The Other Civil War

I've started to feel I've got a bit bogged down in the ECW Portable Wargame recently, and maybe need to step back from it and stop fiddling. Get the written rules up to date, and then leave them for a little bit.

However I have a bit of a head of steam going on gridded games, so I thought it might be good to revisit some of the other things I've dabbled in over the years. I thought I'd get my ACW stuff out last night, and play around with a variant of the One Hour Wargames rules that came to me whilst I was out walking yesterday lunchtime. I played a couple of games and they kind of worked, and I even scribbled down a few notes on movement rates, ranges and how cover and terrain affected firing.

One feature of the OHW ACW rules is that there's no close combat; all combat is shooting. When I first started using the rules I found this a little dull, but further play has shown that it makes for some interesting decisions and tactical play. A unit can either move or shoot. If you decide to sit and shoot from a distance then you may get more shots in on the enemy, but your units may not necessarily be in the best position to exploit any openings you create. But spend too long moving into a better firing position and you may find your troops unable to stand up to the ensuing firefight. I certainly found this last night, with one side winning a local firefight, but then being too far away from where the focus of the battle had shifted in order to effectively exploit their advantage.

Anyway, after a couple of games I felt that I might have something worth writing up at some stage, but decided that the Portable Wargame was still my better bet for a gridded game. Although I did create my own heavily modified variant of it a few years ago ('Mighty Mean Fowt Fights') I thought that it might be interesting to go back to the 'original' rules as published in Bob's recent books and see what I could do with them.

I ended up playing two more games, starting with the Late 19th century rules from 'The Portable Wargame', and adapting and modifying them as I went along. And one aspect I played with was not having close combats. I've always found these a bit of a sticking point in the Portable Wargame, because of issues of balancing things like flank/rear attacks, how retreats work and even whether to engage in close combat or simply shoot in the first place. These are certainly areas I've struggled with in my ECW adaptation. The no close combat OHW approach works OK for the ACW; I simply had all combat as shooting. I did add in a flank/rear attack modifier - +1 to hit if shooting at a range of one into flank or rear - but this is harder to achieve since a unit can't generally get around an enemy flank and then shoot in a single activation, giving their opponent some chance to respond.

I'm rambling. Suffice to say I have some interesting ideas running around in my head, which I need to explore with some more games. For Portable Wargame fans, I used card-based activation and single hit kills. However on the latter I used my own method of the unit's strength and morale being the indicator of whether it retreats from a hit or is destroyed - so a strength 4 infantry unit retreats on a 4 or less, improving to a 5 or less if it is veteran.

I hope to get in a few more games over the next week or so and see what comes out of them.