"Sam Mustafa Rules Relativity Question" Topic

If you have them or have tried them do you find yourself enjoying all or several of Sam's wargame books? Do they build or grow upon each other? For example if I like Sam's new rules "Rommel" would it be safe to assume I would like Maurice, Blucher and the others?

Do they have commonality between the rules? Like for example DBA and HOTT, are very similar yet different in their own right.

Thank you.

I love/d "Grande Armee"! Haven't heard of it? It's a bit "old" now, but it was well done.

I then tried "Lasalle"(?). I did not like those. I have not tried any since then either. I *believe* the others are similar to Lasalle, but I don't know that.

I saw a post about Rommel "town blocks" that someone had just finished building. They looked a heck of a lot like the ones I did for Grande Armee, so I think it's safe to say he does re-use some ideas.

Nope, no commonality. They're aimed at different play scales and, as same points out in each of his rule sets, mechanisms that work well at one scale can't work at another.

Rommel with it's board game'ish area movement, Maurice with the V&B'ish big units, LaSalle with multibase units. All different. I liked LaSalle, couldn't quite get my head around Maurice (although I stole some ideas for in-house rules) and Rommel leaves me cold.

But that's just me.

no, Sam's rules are generally very clear and easy to play. They don't necessarily reflect one's understanding of the period or type of games one wants to play.

So what everyone has said is right, albeit the combat mechanic/engine has some similarities in feel.

I have Maurice, Lasalle, Longstreet and Blucher and am about to invest in Rommel. Lasalle is the outlier for me as whilst I like it and play it there are other Napoleonic rules I prefer. ACW players say the same about Longstreet but the campaign rules and the ability to take your Brigade through the war makes this a set worth playing. I really like Maurice and the way the armies build but also how the firing line mechanics work. Blucher also but this is arguably less of a miniatures game.

Personally, I think that it has been all downhill since Might and Reason.

"All downhill since Might and Reason" might be a bit unfair, as M&R is truly an excellent, excellent set of rules – still one of my favorite. I truly enjoyed Maurice, and I liked Lasalle. I skipped Longstreet (I don't play the period), and I remained lukewarm to Blucher – to me, the scale comes at the detriment of the Napoleonic "chrome", whatever that means (very subjective statement, I concede.)

As for the original question: the only commonalities it is the very clean, crisp style of Sam's writing, and the overall high quality of the final product. Grand Armee and Might & Reason share some ideas. Lasalle and Maurice are two very different games, and so it is Blucher.

There are some similarities here and there – Might & Reason feels a lot like Grande Armee, for instance. But otherwise no, they are not a core idea applied to various themes like, say, Two Hour Wargames skirmish games.

As people have noted you may love some (I liked Grande Armee so much I bought it from Sam and now publish it). Others may leave you cold (I'm not a fan of the cards in Longstreet and Maurice).

Rommel is a very different beast with squares for movement and a scale of 1km per square. To many this makes it a boardgame (though how we decide the difference eludes me) that uses miniatures.

I didn't realize you could still get Grande Armee. Is this the original version or the "fast play" one? I didn't like the fast play version.

Blucher is what got me hooked – Napoleonics without all the fuss was a big draw.

I picked up Rommel, not sure on that one yet due to the scale but it does allow battling out Market Garden in a couple stages.

I'd say that Blucher draws a lot from Grande Armee in that they are both Corps and Army level games where a large foot print unit is essentially a brigade.

One thread that I would say is consistent through the Honor series is the lack of casualty counting whether that is base removal or figure removal. A units fighting efficiency will degrade as it takes hits and the amount of hits is often based on training or élan. In this sense many of the games are similar.

DestoFante, to clarify, I meant everything after Might and Reason. We love M and R, and played it last Sunday.

I'm also a big M&R fan and for me, subsequent rules are not up to the same mark. I liked Maurice and Longstreet well enough but not to the same degree as M&R. I buy all his rules but the recent efforts haven't inspired me.

@NealSmith

Yup it is still available. Hardcopy from ScaleCreep.com or PDF from my downloads shop at FlagshipGames.com

This is the original game not the Fast PLay variant.

Very cool! I really need to get all of that out again and run some games!

I am a big fan of Sams rules in general (started with Grande Armee and Lasalle is still my favourite).

The main thread I find with his rules is that they are elegant and fast so they will not follow a pattern that you are accustomed to. Usually they are a good choice if you are not happy with the rules you are using for a period as they will approach it with a very innovative eye. As a result that means they are frequently radically different and you will find some will stick with you and some may not.

I enjoyed Blucher as a successor to Grande Armee – if you liked one you will like the other. Grande Armee was great (Neal played in my HMGS games all of the time back in the day) but it did slow down for very large battles where Blucher is better.

Hi Tod
I'm pretty sure that I played Blucher with you at Cold Wars a couple of years ago. We llove Grande Armee and still play it (with some modifications), but didn't like Blucher at all. Blucher just seemed too gamey and we couldn't find sensible rationales for some of the mechanisms.
Regards

AussieAndy:

I took the liberty of posting your comment on the Designer's Notes thread. Just FYI.

There are all different in their own way. I have enjoyed all of Sam's rules that I have and have played.

1st for me as LaSalle for a good Napoleonic tactical game. Then it was Longstreet for ACW which is one of my favourite sets of ACW rules. Loved the campaign game. Then came Blucher which is my goto game for Grand Tactical level Nappies. Rommel fits the bill so far for operational level ww2. Other ww2 large scale games were too slow or too clunky for me. Rommel seems a reasonable balance.

I think most of Sam's rules are bound together by a post-modern reaction to the highly mechanical war-game rules from the 1970s and 1980s. Essentially, those earlier war-games reflect a particular World War Two, linear view of power, which posits that power and warfare can be reduced to understandable, controllable factors. Sam's games start with the basic premise that we can never really know what happens inside the brigade base, but can only rely on a description of what happened which is provided by an abstracted dice roll which represents information gleaned after the fact. Nowadays this seems less obvious, but if you frame Sam's games in the context of Empire, or Advanced Squad Leader, or The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it makes more sense. I think his games are a reflection of his job as an academic.

Roberto Bolaño, the great Chilean writer and avid wargamer, wrote a short story in a book called A Brief History of Nazi Literature in the Americas about a fascist American war-game designer who becomes obsessed with writing a novel which is really a codex of statutes and regulations that the Nazis would have written if they'd won the war and taken over the US. So he has entire chapters and volumes dedicated to how the Nazi-American railway system would run, or how the cattle industry in Texas would be governed. He writes thousands upon thousands of pages in this style before he finally dies. It's really a veiled critique at those old, process heavy war-games, which I think is related to Sam's own system/critique.