Review, Revise, Re-engage

Back in the 70's there was a set of Quick Play Napoleonic rules published in Gene McCoy's Wargamer's Digest which was a bit of a shock to a young gamer deep into WRG and indoctrinated in the importance of scale and detail. I forget the author and details of the rules but I remember the aim including something like being "close enough to smell the powder but not close enough to be burnt".

I like that thought.

Experience has shown me that fast and simple is good BUT it can also border on boring if one isn't careful. I put considerable effort into getting my Toy Soldier rules adjusted to where troops moved up into range and quickly got bogged down in a firefight as seems to have often happened in the historical actions I was using for inspiration. It didn't make for a great gaming experience though and didn't encourage the deployment of more units on an already crowded battlefield given the theoretical scales. It also reminded me that past attempts have suggested that wanting to accurately recreate drawn out historical skirmishes where casualties were low and gallant charges rare was always going to be a weak start towards an exciting game and that it would probably take a better mind and different tastes than mine to accomplish that task.

All is not lost though, I like the general flow of my game and the balance between friction and control is about right for me. What I need is to allow more to happen each turn and make the individual turns more decisive. In practice this means that each turn should represent a longer time span and should be interactive at critical points with more happening per turn. Its been done by several rule sets in the past and  was effectively how my Hearts of Tin rules worked.

 This approach will also more or less demand that the armies be both theoretically and actually bigger than what the originally envisaged historical setting would allow. More TOYS? OK, if I MUST....

Looks like the game will now be Thursday with today's version of the rules:
The Defended Frontier.

ps: all distances are multiples of 4", like the grid underneath the cloth. Very convenient....