"What is the LEAST "Beer and Pretzels" ruleset?" Topic

There's a lot of rulesets out there that are described as "Beer and Pretzels" for their simplicity. Which rulesets are the furthest away from being Beer & Pretzels?

And do you enjoy playing them…

Tractics for me. I played it a ton as a teen back in the '70s and looked at it again. Piss poor rules wrt infantry. Have the 2nd edition but yet to take it to the table.

Every time this topic comes up, one of the best answers has to be Phoenix Command, which is a set of rules for 20th-21st century man to man skirmish actions. The rules cover ballistic accuracy, blunt trauma wounds, and so many charts and tables for every gun made since the dawn of time. Every turn is just a few seconds and a five minute gun battle could easily take up an entire gaming night!

Tractics was mentioned earlier, but another one along those same lines would be Combat Commander and its sequel Battlefield Command from Enola Games. The base set of rules wasn't too bad (although pretty chart heavy), but the advanced rules with ground pressure, EW jamming, etc., made the game unplayable. I remember my group trying everything and the kitchen sink one time and I think we got through something like 3 or 4 turns in 8 hours!

Ha! I have those titles from Enola but never read them. I also have Warship commander and tried to get a handle on it at College. I was reading it during lunches and have more notes (questions and assumed interpretations) in the margins than there are rules. Same pig different lipstick!

WRT Phoenix I have pirated copies but soo many books I never read it but take your word for it. I played the Morrow Project which was similarly over detailed but was an RPG so I didn't mention it.

Tractics wins by a mile.

Fell over laughing when I opened the box and never played it.

Another contender would be the Dennis, Knight & Jeffrey "Variable Length Bound" rules, "Napoleonic Rules for a Large Scale Wargame with Small Scale miniatures" and "American Civil War Rules for an Army Leven Game with 2mm of 6mm Miniatures. These are usually described as simply unplayable. Simultaneous move, and everyone proceeded until there was a "change of situation." Since there would be multiple changes of situation going on at the same time, the bounds kept getting shorter and nearby units would be at different times. After a while, that bit about Achilles never catching the tortoise seems reasonable.

What about the Colonial genre? What would be a complex set of rules for that?

I'll certainly second Newberry 'Fast' Play anything but Tractics is a contender.

I had that Enola Warship Commander and it was also kind of a nightmare.

Empire V for Napoleonics. Played years ago, and at times we may have played through one turn in an evening.

All the iterations of Empire.

Any version or offshoot of Empire.

Kuznetsov, look for a little blue book called Colonial Skirmish Rules. Each turn is around 3 seconds with modifiers for things like if your bayonet is attached to the rifle or not. Very detailed and while it works (as long as there are less than 20 or so figs on the board), it can get tedious at times and multi-player games go at least 6-8 hours if everyone has 8-10 figs.

Holy cow. with 3 second turns, do you have to track whether each figure has the breach open or closed?

@aegis is this it?

link

Starfleet Battles
ATTACK VECTOR: TACTICAL
Harpoon
Seekreig
Maybe Final Combat, I never played just heard tales

"… do you have to track whether each figure has the breach open or closed?"

The rules are a time and motion study; reloading typically takes several "turns". God forbid you try to reload a muzzle-loader.

Newbury Fast Play – any period !

Cordite & Steel, TSR, circa 1977. It has 11 pages of rules followed by 4 designer notes (5 pages followed by 5 pages of charts and explanations followed by 50 pages of ship data cards and 8 turning circles. I've wondered if this is how Seakrieg got its start. I have never played it nor seen it played nor heard of anyone playing it.

Re: Combat Commander & Battlefield Commander, I have them, never played them, but have kept them as references for the organizational information.

SPI's The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-1943

link

Famously presented on The Big Bang Theory, using the actual game and citing the actual rules.

Favorite bit:
"We have to roll for the weather."
"It's the desert! Isn't it hot?!?"
(Rolls die, checks chart)- "Yes."

(I know it's not a minis game, but that wasn't specified.)

I thought we were doing rule sets instead of board games. There are hundreds of board games that could be listed.

"Kuznetsov" reminds me of "Song of Drums and Shakos."

Kuznetsov, yes, that's the one. It's quite the set of rules in a small package and it's designed for very, very small actions such as a British raiding party trying to destroy a Pathan gun in an improved position. You would take 7-8 British figs against maybe 10 Pathans and start them less than 2 feet apart, which might take two players 3-4 hours!

Anything from the pen of Scotty Bowden has to be a contender, God love him. Stars and Bars, Redcoat and all of the various iterations of Empire.

There is an urban legend about SB that he, unhappy with the lack of reliable info on the ballistic performance of Austrian artillery pieces, paid a Viennese museum to live fire one of their collection cannons using properly recreated propellant to check its' range on a fixed charge.

It's one of those stories that even if not true, it should be.

Who did Napoleonique and Napoleonique Encore? I seem to recall a convention counting charts. 127, I think?

Cambrai to Sinai? As noted above, pretty well anything Newbury claimed to "fast play" is anything but.

Any set of rules played with ten times as much stuff as it was designed for.

In the late ‘70's what became my group of players started playing Tractics. I was 12 at the time and didn't even know there were other rule sets for WW2. I basically memorized most of the charts and tables and after a while I could run games almost without looking at the rules. "Sherman hit the Tiger's turret side armor at a 45 degrees from 60 inches? Shell bounced, I don't even have to look it up" My 60 year old brain couldn't dream of absorbing that much information now

Good point with Scotty Bowden, Essex. Chef de Battalion struck me as one of the classic mismatches of miniature warfare--to design a set suitable for commanding a brigade, and then to want to apply it to some of the biggest battles of the Napoleonic Wars.

Martin's right, and it happens again and again. We take a set of rules which will work reasonably well for a particular board or army size, try to fight a battle two echelons higher, then blame the rules. The ratio of poorly-designed rules to misapplication of rules by players and scenario designers doesn't bear thinking about.