"misidentification" Topic

With SYW uniforms often being in a wide array of colours it is not surprising that one reads of battlefield misidentification of units.

My group are creating armies for Western Europe with French Reichs armee & Austrians against various combinations of Prussians, Hanoverians, British & small German states. This seems the most pronounced theatre for rainbow uniform colours.

My question is twofold: have you or your gaming partners ever misidentified a unit & are there gaming mechanisms to simulate this?

Nope.

and

Nope.

We have had an incident when one of us fired on a friendly by mistake – a case of older eyes nicely reflecting some real fog of war. I thought the fire should go ahead, but the other player felt not – and so we didn't.

there were some instances of misidentification during the Wars of the Roses, but I don't know any of these rule systems well enough to know whether specific rules cover the event.

@ norm

You would not want to overdo the misidentification issue but I wouldn't mind adding a low percentage chance of such a happening.

I think you were kind to your older friend.

Thanks for the reply.

Not quite the same thing as you are talking about, but in GHQ's American Civil War Rules (which are quite good despite having the terrible title 'Micro Force: The Game') there are rules for friendly fire included in the scenario for Cleburne's Night Attack at Chickamauga.

Basically, because of poor visibility, during the firing phase all units have to fire on any unit, friend or foe, that is in front of them and in range unless they are able to pass a command and control test.

Not in rules.. but, in a series of campaign battles set in the war of spanish succession,one of my opponent developed a mortal fear of the wild geese.

This was abused by having other red coated French allies hold villages as well as the wild geese, and once he saw red coats he would order his troops to halt and bring up guns to support the attack.. sometimes wasting the whole day and allowing an allied commander to attack completely unsupported.

(His fears stemmed from an earlier battle where they had fired their first fire at thirty yards, and then assaulted from a trench into his wavering troops, killing more than fifty per cent of his first quality foot (one step down from guards), for the loss of about fifty men in total.)

I used the red coats in every battle after as a psychological tool and it always worked.

No, but then I painted all the units I play with.

Yes, I play Piquet. In that game your turn sequence is governed by cards that allow you to do things as the cards are turned, one at a time, from your army's face down sequence deck. There are several extra cards that can be added, and with a simple rule governing the effect of the card 'friendly fire / blue on blue' can be simulated.

Example:

The umpire secretly adds a "Merde!" card to one side's deck. The definition of the card is not disclosed to either side. The card is defined as follows:

On the appearance of the "Merde!" card an umpire chosen unit of infantry which has an friendly unit from another brigade dressed in red coats, in unobstructed line of sight, to its front, and within musketry range is misidentified as the enemy. The chosen unit will open fire on it at full effect and will keep firing whenever it is able until rallied on an "Officer Check" card.

No, but then I painted all the units I play with.

It would be a poor mother who doesn't know her own children James.

My rules aren't card-driven but that's the sort of thing needed.

I'll have to ponder.

In our set of more tactical rules (1:20), both freindly and target units could be caught in the effective range fan. In those cases casualties were taken from both enemy and friendly units.

I was playing a game in Wally Simon's basement. The power went out, but that wouldn't stop Wally from playing a wargame. He lit about a dozen candles and lined them around the game mat. He advanced his army and set up a beautiful flank attack on a unit. It just happened to be one of his units, that had advanced impetously two turns earlier. In the dimness of the candlelit basement it was difficult to identify your troops across the table. The attack went home and routed a unit.

Once after a Napoleonic game was set up and about to begin I had out the hussars on the French side were actually British hussars and the Dutch lancers of the Guard should on the French side instead of that of the British… they were borrowed figures unfamiliar to the referee so we simply swapped the units and got on with the game.