Dear Desert Fox.
"Oh God! Anything but a Six!" is my wargame rules for the 18th century and a bit into the Napoloeonic period. One devotee of the rules has some add-ons he uses for the latter Napoleonics. Several players use them and they are fast and very easy to learn and use several new and innovative systems. They were also designed to be useable in campaigns. If you'd like a copy, just send me your postal address at sigurd@eclipse.net. I don't do electronic copies of enything. There is no charge.
Now the long Explanation.
The genesis of the game came some twenty-five years ago at a game when I commanded "the refused wing" of an army that was guarding the flank against an enemy force known to be an outflanking move. Now as we all know, the literal translation of this Scenario-ese is "You are going to sit here for the next ten hours and do NOTHING! Because we will run out of gaming time long before the 7 turns when the enemy would START coming on would elapse. I was, in the end, corret, for the game was called at 10 pm after 12 hours of gaming at turn 5.
Anyway, during this game I decided that rather than sit around doing nothing, I would "IE" the game or use the practices of an Industrial Engineer to rate the game, doing a time/motion study and industrial process efficiency the same way you would do it for a production line inan industrial plant. My wristwatch then had a stop watch and I could keep track of this rather accurately. "Productive time" was rated when they were rolling the die, talking about strategy, making decisions, moving troops, and how much work (turns) they produced for the effort. Well after the game everyone was congratulating each other on a great game, and I piped up with. "It sucked!" I told them what I had been doing and I said that "If you guys were supervisors of a line in industry you'd be fired the first day! I said that "productive work" accounted for only 28% of the time, while 72% of the time was spent in non-productive work like arguing, looking up rules, counting endless lists of modifiers, arguing, debating what a unit could or could not have done, and in rechecking the same rules. Further, if you applied an over-all levelling criteria that you had only produced 5 turns out of the 12 desiged that was 28% times 5 /12ths or the productive time was 11% efficiency.
After that eye-opening exercise I went off and began designing the set of rules that eventually became "Oh God!" Anything But a Six!." What I did was toss out EVERYTHING that took time, EVERYTHING that required gamers to stop moving troops, rolling die, or keeping their eyes on the pretty toys. I went to a gridded game, base rules, and a lot of tools and gadgets to speed things up. I also stripped the system down to barebones and ran dozens, hundreds of game to test it. Once we had the general principles of what we wanted to do donw, we got a very simple, very streamlined, very exciting game that we could now add back things like chrome that we wanted to see. For example, we saved so much time with the system that we were able to go to an ungridded game and take the time for simple measurement etc.
The principles that came out of this were as follows.
1. The game was to firmly fix the role of the players as the commander of an Army or the wing of an army in "The Long 18th century, from roughly 1660 to 1815. A player was not a colonel of a regiment or a drill sergeant, but a general and he was going to be required to deal ONLY with those questions and challenges that a real life general of the 18th century who commanded the wing of an army would be dealing with. He wouldn't for example bother about facing or formation of a unit- that was the captains or sergeant major's job not his. The general was interested only in the general combat readiness of his maneuver elements– could they still take part in his plan? Were they able to defend themselves? Were they properly employed? Did they have to be protected? Were they in a bad way? What was the other guy doing? What was happing behind, off to the flank, and just over those hills to the left? This meant that we simply threw out all this foolishness like facing, formation, drill, limbering/unlimbering, mounting/dismounting, odd ball weapons and guns and the like. A general didn't do that, the regimental quartermaster did or the sergeant or the captain.
2. I determined that the game had to run on a handful of general principles and concepts and that the complexity would come from the interplay of these concepts in creating novel situations. That is, there had to be a few general principles that the player could get into his head quickly and the rules be intuitive from there. Further it had to have very robust and rugged structures that would allow of a lot of variation and at the same time could be resolved quickly. For Example, the first principle is the name "Oh God! Anything But A Six!" In the game as I shall detail the troops have basic values and these can be modified up or down. However, regardless of the modificantions, if a troop had a numerical statistic in some area, it could not be modified to more than 5 or less than 1 which as low numbers are good on the rolls of die, it meant' that if you rolled a 1 you could do what you wished and if you rolled a six– you couldn't no matter the modified value of the troop could be 45 or a million! In another example, troops are defined by ABILITIES (which are their numberical statistics) and ATTRIBUTES which are properties. Abilities refer to some numerical value used but attributes refer to a power they either have or don't have and are not confined to probability. For example, a light infantry unit may have a fire value of 3, but it has the attribute of going into open order. Another principle was self-responsibility. Players were responsible for their own game. If for example a person forgot to do something or did it wrong, it stood. It was not redone or compensation made. Players would have to attribute it to "the inscrutable nature of war, and how, when prolonged, it often ends by becoming a matter of mere chance."
3. I determined that the game MUST BE ON THE SURFACE. That is, the properties of the unit (attributes and abilities) must be self-evident. There could be absolutely NO looking up its powers in the book or on charts and that in fact all modifiers had to be self-evident as well! That is, there was going to be no long list of modifiers or case situations to keep dragging players back to the rules to look up, discuss, and argue. To enforce this I made the stipulation that the rule book could be NO MORE than 12 pages long, single spaced 12 pt Times Roman Bold, and all rules, examples, illustrations, charts, diatribes and so forth had to fit in that space and if it did not, the red pencil had to be gotten out and the blood-letting would begin. This led us to the markers seen, which I will get to in a moment, and to each stand having its attributes or abilities on tags on the left rear of the base of stands, and that would be the ONLY place it could appear. Finally, the acid test of these was that the rules had to be proved at conventions where newbies would walk up never having played the rules before, and the rules had to be explained by me in 10 minutes (no more) with appropriate floor show, and that I would go through the first turn as a learning example for them, and that after turn two they could play like experts. Further, that the game could last no more than 12 turns or 6 hours and that an obvious decision was reached.
I am so far happy to point out that it has succeeded in this field test 12 times out of 14 and the two times it has not was once because there was an extremly obstreperous and difficult player in one game, and in the other there was a power failure at the convention facility and the gaming had to stop.
The game features a combat system which uses cards for combat results, these are special printed cards.
The cards you see are part of the combat results system.
How this works is this. There are five parts of each turn. The first is that the player who had initiative from the LAST turn pulls an event card at random from the EVENT deck. These are not the cards you see on the troops, but general cards which govern things in the game like weather, or unforseen evnts, or impose some condition on either or both sides. This is quite involved and gives the game a lively flavor, but I will not go into it here because it does not answer your question.
After that the player who had initiative LAST turn draws (he can choose from the remaining cards in his hand) an initiative card to roll on to KEEP the initiative for this turn. It will be a range of numbers from 1, to 1 to 6. Thus, if you still had it and wanted to keep initiative, you would play your 1 to 6. If you score within the range, you keep it, if you score outside the range the initiative passes to the other side without him having to roll (and at the end of this turn he now does the same process to see if he keeps it. Initiative if VERY important in the game. The side WITHOUT initiative is restricted to one measure of movement for infnatry and guns (anything with two legs and wheels) and two measures for cavalry (anything with four or more legs.) The side WITH initiative however can move as far with whatever troops he wishes AS FAR AS HIS LEEDLE OLE' HEART DESIRES! Even to the point of taking troops from one edge of the board to the other! The only restriction on both sides is they must stop when they come to rough or very rough terrain, or within one measure of an enemy unit.
A measure is the basic measure of the game and is equivalent to the frontage of one of your units. Thus, if an infantry unit in line has a frontage of 8" the measure is 8".
The initiative side moves first, and then the non-initiative side, and after that we come to the combat phase which is AT LAST the answer to what those cards are.
OGABAS has the only simultaneous combat system in the world of wargaming. There is no separate fire and melee phase, they all take place at the same time. Combat is handled by the use of the abilities of the unit and its attributes, and the Combat results deck.
Each unit has abilities rated numerically in Movement, Charge (melee) To Stand, Rally, Fire value, and Range. Some of these numbers are used differently Movement, To Stand, and Rally are done with the rolling of die. Fire and Mellee are done by the placing of cards drawn face down from the Combat Results deck. Distance is simply a reference to the number of measures a unit can fire. Generally most fire is 1 measure, as is melee range, but some elite infantry have a fire range of 2 and artillery goes out to two to four measures depending on the gun.
Regardless of range however, the power of the units in combat is in the fire or melee value. In combat a unit can use either its fire or melee (charge) value as it wishes and playrs usually use the higher. Some special units are allowed to use BOTH. (Very few, very rare). How this is handled is that once the combat stage is reached each player starts with the left-hand most unit of his command and choses what units within range he wishes to combat. He then can take whichever combat value he will use or can (charge or fire) and deals off face down on the desired enemy target the number of cards he is allowed. Thus a line infantry unit with a value of 2 in charge would place two cards, a heavy cavalry unit with a value of 5 would place five cards. These cards are applied to any enemy units within range that the placer desires. He can bunch them up on one unit, or spread them out to several units. Several units can fire on one if they wish and so forth. Players keep placing going left to right till they are done. Once all players have placed cards they then go right to left and begin "rolling off" on the cards with their "To Stand" value. Thus if the light infantry got five cards from the heavy cavalry unit, it would havee to roll five die and for each roll that was less than or equal to it's "to stand" value of 2, it could toss them off while still face down. Any that did not roll off are now revealed and placed on the unit and the penalties (or benefits) written on the card exacted. He then goes on to the next unit.
Units get modifiers on a very simple scale. If the unit is in rough terrain, its to stand and rally value are raised by one point. If they are in Very Rough terrain they are raised to 5. If they are in field fortifications or permanent fortifications ALL their values are raised to 5 (including charge and fire but not distance. Officers also affect a unit. These are small stands with a single figure on it and a numerical rating from 1 to 4. You may add these to ANY ONE value of unit in a turn, but you can't use that value again. Thus, if you use the officer ability of 2 on a unit's movement to make sure or pretty sure it can move (movement requires you to roll a die and roll less than or equal to the units movement rating) then the officer is "withed" the unit and tipped to show he has been used. You could use it to modify the "To Stand" roll upward for all the cards rolled against for example.
Once the cards are revealed the combat results enacted. In one out 100 cards there is a card with a black face which is the ELIMATED card. This card simply removes the unit from play. It is gone. Other cards may be no effect or cause the unit to retreat one measure. If a unit gets three retreats, it must go back three measures. If it gets four retreat cards it is ruled off the field and run away. Others are beneficial or invoke special situations which Iwill not get into here. The final class of cards are the "marker cards" which are shown by the silhouette of a colored triangle behind the print. A grey trinagle is a SHAKEN card which means the unit cannot move until the card is removed. A Brown card is FATIGUED which means the unit cannot use it's Mellee value or more more than two measures in a turn (even if on the side with initiative) untill it is removed. Out of Ammunition means the unit cannot fire until replenished with an ammunition wagon, OUT OF CONTROL which means the unit cannot have an officer use his ability on the unit until it is removed, DISORGANIZED which means ALL abilities of a unit are reduced by ONE, and BROKEN which means all abilities of a unit are reduced TO ONE! If a unit acquires two broken markets in a turn, it is eliminated.
In the rally phase, after combat, you simply get to roll one die for EACH marker card on your unit and for each die rolled less than or equal to your rally, you can remove one card of your choice.
That's pretty much the guts of the rules. There is a bit of chrome here and there but I've told you most of the main thread.
Otto
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