takes a look at flexible roads made from long-lasting flexible resin.
Introduction from the rules writer James Daniels:
All pictures were taken at a recent re-fight of Lansdown Hill using the Kingdom is Ours rules.
Having played many different sets of rules over the last 35 years, I found it historically challenging to provide something that would be fast enough, and yet, enjoyable and competitive enough to sustain interest. Therefore, I was looking for something that would provide those moments of hilarity as your troops did something out of your control their general and remain a balanced, historically as accurate as possible, tactical game to pit your wits against the opposition.
Scales
The scale is really flexible – each unit represents a unit that would be about 500 to 800 strong in the Civil War during a major battle, or could represent smaller forces if wargaming a skirmish. What was more important to me was the way that the units react to percentage of casualties caused. I also did not want to get hung up on unit points values and introduced a simple swapping system for different troop types – giving advantages and disadvantages for each type with limits on the rarer types found throughout the wars.
The Turn Sequence
The turn sequence is something common to all games – trying to get as close an approximation to real time as possible. This required randomness – as opposed to one player moves and then the next which lead to the order dice being created. Each unit should have the ability to action once per turn with some units doing more. This was where the balance was struck having one order die per unit and the generals command die as an effective number of moves per turn. To add to the randomness and prevent a pure strategy game, the "purple dice of doooom" was introduced to ensure that the end the turn could occur at any point. This stopped the game playing of saving your best troops movements and attacks back to the very end of the turn – where you knew you had five moves left against your opponents one for example.
Command & Control
Command and control is an important factor – therefore, giving generals a limit on the amount of orders that they can issue per turn helps – the better the general, the more orders per turn he can issue. Combined with this – it doesn't matter how good a general you are, your troops will always surprise you in some way, and so the random events were introduced at the end of every turn. These are designed to add a bit of fun to the game and also to prevent the boring two lines of troops opposite each other whilst each player is waiting for the other to make the first move.
Melees & Charges
Historical accuracy comes from reading and experience of battle re-enactment – where I wanted cavalry to be able to fire and then decide whether to charge into combat or swirl around the enemy. As cavalry was very effective at fighting disordered foot but would be easily defeated by a unit in charge for horse formation. This is covered by the charge sequence which needs to be followed carefully to get the true feel of the "swirling" cavalry just looking for an unformed foot unit to attack. In detail, the unit declares a charge, then before any dice are rolled the target unit declares its response intent. The charge is then tested for, and if successful then throws for movement and is moved up to the ½ move point. If the cavalry engage the target, then they do not get a chance to respond. If they do not contact, the target can respond and then the attacker can fire and choose to engage or to "swirl" around the target. This forces units to adopt the charge for horse formation for defense whenever cavalry are in the vicinity as the turn randomness can give cavalry units several moves consecutively. Obviously, this advantage can also be countered by your own cavalry which makes for a great battle.
Basing Requirements
To speed up the playing time, figures are based in blocks of four (a stand) – this is for both infantry and cavalry – this means that units can be moved around the field much faster – as you don't have those pesky single figures that keep falling over and also casualties are tracked on a tracker so that you don't remove any figures until a stand is lost. When stands are lost this effects moral and so by removing the whole stand it is very visible that the unit effectiveness is diminishing. With the trackers, all the units (or commanders) stats are visible and stop some players referring to their army lists and not being able to determine which unit it is at a glance.
Paperback
248mm x 180mm
72 pages
Color illustrations throughout