A Square Grid In Riskovia

We're playing Maurice again on Thursday, so I dredged my gloriously unpainted Risk figures out of their cupboard this evening. And I noticed that two bases from each Maurice unit fitted into a square on my chessboard, and I thought ... why not?

I made the rules up as I went along. The basics were the same as my other square-grid Battle Cry derived games, but I thought I'd throw in some 18th Century specifics, derived from Maurice, mostly.

Movement distances were the same, but Artillery got a marker once it had fired. It couldn't then move again until the marker was removed - which cost it an activation.

Combat factors were reduced to reflect the fact that cavalry wasn't really shock-cavalry and infantry firepower wasn't as deadly as in the Mexican Adventure games. Infantry fought at 2-1, whilst cavalry fought with 3 dice, but automatically lost one if fighting Infantry. Artillery fired at 3-2-2-1.

The biggest change was that units could be activated in groups. The activation of a particular unit type could include a group of units, so long as they were all adjacent to each other and  on either the same rank or same file of the board. They all had to be in the same terrain as well. Activated units could move individually, but had to end orthogonal and adjacent to at least one other unit in the same activated group. Any units in the activated group that were eligible to battle could do so.

I used the close combat and troop quality rules I have been trying out.

I gave both armies six units of Infantry (two Elite) and three units of Cavalry (one Elite), plus one unit of Artillery. I didn't bother with a General on either side. I set victory at five flags, and gave both sides three activation dice.

I didn't take pictures of the game itself, but posed a few afterwards. The Riskovians won a crushing victory over their Sans Couleur foes, destroying five of their units for the loss of only one of their own. The group activation and low fire dice made for a wonderfully linear game, with infantry blazing away at each other for several turns. San Couleur attempted a cavalry flank move through some woods, but it was too slow to affect the game. The battle was won by the Riskovian elite infantry steadily eroding the San Couleur centre with deadly musketry, whilst their elite cavalry held the flank.

It was a lot of fun, and I'm going to do it again another day.

Here's the posed pictures.

The Riskovians fire another volley.

Their elite cavalry rides up in support.

The Sans Couleur infantry fall back, before routing from the field.