impression is that this is hugely luck based, you put in an attack that has been worked for and has all of your hopes pinned in it, only to find that as the attacker you roll ‘3’ and the defender ‘11’, which would be a mighty blow to the attacking unit.
But two important things are going on. The first are the modifiers, these tend to gently temper the results rather than cause big swings, but importantly, the casualties received so far, play into the results, so the gamer needs to think about preparation by fire before assaulting and possibly assaulting with fresher units. It does put an emphasis on having reserves on hand or rotating regiments within the brigade.
Secondly and perhaps more importantly is that if a lead unit can claim support from nearby unengaged units to their flanks or rear, they can claim a re-roll of one dice for each support they have. This is a very clever mechanic. Not only does it dampen down extreme dice rolling, but it encourages the player to think in terms of support of a lead unit and keeping brigades together with a specific focus.
In one of my attacks, the Union on their 2D6 rolled 5 and 1. They had a supporting unit to the rear, so re-rolled the 1 and got another 1, such is life, but the dice in this instance were obviously and clearly telling a story that the attackers had lost heart. The re-roll is no guarantee of a win or an equaliser, but it does over the course of the game reduce the impact of extremes and gives players the feel of a fair fighting chance .... if they use the right tactics.
In a few instances, I rolled dice that were dire and then desperately looked around for a support and realised there wasn’t any, this was just plain bad planning / deployment on my part, with me thinking after the event, though it does show the potential problems of having a single defensive line like the Confederates have in the Sunken Lane, cause a few retreats and an isolated unit left behind can be in real trouble. You can of course counter this by deploying a brigade in a two up and one behind type of formation, to offer them the potential of a rear support.
This simple rule drives realistic tactical deployment, use and brigade level focus on the table-top and is probably my favourite mechanic in the system.
The Interlaced sequence of play keeps both players active, stopping one side being able to do everything in their turn, while the other just sits and takes it. Selecting who is player 1 each turn can become important in areas of crisis.
At the start of the turn players dice off to see who gets the initiative (player 1). A player’s dice roll is reduced by 1 for every one of their currently hesitant brigades. The winner will go first in each of the subsequent sub-phases, which are, Charge, Move and then Fire.
Though both players act in the same phase, they are not joint phases as such, so player 1’s fire will hit and be actionable against the enemy before that enemy gets chance to do their fire - so the sequence of play is a good way of adding some chaos to proceedings without it being overly present.
I really like the way that the Charge process is blatantly avoiding the notion of the initial charge being a man-to-man thing, rather it is trying to reflect that final bit of closing with the enemy, where each side hopes the other will break off due to their sense of presence and threat, rather than things going to point of bayonet - however, if the sides stall (draw), so that neither give way, then the combat goes to a second stage (called ‘True Grit! Close to Melee!) which is now reflecting a more proper close combat type melee and there is a different and simple way of inflicting casualties to sort it out.
One of the things that is different from a lot of games is that a unit can take quite a bit of damage before it deteriorates. Typically, an infantry unit is still fresh until it accumulates 4 hits and at that point it is really only suffering a -1 modifier on tasks. Compared with 4 hits in something like Black Powder, which takes a unit straight to the Break Test Chart, with the risk of total loss! and so after me playing quite a bit of Black Powder it takes a bit of getting used to, that a unit can have casualty dice trailing it with multiple hits, yet it can still be effective offensively.
Most of the regiments in this particular scenario are classed as small, so they will ‘Disperse’ (leave the table) once they have accumulated 10 casualties, while the large regiments (Morris has them in this scenario) don’t disperse until they have 14 hits. Average sized units go out on 12 hits, in our game Weber had average sized units, so had a bit more staying power.
The impact in play of this higher casualty allowance is that an initial clash between fresh forces, is unlikely to see any instant major combat outcome. The art of play might be to get a fresher unit against a weary unit or get a positional favour such as a flank attack, I know this sounds obvious and most systems reward this kind of thing, but here, it feels that there is a more active encouragement of the same.
If I were to re-run this scenario again, I think I would have the Union concentrate their artillery efforts against part of the line (a single brigade) to weaken it, before hurling an assault in ....... yes obvious - I know!
As the above comments suggest, reserves of fresh units are by implication encouraged. In this scenario, the Union are allowed to hold 1 brigade in reserve status, perhaps I should have done that, but then I wanted enough initial momentum to overwhelm the Confederates and to cover the whole front ..... choices, choices, choices :-)
The skirmisher rules are a nice touch and do enough to make the units feel different from line and to encourage proper use.
When looking at things like Hesitation and the allocation of ADC’s that add a bit of colour to the command and control engine, they work well here, though are reflections of similar mechanics that we see across other rules, perhaps with different names, but of course they are a universal rule type because of their relevance to battle / wargames, so are most welcome here. For example in turn 1, Green ‘Hesitates’ and doesn’t advance, in Black Powder a failed order roll would do the same, in Firepower with random movement, they might have rolled just a 2” move, roughly giving a similar effect.
All told, I like this set and will explore it a bit more to see whether it will become a 'go to' choice, though it does hold promise - not least because a napoleonic version is also available as a sister rule set, so double the gaming for half of the learning :-).
If there is interest, I will come back to this scenario, both with the same rules and with some other sets as it seems to offer good bench testing qualities. Perhaps the four sets that I looked at a couple of weeks ago would be a justifiable part 2 to that post.
Complexity - I would place this at slightly above medium for a first game, dropping to medium thereafter. It is almost as if there are two elements to the rules. The heartbeat is actually quite intuitive, quick to pick up and quick to implement. Running alongside that are the more niche bits that need some repeat referencing, but if this was a regularly played system, they too would become second nature. By halfway through the game, I was running most things through the very good quick reference sheets. I will write myself a 1 page memo that covers my ‘most forgotten’ rules, which will help with future games. In play, I found the rules easier to implement than I thought I would from the initial read, though I had been watching some play on YouTube of the Napoleonic version of the game, which I think helped.
Size - The rules are in an 80 page A4 ‘perfect bound’ format, with 2 double sided play aid cards. The game runs with each player having a division per side, so that will be four or five brigades, each with three or four regiments. The scenario I played today was on a 6’ x 4’ table with measurements used for 15mm, though all of my regiments had 80mm frontages, rather than their proper size based upon the number of bases in a unit (between 3 and 7). The rulebook says that for this scenario in 28mm, ‘use an appropriately larger table’. As a guide 15mm infantry move 15cm, while 28mm infantry move 9”, suggesting that 28mm need half as much space again. I think I would just be tempted to just have fewer or smaller brigades, though the command system does look like it prefers four or more brigades in the game.
Solitaire - I ran today’s scenario solitaire and didn’t come across any issue that would prevent solo play. There is a bit of chaos in the system, which of course helps solo play.
Time - I’m not sure, because I played my game over two days in 40 minute stints because my back has been playing up, but I would think that four hours would have covered this game and having regard for it being a first game, that could likely be decreased with more experience. In the last few turns, things were skipping along. Next time I play this, I will come back and update this paragraph if necessary.
Resource Section.
My sister webspace COMMANDERS has a collection of shorter AAR’s. Link.
Enthused, Colquitt’s whole brigade advances, including two regiment’s jumping the fence and leaving the sunken road - the brigade advance on the retreating Morris and the deployed Union artillery battery.
Now, all along the line, the Union are falling back, the exception being in the centre, where Weber alone presses on, believing that the Confederate centre is about to break. On the Confederate left, Rodes loses his second regiment, leaving him with just sharp-shooters to cover the wing, he is in serious peril ..... and likely done for!
Turn 10 - On the Confederate right, Colquitt’s men break into a spontaneous charge, attacking both Morris and the deployed Union guns, but it doesn’t end well for them, especially for the two regiments charging the 3” artillery battery! they are repulsed and the brigade falls back to lick their wounds and resume a defensive stance.
Anderson in the Confederate centre at 50% losses is ‘tuckered out’, making it much more likely that they will hesitate, rather than obey orders in the Command Phase, while Weber, opposite him, is pulling his hair out, he has put his Union troops back into the lane, and he believes the Confederate defence is about to fall, but with the rest of the Union army retreating, leaving him isolated, he has little choice other than to abandon his plans for attack and he follows suit.
Both sides are getting too exhausted to do anything else, but for the Confederates it doesn’t really matter, as all they have to do is hold on to the lane, which they have.
Their artillery has worked well through-out the game and has been responsible for both blunting the enemy charges and covering the increasing gaps in the the line due to friendly infantry regiments breaking.
The Confederate veterans on the left under Rodes are smashed, but elsewhere, with the enemy falling back, the Confederates will claim a victory. The game ends at this point because there is no prospect of the Union effectively returning to the fray to get anything close to a victory.
Conclusion
That gave a good game. The scenario is surprisingly large for an introductory scenario, though obviously it does its job in touching on all elements of the rules.
Some elements of the system become second nature very quickly, the more quirky stuff needed quite a bit of rule referencing during play, but was well within the bounds of what would be normal for trying out a new, fairly meaty system and at no time did I come across anything I didn’t understand or that conflicted with other rule sections. Plus the two play aid cards are superb and complete.
During play some strong characteristics of the rules were quickly showing themselves and they were things that I liked. The first comes from the charge process, which uses opposed dice, 2D6 per side. You just roll and compare, the difference in the score being the advantage that the winner takes to the Results Table, which is differential based.
Now, the first impression is that this is hugely luck based, you put in an attack that has been worked for and has all of your hopes pinned in it, only to find that as the attacker you roll ‘3’ and the defender ‘11’, which would be a mighty blow to the attacking unit.
But two important things are going on. The first are the modifiers, these tend to gently temper the results rather than cause big swings, but importantly, the casualties received so far, play into the results, so the gamer needs to think about preparation by fire before assaulting and possibly assaulting with fresher units. It does put an emphasis on having reserves on hand or rotating regiments within the brigade.
Secondly and perhaps more importantly is that if a lead unit can claim support from nearby unengaged units to their flanks or rear, they can claim a re-roll of one dice for each support they have. This is a very clever mechanic. Not only does it dampen down extreme dice rolling, but it encourages the player to think in terms of support of a lead unit and keeping brigades together with a specific focus.
In one of my attacks, the Union on their 2D6 rolled 5 and 1. They had a supporting unit to the rear, so re-rolled the 1 and got another 1, such is life, but the dice in this instance were obviously and clearly telling a story that the attackers had lost heart. The re-roll is no guarantee of a win or an equaliser, but it does over the course of the game reduce the impact of extremes and gives players the feel of a fair fighting chance .... if they use the right tactics.
In a few instances, I rolled dice that were dire and then desperately looked around for a support and realised there wasn’t any, this was just plain bad planning / deployment on my part, with me thinking after the event, though it does show the potential problems of having a single defensive line like the Confederates have in the Sunken Lane, cause a few retreats and an isolated unit left behind can be in real trouble. You can of course counter this by deploying a brigade in a two up and one behind type of formation, to offer them the potential of a rear support.
This simple rule drives realistic tactical deployment, use and brigade level focus on the table-top and is probably my favourite mechanic in the system.
The Interlaced sequence of play keeps both players active, stopping one side being able to do everything in their turn, while the other just sits and takes it. Selecting who is player 1 each turn can become important in areas of crisis.
At the start of the turn players dice off to see who gets the initiative (player 1). A player’s dice roll is reduced by 1 for every one of their currently hesitant brigades. The winner will go first in each of the subsequent sub-phases, which are, Charge, Move and then Fire.
Though both players act in the same phase, they are not joint phases as such, so player 1’s fire will hit and be actionable against the enemy before that enemy gets chance to do their fire - so the sequence of play is a good way of adding some chaos to proceedings without it being overly present.
I really like the way that the Charge process is blatantly avoiding the notion of the initial charge being a man-to-man thing, rather it is trying to reflect that final bit of closing with the enemy, where each side hopes the other will break off due to their sense of presence and threat, rather than things going to point of bayonet - however, if the sides stall (draw), so that neither give way, then the combat goes to a second stage (called ‘True Grit! Close to Melee!) which is now reflecting a more proper close combat type melee and there is a different and simple way of inflicting casualties to sort it out.
One of the things that is different from a lot of games is that a unit can take quite a bit of damage before it deteriorates. Typically, an infantry unit is still fresh until it accumulates 4 hits and at that point it is really only suffering a -1 modifier on tasks. Compared with 4 hits in something like Black Powder, which takes a unit straight to the Break Test Chart, with the risk of total loss! and so after me playing quite a bit of Black Powder it takes a bit of getting used to, that a unit can have casualty dice trailing it with multiple hits, yet it can still be effective offensively.
Most of the regiments in this particular scenario are classed as small, so they will ‘Disperse’ (leave the table) once they have accumulated 10 casualties, while the large regiments (Morris has them in this scenario) don’t disperse until they have 14 hits. Average sized units go out on 12 hits, in our game Weber had average sized units, so had a bit more staying power.
The impact in play of this higher casualty allowance is that an initial clash between fresh forces, is unlikely to see any instant major combat outcome. The art of play might be to get a fresher unit against a weary unit or get a positional favour such as a flank attack, I know this sounds obvious and most systems reward this kind of thing, but here, it feels that there is a more active encouragement of the same.
If I were to re-run this scenario again, I think I would have the Union concentrate their artillery efforts against part of the line (a single brigade) to weaken it, before hurling an assault in ....... yes obvious - I know!
As the above comments suggest, reserves of fresh units are by implication encouraged. In this scenario, the Union are allowed to hold 1 brigade in reserve status, perhaps I should have done that, but then I wanted enough initial momentum to overwhelm the Confederates and to cover the whole front ..... choices, choices, choices :-)
The skirmisher rules are a nice touch and do enough to make the units feel different from line and to encourage proper use.
When looking at things like Hesitation and the allocation of ADC’s that add a bit of colour to the command and control engine, they work well here, though are reflections of similar mechanics that we see across other rules, perhaps with different names, but of course they are a universal rule type because of their relevance to battle / wargames, so are most welcome here. For example in turn 1, Green ‘Hesitates’ and doesn’t advance, in Black Powder a failed order roll would do the same, in Firepower with random movement, they might have rolled just a 2” move, roughly giving a similar effect.
All told, I like this set and will explore it a bit more to see whether it will become a 'go to' choice, though it does hold promise - not least because a napoleonic version is also available as a sister rule set, so double the gaming for half of the learning :-).
If there is interest, I will come back to this scenario, both with the same rules and with some other sets as it seems to offer good bench testing qualities. Perhaps the four sets that I looked at a couple of weeks ago would be a justifiable part 2 to that post.
Complexity - I would place this at slightly above medium for a first game, dropping to medium thereafter. It is almost as if there are two elements to the rules. The heartbeat is actually quite intuitive, quick to pick up and quick to implement. Running alongside that are the more niche bits that need some repeat referencing, but if this was a regularly played system, they too would become second nature. By halfway through the game, I was running most things through the very good quick reference sheets. I will write myself a 1 page memo that covers my ‘most forgotten’ rules, which will help with future games. In play, I found the rules easier to implement than I thought I would from the initial read, though I had been watching some play on YouTube of the Napoleonic version of the game, which I think helped.
Size - The rules are in an 80 page A4 ‘perfect bound’ format, with 2 double sided play aid cards. The game runs with each player having a division per side, so that will be four or five brigades, each with three or four regiments. The scenario I played today was on a 6’ x 4’ table with measurements used for 15mm, though all of my regiments had 80mm frontages, rather than their proper size based upon the number of bases in a unit (between 3 and 7). The rulebook says that for this scenario in 28mm, ‘use an appropriately larger table’. As a guide 15mm infantry move 15cm, while 28mm infantry move 9”, suggesting that 28mm need half as much space again. I think I would just be tempted to just have fewer or smaller brigades, though the command system does look like it prefers four or more brigades in the game.
Solitaire - I ran today’s scenario solitaire and didn’t come across any issue that would prevent solo play. There is a bit of chaos in the system, which of course helps solo play.
Time - I’m not sure, because I played my game over two days in 40 minute stints because my back has been playing up, but I would think that four hours would have covered this game and having regard for it being a first game, that could likely be decreased with more experience. In the last few turns, things were skipping along. Next time I play this, I will come back and update this paragraph if necessary.
Resource Section.
My sister webspace COMMANDERS has a collection of shorter AAR’s. Link.
https://commanders.simdif.com/
An earlier post, looking at charge sequences from four different rule sets including Pickett’s Charge. Link
http://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2021/04/acw-rule-comparisons.html
