""Taiping Era" rules review" Topic

uiduach OB has posted a review of Taiping Era, over on his blog. It has a fair summary of the mechanisms and so on. He concludes:

"There are two burning questions when reviewing rules. Will I get a good game and is it straightforward to learn? To both of these I'd answer in the affirmative. More, I'd say you will get a good flavour of the nature of command and combat in mid-19th Century China."

Full review here: link

(BTW This is an ewxcellent blog, and it deserves you all to follow it)

I bought the PDF and it has a lot of background material in it plus unit organizations. I've read a lot on this particular war too and Trebian's research is right on as far as I am concerned.
For any newbie looking to start in this fascinating period, this is a one stop shop for learning about the war. Also his blog has a lot of color pics of his collection for uniform information.

I, for one, was glad I bought it.

Great review,,thanx…only problem i have is the grid system…but otherwise..looks good.

Do the rules cover the European forces in the Arrow War or just the Taiping forces? I am planning to game the assault on the Taku forts. Would this set of rules be helpful?

@jurgenation: Do not turn away just because of the grid. You can easily mark up a cloth with sticky dots from a stationers for the corners, and then take them off if you don't like it. For those of you who really hate squares (and it is a shame if you do – I wargame both with and without, depending upon what i want to get out of the game) then it shouldn't be too hard to retro fit the rules to a non-squared basis.

@Nick Stern: Yes. It has force lists for the 1860 War, together with unit standards. They have rules for knocking down walls with artillery and fighting in built up areas and the inside of fortifications.

Helpful – thanks for sharing!

thanx…