"On rules for committing reserves" Topic

"I am fresh from an epic game in which commitment of reserves was crucial. Maintaining a reserve is a rather fundamental principle (even if it doesn't make it into the UK military's list of 10 principles of war these days). Any real-life general will keep troops in reserve: to exploit success in the attack; to plug holes and counter-attack if defending; and generally to respond to unexpected or adverse events. This is mainly because of fog of war, something which our tabletop games don't do very well. We wargamers with our helicopter view usually know how many troops our opponent has, where they are and what they are trying to do. It is hard to achieve deception and surprise, so there is not as much incentive as in the real world to hold troops back just in case.

Some rulesets make an effort to address this by various means. Units that are formally designated as reserves may enjoy certain advantages in exchange for initial restrictions. Units beyond a certain distance from the enemy might qualify. Command point systems or card-driven mechanisms might reward players who keep a reserve…"

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Armand

An intriguing concept!

To be honest a game of only 4 to 6 bounds is never going to get reserves right. 1 bound to contact, 2 bounds for it to show where the reserves are needed, OOPS out of time to get reserves in. Our modern rules can get reserves in as we can get a small game of 10 bounds in an evening but only a one to one game with competent players. No chance with beginners or multi player games, they never have a full compliment of competent players and who wants to be the reserves when they may never be called?

Secondly there are players to whome hiding figures is unsatisfactory, in that case the real need for reserves is eliminated in a large part, no amount of die rolling will make use of reserves realistic so why bother in those circumstances.

Some of the suggestions in the article are really pre-programming so are not reflecting the commanders decision to call in reserves. Nothing wrong with that but it's not really how reserves work.

Thanks.

Armand