"Rule suggestions for RCW and Russo Polish war" Topic

Going to use 15mm Peter Pig figs, looking for rules suggestions for RCW and Russo Polish war.

Perfect Captain had a set called (IIRC) "Red Actions"; played it a couple of times years ago. I remember it as a fairly simple, fun game. We used 10mm Pendraken, so 15s should work fine.

Try Trench Wars by Old Glory, I played them years ago, very simple, quick, rules and pretty bloody.

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We (the Jackson Gamers) developed a set for 15mm figures many years ago and have played it many times.

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There is also an addendum for using ships and aircraft:

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They are fairly easy rules that seemed to give good flavor to that period. And the best thing is that they are free!

If you try them and have any questions, just PM me and I'll try to provide elucidation.

Jim

Contemptible Little Armies is a fun set of rules.

Red Actions from The Perfect Captain would be my recomendation. Though that site no longer functions as I understand it. I also have The Contemptible Little Armies Rules, Army lists, and the Back of Beyond expansion though have not tried it. If you would like to see the few miniatures I have painted for them (Copplestone Castings Elite White Russians Painted as Markovtsy,Kornilovtsy,Drozdovtsy,and Alekseevtsy) let me know.

Another vote for the Perfect Captain's Red Actions… the site has gone I believe but there is a Facebook page with the files preserved.

Also have a look at variant rules for the excellent Chain of Command rules from Too Fat Lardies

Hello Mike
I am not sure what your needs are for a set of rules.
However, you might consider "Square Bashing".
They are a full battle set.
They are also "normal play" i.e a game will last 2-3 hours. No need to go fast.

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Maybe read through this and compare with the same from other rule sets for comparisons?

You will need to watch Dr Zhivago of course!

martin

You could try Fivecore Company Command, which should work well.

Check out Nordic Weasel's October Hammer.

Another vote for Square Bashing. Includes lists for the RCW and the Polish too.

Red Actions is what we use for 10mm. Tried Square Bashing but it is far too luck dependent for us. Many of the WW1 sets are mostly about trench warfare and the RCW was more about manoeuvre. Red Actions allows for a very wide range of troop types and really does have the right 'feel' that more generic rules lack.

The files for the Perfect Captain's "Red Actions" are all at my site.

My objection to the excellent Square Bashing is that they are very much a WWI rule set. But the RCW wasn't really like WWI in many ways at all.

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Thanks for that, Mark, and for an excellent site and collection of resources.

Doesn't Osprey have a rule set that covers both these Wars?

Not sure how these are:
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The question is what level of resolution are you after? Skirmish, Company, Brigade, Division? I'm currently working of a set for Brigade/Divisional level games, based on my Spanish Civil War set "For Whom the Dice Rolls".

I would avoid generic period rules at all costs. The RCW has a unique flavour. The Perfect Captain's "Red Actions" are fun, but are at very low level – company, I think. They are good, but don't capture the feeling of vastness you should get for the period. In practice you'll probably need more than one set. I use "Red Actions" if I want a company to battalion game, and PBI with mods for below that.

Trebian, I agree with what you said, except that for the RCW a company isn't that low level.

Single regiments would often cover a couple of kilometres of front. At that density, playing with the base unit as the company reflects the reality of the war. There simply were not very many men at the front.

The next level up is the brigade as the deployment unit, with a frontage of tens of kilometres. But they mostly operated independently, because the communications system did not allow Army HQs anything but the most rudimentary control at that level.

Entire brigades would be out of contact for days. Whole divisions would sneak unseen through the front lines. Tukhachevski lost contact with entire armies in August 1920 (he didn't even know where the Horse Army was, and he was in contact with it).

It would make for fascinating gaming, kriegsspiel style, but how you represent a brigade with a frontage of 4 km with figures?

Mark – I am re-reading on the war at the moment. Whilst armies are responsible for quite wide frontages, they do concentrate in order to fight battles, so I don't think you can take 3 battalions, divide by 4km & say that's the width of frontage when contact happens.

For more operational games I would go to 6" squares, representing about 500 yards, so on an 8' table that's about 4km.

I can't think of many battles at much tighter densities than one brigade for every couple of kilometres. There's not a lot of reliable maps and descriptions at that level, but thinking through the likely suspects.

Radzymin-Wolomin outside Warsaw was relatively high density, and the frontages there were less dense than that.

The battles north of Moscow with the Polish 5th Army were a confused jumble with massive gaps between brigades, interspersed with concentrations. Not that Sikorski had any idea what was going on half the time, and the Soviets were worse off.

The 1919 assault on Tsaritsyn, the 1920 attacks on Perekop and Kakhovka are about the only ones I can think of with brigades under one per km and commanders actually able to command.

A lot of the actions in the books I've just finished – including Budyenny and Hillman – take place around main roads and the railways, and there seems to be a Regiment/Brigade or two a side most of the time. That's about where I'm aiming for my level of resolution. 3 – 6 battalions, with supporting arms. The big gaps between the more slow moving infantry Divisions are exploited by the cavalry armies in the south, for sure, and they range over big areas. But I keep coming back to attacks along railway lines and around stanitsas close to them, with isolated brigades with wide open flanks. I'm working at a ground scale of about 400 yards to 6", which gives me 3 – 5 miles width, depending upon the size of table I use (I can go from 6' up to 12' at a push). I suspect we are not too far away in our interpretations. The one thing I'm not looking to model in detail is the sort of attack where an armoured train turns up and disgorges 200 men in the middle of a town. That does work best with Red Actions, and I see no need to reinvent that particular wheel.

I agree we're not too far apart. Most actions *were* about a town, railway junction, bridge etc.

And the concept of working at the level you are suggesting doesn't bother me, except for the command and control aspect.

When a cavalry brigade was sent to operate against the flank of some infantry, the higher level commander basically lost control of it at that point. If a player is able to control a cavalry army at range the infantry is basically always doomed. It will be outmaneuvered every time.

But the infantry did manage to fight off cavalry, because the cavalry did not know what was behind *its* flank. It had no idea what the other units on its side were doing. Nor, usually, did it even know what it was facing in any detail. So it had to operate with circumspection and mostly blind, with the local commander operating only on the basis of very general orders.

That's why I prefer either small scale actions -- or to kriegsspiel the RCW, because that retains the elements of uncertainty, without losing the ability to move freely.

I am using a variant of the command and control system from my Spanish Civil War rules, "For Whom The Dice Rolls". It uses alternating suits of playing cards and restricts how many can be played buy each player before the turn passes between them. It resolves most of the issues you identify, the rest are dealt with at a scenario level. You can throw caution to the winds and deliver a devastating flank attack, but you have to be careful you aren't left hanging out to dry when the enemy cavalry arrive. We've played a few games to test the concepts that are being developed. They are over on the "Wargaming for Grown Ups" blog, like this one: link

I'm currently working on the armoured car random events table.

I used to enjoy KoenigKrieg, which used a system like that.

I'm not familiar with KoenigKrieg, so I can't comment on any similarities. Briefly, the main mechanism I am using is that units can perform a maximum of three activations in a turn. If all three are used up then you can't respond if attacked in anyway, except to fight back in melee. So if you use all your three activations, you can be over run by cavalry. If you hold one back, then you get to shoot, most likely, which will normally stop them in their tracks. Of course, you don't know what command cards your opponent has in their hand, so you don't know if the cavalry will be able to attack you or not. So perhaps taking the extra move increment to get to the objective first is the thing to do anyway.