"One hour wargames - bigger battle" Topic

This is an AAR on McPherson's Ridge (opening stages of Gettysburg 1863. I am just trying the rules out in a bigger game than those proposed in the book.

The game is played on Kallistra Hexes with Kallistra 12mm figures.

There is also download support material on the blog page.

Link – link

Thanks for that, and the interesting house rules. I have played three ACW games using various unit and table sizes, but I am not satisfied with the rules -- there is just too much that is missing for me -- but I wanted to play multiple games before I did any tweaking to the rules.

I haven't been able to get a game to last more than 30 minutes, and one was over in 15. What kind of times are you getting?

Several of the things that stick in my craw is no movement and fire, no pluses for attacking flanks or rear, and no melee. My brother was able to get a cav unit behind one of my artillery units and he couldn't do anything except shoot at a -2. I ignored the cavalry unit to my rear and kept working the guns; my brother kept rolling 1s and 2s, and I had another unit come up and chase the cav away. My artillery should have been mauled. I didn't even turn to face the threat …

Hi, I agree with all of that.

I think 'One Hour wargames' might well include setting up and putting away :-)

Though the rules do allow gamers to get figures out on a table when time is short – especially say a midweek game or a game with kids before they go to bed, or the gamer who 's figure collection has not hit the table for 10 years etc. It is that sort of easy access that these help with ……. but the stripping down that goes with that will no doubt lead to some dissatisfaction with gamers who like to player at a 'deeper' level (and I think the number is substantial).

I am guessing that favoured periods will not feel right at all (I like WWII and see substantial short-comings with the rules for that period), but I am more forgiving with what I might consider secondary periods.

My games are going in the 30 – 40 minutes period for those scenarios in the book that have 4 – 6 units per side, on terrain that is relatively sparse.

My use of the rules for this game was just to do something quite different with them and pull them out of the constraints given by the book, though I am quite certain that once one does this, it rather misses the point of the book and the intended audience and you cross a line in which you might be better looking at other rules. But the system is robust enough that you can tinker without throwing other parts out of balance.

My adding of morale rules had to take account of the 'no move and shoot' thing. Initially I just had the failing unit fall back a hex, but the reality of that is that the attacker would then have to move up again and not be able to fire, while the retreating unit then gets another round of non-returned fire against the unit moving up. In effect the retreating unit was a actually being rewarded with extra fire opportunities – so I added that a retreating unit also took 2 hits and this makes failing a morale test much more punishing as it can often puttee unit to elimination or most certainly make subsequent morale checks more likely to fail with the consequences that fall out of that.

I think at some points in the game you might have to make some decisions that 'feel right' as these are not lawyer type rules so there is no real need to hang your hat on every rule / situation, especially in a friendly game. (note twice I re-rolled the dice in this game, I would probably struggle to be so relaxed about doing that in deeper systems). So for your artillery situation, I think I might be tempted to say that in that specific example, taking the charge rule out of the Horse and Musket section might be justified.

i think that kind of interplay is OK and in fact needs to be done to do a Wars of the Roses battles as that era is not specifically covered in the rules, requiring a cobbling together of the adjacent rule-sets.

It is a thought provoking design to say the least.

We generally find vanilla games transactions an hour, including setup time.

It is always easy to make rules more complicated by adding in lots of extra ones if you feel the standard ones are too light. Just lift the melee rules from the ancients set.

They OHW are far more about how the rules, scenarios and random armies interact than using them for historical delights though.

I find them useful for getting new players to think about basic tactics. And for getting old armies onto the table.