I played my first game of this last night. It was a little bumpy learning the rules and I'm not sure I did everything correctly.
The forces were Lithuanians and Cossacks. The Lithuanians had a 9 FPS skirmish army and the Cossacks had a 6 FPS skirmish army. Looking at the lists I'm surprised at how much infantry the Cossacks had to field. They had no cavalry in their army but two wagons.
The scenario chosen by the Cossacks, as the weaker player from the option rolled was the ambush scenario.
The Lithuanian player started in a 40cm square in the middle of the table and the Cossacks had one unit as bait about 20cm away. This was some registered Molitsy.
Then after the Lithuanians were placed the rest of the Cossack forces were put down at least 20cm away from the 40cm ambush zone.
The Cossacks started with their wagons moving towards the top of the hill near where the bait Molitsy unit was. The other registered Molitsy units had defense orders and the unregistered Molitsy were moving towards the Lithuanians.
The Lithuanins were all started with move orders, two of the units changed their orders to charge in the order phase and charged at two of the Cossack units while two more units advanced.
The registered infantry on the North slope of the hill fired volleys at the approaching Lithuanian cavalry, shattering one unit and driving back the Dragoons.
On the south side things were not going as well for the Cossacks and the regular Molitsy were charged by cavalry, broken by them and then run down by them.
The cavalry swept around to take a run up the South side of the hill while a banner of Tartars moved further east to move behind the hill and into the rear of the Cossack infantry on the other side.
The wagons defended the crest of the hill admirably, forcing two units of cavalry to withdraw and causing havoc among another with canister shot from the one with a cannon.
The game came to an end after 6 turns and after totally it up both sides had sustained heavy casualties during this brief engagement but the Lithuanians came out the winners, mostly because of the unit of crappy Cossacks that ran and were all cut down. That was 8 bases of infantry destroyed in a rather short engagement.
This was just a quick dust up to learn the rules. I'll go through and add any special rules for weapons and troop types later. A few were used as I remembered them but didn't want to spend the entire time looking through the book.
Overall it seems like a good set of rules and I really like how the scenario selection balances out the different value of the two forces.
Another thing that is great about the book itself is that it has an index so things are easy to find when you are learning to play.
I'll make army lists too as flipping through the book was a bit of a pain from page to page.
In another game or two I'll probably have it nailed down. If you are interested in learning this system we will be doing demo games at Con On the Run on September 6 from 9-5 at Bushy Run Battlefield near Pittsburgh, PA.
is a big fan of the Age of Sail, and these ships really speak to him - he loves transitional eras, and the Anglo-Dutch Wars was one of those.