Black Powder 2 First Impressions

So I went in and pre-ordered BP2 earlier this fall.  My copy arrived in the post on Tuesday Oct 9th having been shipped on Sept 24th, not bad turnaround for shipping from the UK to the Canadian backwoods.  Curt got his copy on Friday the 5th, but we had the Thanksgiving Weekend in between so that's only one business day between.  Judging by forum and FB chatter, I'm actually ahead of the curve on this one - that's ominous IMHO!

First off, BP and it's stable mates are a bit like Marmite - either loved, hated or just put with since we don't want to make it ourselves - in the war-game community.  I find that they give a good game and allow a fun game to be played out in an evening.  They are easy to pick up and that works well with new players those unfamiliar with the period in play.  Furthermore they give a good framework and allow the players to tailor them as desired.  Basically you can follow BP like my wife follows a cookbook recipe - keep to the way it's written the first time mostly and then mess around with it once you know how things work out.

I won't go through an in-depth review of changes, because I don't have time to do a side by side comparison, I play HC, P&S and BP and can't keep the subtle changes straight anyway and since we tend to work from the rulebook as we play anyway rather than rely on aging and fading memories.

Briefly here's the good points on the new edition.

• Visually it's what you expect - high quality printing with lots of eye candy - too bad the proof reading wasn't up to the same production standard (see below).
• It's well organized.  Hallelujah there's an index!!  I found it very easy to navigate and had no trouble finding the rules I wanted - often there's cross referencing.  Well done lads.
• I like the selection of scenarios - a wide range covering mainstream and no so mainstream periods.  There's also some valuable design notes on fitting historical battles into war-games scenarios.  Well done again.
• They've expanded the rules on Generals, adding personality traits and other features.  Most of us could do the same but it's useful to have the rulebook examples as a template to follow along or ignore as we wish.
• Having pre-ordered my copy came with a lovely figure of Russell Crowe from Master and Commander.  He won't fit into my current projects, but he might appear if I get back into War of 1812.

There are various fine tunings along the way that seem to bring the mechanisms in line with BP's younger siblings HC and P&S.  The ones I noted based on my read through and from following interweb chatter are.

• Artillery can now ignore skirmishers and fire on supports.
• Enfilade fire now retools misses instead of rolling twice the dice.
• Evade rules are more variable- you might get away or you might get caught.  Also I believe March columns can also evade.
• I think there are subtle changes within the command rolls and unit characteristics but have better things to do that work them all out!
• There are subtle changes to Irregular units, mostly who gets considered irregular.  In the Napoleonic age Riflemen and Voltigeurs count as irregular skirmishers which seems appropriate.  Furthermore in the 1815 rearguard scenario, both British and French Light Cavalry units are Irregular.  This is no hard and fast rule, but there's interesting scope for the scenario designer or tailor.

Ok now the not so good - the typos.  Here are the one's that jump out at me so far.

• This one is just annoying and has no effect of play but on p19 a picture of two lovely Napoleonic Chasseurs a Coeval Cheval Elite Company is labeled as French Cuirassiers.  Seriously?   You couldn't find a proof reader with even a rudimentary knowledge of the most well studied army in your period? Not one of you read a Blandford or Osprey or bought a box of Airfix Waterloo French Cavalry?  Reminds me of the first club armour game I played as a 13 year old and I confused T34s with Stalins.
• This one is far more serious.  On p49 the Morale Dice (Saving Throw) modifiers in the table are completely wrong - they cut and paste the mods from the command roll table.  After 5 minutes of WTFing about why distance from the General affected casualties I worked it out.  Luckily the table on the QRS got it right, and it hasn't changed from what we're familiar with.
• The enfilade fire rule mentioned above is correct in the rulebook p53, but wrong on the QRS p96.  So now we're left with the conundrum of is the rule book right (as with enfilade) or the QRS (like Saving Throws)?

Frankly I am disappointed with Warlord over the typos.  Personally I am a typo machine (ask my students) and I can work with typos in a lot of the hobby press.  But this was a high production, big box store rule book from an outfit that occupies a leadership position in the hobby.  I expect high production, leadership type production quality in proofreading as well as glossy pictures.  Warlord are not a cottage industry or a hobby press, they need to pull up their socks.  I've yet to see an official errata sheet or FAQs and that needs to hit the web ASAP.

However, once the typos are worked out I'm sure that BP2 will generate lots of fun games and get a lot of usage.  Hopefully it will generate interest in the Horse and Musket period in the hobby.

Pooltime Ponderings on Recent Italian Wars Game

It being summer I get my my regular exercise swimming laps in my local outdoor public pool.  I show up when it opens at 8am with a bunch of older and grumpier old farts and then head off to what ever office I'm haunting for the rest of the day.  This morning while getting my cardio in under clear blue Prairie skies I did some pondering about the recent game that I GM'd.  There were two problems encountered - slow deployment times and too much disruption - under the Pike and Shotte/Black Powder/Hail Caesar system.  Here's what my oxygen starved brain came up with.

Slow Deployment From Column of March
The issue here is that for the scenario I wanted to have the attacked deal with the issue of entering on in column of match and deploying on the go.  But with basic P&S movement rates this becomes a slow process, especially when the columns have to deploy. 

In this particular scenario had I let the attackers come on deployed they likely would have rolled over the defenders.  I also have issues with too perfect deployments when historically sub commands showed up early, late or in the wrong place on occasion. So incorporating some ideas filched from Sam Mustafa's Blucher rules, here's how I would approach this scenario next time under P&S/BP/HC.

I'll use this map as a reference.

1. The attacker puts his units into divisions and gives an order of march for  the units within divisions and for the divisions themselves.
2.  The defender plots his deployment up to line X on the map, keeping units in cover or dead ground (including everything behind line Z)  off board.
3. The attacker then gives orders to each of his divisions subject to the restrictions of his deployment move below.  So given Curt's order of march we might have something like.  "The cavalry division advances and deploys on the front slope of the hill facing X on the map.  The main body deploys and advances to a position just north of the woods in the pass.  The rear division advances onto the northern hill and then deploys."
4. The attacker then moves his divisions on one by one according to his order of march.  They get a special deployment move equal to X plus the number of moves indicated by a command roll.  So for this action I might make X=2 and then each division would have between 2-5 moves to make based on their command roll.  To avoid getting too cheesy I'd restrict these so that they couldn't close to withing musket range (16") of the enemy, so that the defender has a bit of a chance to react as they come on.
5. Each deployment move would be a regular infantry move (8" for our P&S games).  Each column would enter in column of march and need to deploy, this taking one move to deploy a whole division.  Cavalry would be moving at a walk, but an all cavalry division could make a free deployment.
6. The orders should note when deployment takes place.  Given the sample orders above a bad roll (i.e. 2 moves) would see the centre division deploy then move 8" on table.  On the same result the rear division would move two moves (16") without deploying.
7. Blunders on a deployment could see a division be delayed, too far left or right or too far ahead depending on the result.
8. The defender gets to go next and for each division can elect to either have one move without a command roll, or take their chances on a command roll.  This allows them to reposition as the enemy advances and possibly get some shooting in.

The same thing could be used with reinforcements arriving from off table, where the entry point is some distance away from the enemy.-

Too Many Disorders
Under the P&S/BP/HC any natural 6s on shooting cause a disorder, preventing the target unit from doing anything in their next move.  This seems to cause the attacker's a undue hardship in the recent game - Stacey rolled many 6s leaving the attackers effectively pinned in a fire zone at times.  I am thinking of letting the target unit taking an immediate save roll against disorder once all the shooting on the unit is completed.  This lets better troops more likely to shrug off disorder while inferior troops will be more likely to be disordered.  I think that there may be two exceptions when no save roll is permitted.  First, any units charging into contact are auto-disorder by fire.  Second, any unit taking two or more disorder results in shooting are also auto disordered.

Any that's what my brain came up to this morning, we'll see what a night's sleep does with these ideas.

Sharp Practice 2 Thoughts

Curt and I were both planning SP games for this weekend coming, but he got his note out first so mine will wait a week or two.  But the thought process (my brain hurts) made me realize that I had not posted my thought son the rule system following my AAR a few weeks ago.  So here goes.

·         Overall things ran smoothly, and gave a fun game with lots of action.  The system is intuitive and we got into the swing of the play very quickly.  All good stuff.

·         I liked the unit/leader activation system which gave suspense and randomness without being too wacky.  We used cards, but long term I will use poker chips.  I found it hard to adequately shuffle a small hand of cards, much to Stacy’s disgust as he had to take several random event rolls following the appearance of the 3^rd command card in a row.  If I don't get my poker chips painted in time (they are fiddly), I'll resort to fanning the cards and letting players choose one at random.

·         Getting the feel of when to use Command Cards will take a bit.  Stacy and Sylvain tended to hold on to them to make sure that units activated on the tiffin card, but I think that both made use of Cards for “Step Out” actions adding movement or prompted activations out of sequence

·         Movement is based on a number of d6s making it random, but that was just fine by me and it worked in practice.  Cavalry take some thought as they need to take a turn to slow down or speed up. 

·         Small arms fire was a snap to get – lots of d6s with simple to remember scores to hit.  We rarely need to resort to a table.  If three men in their 50s don’t need reminders, the system is pretty idiot proof!  Units need to test to stop uncontrolled fire once they start, which is something that we forgot to do.  

·         Artillery fire is also simple and can be deadly (or not).  Stacy cunningly placed his gun on a hill and Sylvain obligingly deployed on a hill in the line of fire.   In retrospect he could have avoided some of the fire by coming down off the hill but that didn’t seem obvious at the time.

·         I liked the differentiation between musket and rifle armed troops, and formed troops vs skirmishers.  Both sides’ skirmishers were effective, but Sylvain unfortunately turned his Jaegers rifles from a plus to minus by moving into close range.

·          Cavalry is brittle and tricky to use, as it should be.  Both players got their hussars into tricky spots where they were shot apart by musketry.  A learning opportunity hopefully!

·         We used a big table that allowed a lot of flexibility on deployment.  It also had the plus of letting both players get familiar with movement and activations before running into the enemy.  A few units on a big table gave a very nice feel.

·         We never got to fisticuffs so I have no idea how well that works!

·         As commented on the SP forum over at the lardies home, there are some unit points costs issues that need to be sorted out.  I went by the points in the book and may have given Stacy an advantage as the Brits seem overpriced.   We can work this out over time. 

Ad in conclusion I can't wait til we go tho the Penninsula with Curt's lads this week and hiope to go to Hesse soon with my SYW lads.