ECW Battle

I tried a simple ECW Portable Wargame this evening, partially to remind myself how to play, and partially to try out the rules for limiting card-activation runs.

I gave each side four regiments of foot and two lots of horse. Parliament had trotters, and one of their foot units was entirely shot-armed. The Royalists had gallopers, and two of their regiments were entirely pike-armed. The terrain was some scattered enclosures. I forgot to include commanders.

Both sides' horse advanced on the flank, and started a fight which pushed back and forth with no result.

Parliament's foot advanced.

The Royalist foot was slower; their command effort was still being put into trying to win the cavalry actions on the flank.

However with the horse showing little inclination to win, the Royalists committed their pike units, who drove back the Parliamentarian regiments in front of them.

Parliament's foot gave ground, as the Royalists drove forward.

But the Royalist units couldn't maintain the momentum, wavered, and the Parliamentarian foot destroyed them both.

Their centre units pushed forward, and helped drive off the rest of the Royalist foot. The battle was an obvious Parliamentarian victory.

This was a pretty basic game and, to be honest, not that exciting. But it got the rules back into my head. In terms of the card-activation, it certainly limited runs, but whether it was too much I'm not sure. I did it slightly differently to how I described it in my original post; instead of subtracting one from the value for card after the first, I simply halved the value of each card after the first. With six units this was pretty much the same as the subtraction. Most runs were two cards; I had one run of three.

I shall try the system again, but maybe with a more interesting action. Possibly even an historical refight.