"1644 rules review" Topic

The latest in my series of Civil War rules reviews looks at the stalwart 1644 set. link

Nice review, I had a copy long ago and now lost. It was very helpful starting out in ECW but never really cared for the rules themselves. Imho that is.

Good review 👍.

We tried them, for nostalgias sake, recently. I was quite concerned about the simultaneous movement, as we haven't played a game with that for decades. However the order system, with little chits, worked really well and was our favourite part of the game. Old fans of figure casualties also liked the opportunity to take single figures off again. 😀. Melees did take a long time to resolve.

I had some enjoyable games with these rules. They're still on my bookshelf if anyone wants to play.

One of my favorite rule systems. Always have a fun game with them…..now if I could only roll better!

I used to use these for larger battles as they were reasonably fast play compared with Forlorn Hope.

Main issues I found were that the musketry was very devastating. Casualties were high and /or morale too insensitive to losses so units often survived to 50%. I heard that the ECW rules were adapted from a set of Marlburian or SYW rules, so maybe a bit of a hangover from these?

Not fatal issues, as one could handwave 'casualties' as disorganisation, stragglers etc but units standing after taking high casualties does not seem typical of the ECW, a few cases excepted.

Funny to see this post! I just ran across my copy in a stack of old rules and pulled them out to see their suitability for 2 10mm Pendraken ECW army packs I recently acquired. Am taking a closer look at the campaign system in the back for possible applications in other periods. Rick seems to have hit the right buttons there with me.

Clearly much love still exists for these rules. And so there should be. The layout is a bit of a benchmark and pattern for those which followed. I just think that there are better rules in existence.

Dye4minis – Regiment of Foot v1 has an excellent campaign system. Worth a look if you can find a copy (they ditched the system in V2)

Regiment of Foote v1 has just been re-released in pdf format on the Peter Pig website. You only need to scroll down a bit. And for a very reasonable price I think.

Thanks Olivero, I knew that it was in the pipeline to become available as a PDF but was unaware that it had finally made it.

1644 has some great ideas. The morale ladder, the way cavalry melees work with extra ranks being fed in. But it has some not so good ideas as well; the casualty system is very deterministic; you know you will cause 1 casualty with a 50% chance of a second, that wort of thing. No outliers possible. The infantry melee system is a bit clunky, and the game plays quite slowly.
The Scruttockshire campaign included is excellent.

Another vote for Scruttockshire! I agree with the comments on the devastating musketry.

Purchased it years ago when I was transitioning from Warhammer to historicals. That, along with DBR, some of the first historical rulesets I owned. Never played it but was the first of many pike and shot rules purchased in my quest to find something I liked.

I heard that the ECW rules were adapted from a set of Marlburian or SYW rules, so maybe a bit of a hangover from these?

At least my copy of the rules (Foundry Publications, 2007) clearly states in the foreword on page 2 that the rules were

"… originally designed for the War of the Spanish Succession, and subsequently adapted for a wide variety of periods."

There are also army lists included for the Marlburian French and British force (pages 106-109), and on these lists musketeers tend to have higher fire factor than in the ECW and TYW lists (3 vs. 4), so some effort was taken to set apart the effectiveness of musketry between the different sub-periods.