In early June, I demonstrated an old set of rules that are still available, which uniquely are played just with a few index type cards. Each card refers to a particular part of the Sequence of Play, such as the Movement Phase or Missile Phase. On the front face are the rules and on the reverse are examples of play.
(Above - the cards, the orange one is ignored as it relates to elephants!)
Anyway, the demonstration used some Punic Wars figures from the Warlord Games ‘Epic’ range, with the Romans at the foot of a hill and warbands atop. That post gave some detailed explanations about the system (see link below), so today I will just give more of an overview of the system working in a later period with my Wars of the Roses figures.
https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2025/06/old-boxed-set-of-ancients-rules.html
The cards can be a little brief, but amongst the examples given, they talk about billmen and on the missile chart, cannon are included, so one assumes that the rules stretch to 1485, even though some of the wordage and system seems a bit ‘Classical’ related.
Today we are setting up a rather contrived and contained situation, mirror forces face each other and the flanks are closed by terrain. Each force has three longbow units in the front rank and in the rear rank, there are three melee units, these being Billmen - Men at Arms - Billmen, so the MAA are in the middle.
Firstly I should say that my own take on period formations is that you can have archer units (alone) melee troop units (alone) or a mix where bill and bow work together. In the latter, I see the bowmen being out in front until they are under the threat of being contacted, at which point they in effect swap places with the melee troops and the archers can count as (rear) support, reflecting them gathering into small knots and shooting through gaps or from flanks etc and even dispatching fallen enemy. I do not see them as being fully melee capable and I think rules that allow that can allow the role of the archer unit to become abused.
So whatever our card rules give us, I will overlay that principle on them.
The archers set up at maximum archery distance apart, which is 300mm. I have classed all melee troops as Battle Troops and archers as Auxiliaries. I am assuming that at this time, we are well into the Wars of the Roses period and that most men have some battle experience, so all are counted as Regulars. The Men-at-Arms are B Class, so use a D10, while everything else is C Class and uses a D8.
(Above - Lord Stanley’s men join Percy). Each stand is a single unit, a contingent and I have settled on a starting strength of 6 for each. The Force nearest the camera are the Yorkists and they have been given the difficult job of attacking. I say difficult because the forces are exactly evenly matched, so the attacker starts without advantage and has much work to do.
At the start of each turn, we establish which side has the initiative (becoming Player A for that turn …… and then the following happens;
Player A conducts Routs, Charges and Tests.
Player B conducts Evade, Routs, Pursuits, Charges and Tests.
Player A conducts Evades and Pursuit moves
[It is too early in the game for either of our forces to be concerned with any of those things].
Player A makes normal moves, followed by Player B.
[Neither side will move to start with, instead they will wait for the Missile Phase].
Next is simultaneous missile fire. You start by taking half the value of the unit (rounded up) and then use Modifiers. Our archers start at strength 6, so half of that is 3, this gives the base strength. This will be modified by +1 for enemy target being a shieldless target (there is a list of mods, but this is the only one that matters at the moment), so 3+1 is 4, the firing unit rolls its Class dice (D8 here) and must score equal or less than 4 to inflict a hit. Amazingly, all 6 archer units on the table fail!
Next is the Hand-to-Hand Combat Phase, but obviously there isn’t any so it is on to turn 2.
This time the Lancastrians get the initiative, not that it is going to matter this turn. They decide to stand firm.
(Above - the order goes out for the melee troops to take position up front).
The Yorkists need to move, because they will ultimately need their melee troops closer to the enemy, but also the Yorkist archers want to get nearer so that they can start getting positive modifiers for being at a closer range. The downside is, when they fire in the Missile Phase they will get a -1 Mod for that movement, but the non-moving Lancastrians will not, giving them a small advantage.
The Lancastrians score two hits, but also for the third unit the fail the hit by one, which obviously does not cause a hit, but it does cause the target to be marked that it cannot move in the next turn. This gives the Yorkist player a decision, does the line keep moving next turn, becoming disjointed as it leaves the left flank unit behind or should the line just halt and shoot and benefit from not getting a negative mod for moving before shooting. They decide to do that.
As the turns pass, the dice are very cruel to the Yorkists, their line is peppered with arrows and casualties continue, while the Lancastrian line are pretty much untouched! This is just a dice thing, but it does shake things up.
Firstly the Yorkist archers through losses drop from strength 6 to 5 and then from strength 5 to 4. At this point their starting point for shooting before Mods is now just 2 (half of 4) rather than the 3 they have been using. So now they have two disadvantages, this new lower shooting strength and a -1 Mod if they move before shooting. This starts to matter against the equal sized opponent.
Suddenly the Yorkist archer in the centre drops to fighting strength 2. It has fallen below half strength so must take a Panic Test with its Class Die (D8) against the number of losses already suffered (4). It fails, so loses 1 more strength point and routs, running through the Men-at-Arms unit behind it. Now all Yorkists within 100mm of the routing unit AND of the same Class or lower will need to take a Panic Test, this in fact is everyone except the Men-at-Arms, because their class is higher (they are Class B denoted by using a D10).
(Above - the archers in the centre rout through the Men-at-Arms). The first units to test are the Yorkist melee troops on the left. They have not lost any strength so far, so should be an automatic pass, however a testing die roll of just ‘1’ is an automatic fail and that is exactly what those billmen roll! So it takes 1 loss and Routs. The other testers pass, but the Yorkists now have two units running for the rear.
(Above - 2 units routing). Things are grim for the Yorkists, their archers have taken heavy losses, despite still being quite far from the Lancastrian line, their melee troops need to get going, the archers cannot take much more. At this point I have to fiddle the rules. Interpenetration can only happen with skirmishers, but as stated, I want to see archers exchange places with the melee troops of their unit when needed, so I allow that in lieu of movement.
We are coming to the end of our demonstration. The two routing units each reach the Yorkist baseline and their Rally Tests (same as a Panic Test) allow both to rally, but rout moves are so large, that they will never get back into our game in time. However, it matters not, Lancastrian arrows continue to hammer the Yorkist line and as the Men-at-Arms drop from strength 6 to 4 and they still have so much ground to cover, the attack is called off as a hopeless cause.
Just to show the damage caused by the Lancastrian arrows, total end of game losses are 16 for the Yorkists, but just 3 for the Lancastrians! As I said, the dice are to blame here, overall the Lancastrian archers did not face the negative modifiers of moving and shooting or casualties reducing the base starting value. If we ran this again, the opposite results could occur and all shades of grey in between.
I actually thought that went quite well, with my attention held throughout. Certainly promising enough to try out a bigger game, where more things would come into play - more moving parts!
There were a couple of things that felt like a tweak was needed for the period to be better recognised, such as cognisance of the plate armour carried by the Men-at-Arms.
I like the idea of the Class dice differences, which permeated into several areas and aspects of the rules.
In close combat, which we never got to, the full strength of the unit counts, rather than the half strength rounded up that missile fire uses and it can go to three rounds, so there is some potential there for serious damage.
It is two months since I last used the rules and I fumbled a bit and I can remember getting stuck on some of the same points as I did last time around, causing me to read all of the examples looking for some clues, so I think these sort of things need writing down on a reminder sheet so that on each subsequent game there is a smaller learning curve.
Anyway, I think they are rather clever rules. There seems to be a sense of thinking many old school rules are often not quite up to it any more, for archaic reasons, but I think these rules could be very easily tweaked to the meet the users personal likes, perhaps putting a specific period flavour on them.
We shall no doubt see these rules in a bigger battle in the future, perhaps in a scenario that I have already played with other rules for a bit of compare and contrast.
Please note that my COMMANDERS page gets more updates than here and you may be relieved to know that the items are a lot shorter :-)
LINK
https://commanders.simdif.com/dear_diary.html
