"A return to the Seven Years war" Topic

We did a little game at the club yesterday, to try out my old rules in the hope it would help me formulate a new version that would play faster!

The write up is at: link

Nice!

Welcome back to the SYW

Welcome home! Your battle looks suitably linear, at least until things go pear-shaped. It strikes me though that a lot of units refused to move, which must be frustrating for the player, as well as possibly unhistorical? These were, after all, professional soldiers. You do hear about the occasional failure to charge, but even then it's often down to a split command structure or similar, not to the unit(s)as such.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for modelling friction, but there's usually more of that once armies get closer to each other, than right in the starting blocks?

Very nice – inspiring pictures remind me of a pile o' Prussians still waiting to be painted.

I'm inclined to agree with the previous poster about 'friction' when troops are not even in combat, the armies of the day were not known for tolerance and sensitivity when it came to unquestioning obedience…. perhaps a little less friction will make your games flow faster :)

As the blog post mentioned, I am planning a new set of rules to enable faster play.
As to 'Friction' and the lack of activity at the start of the games, this is better than the previous versions, where everything had an order at game start, and flew about in a rather unhistorical way.
As to 'possibly unhistorical', I think it is, in fact, actually quite historical. If you read accounts of most battles of the 7yw, it was the Prussians who do almost all the moving while their enemies stayed largely in position.
Typical battles where this seems to have happened include Kolin, Zorndorf, Leuthen, and others.

This is a lovely period, and I hope to be able to get a better rule set up and running before too long!