How many bases to a regiment?

 As I said in the last post, Charge! is among my favorite beginner rulesets. I prefer simple rules for solo games, and especially for running with kids - thoughts about fantasy roleplaying with young'uns will be in future posts. But I'm torn between the old-school each-figure-represents-one-man style and the simpler, easier-to-grok "unit base." 

One set I have in mind is something Donald Featherstone devised later in his career, in which casualties are not even removed, but a regiment is assigned a certain number of hit points, and when they are gone, so is the unit. Simple, but one must track the hit points, which can be tricky if you have a lot of them. You can mark them on a paper army list, but this takes time if you have lots of units on the table. I've experimented a bit with a few derived rulesets found at the Natholeon's Empires blog, and they're very workable, because you can have units of any size.

Another is the 18th-century rules of Wargames Illustrated #75 and #134. I used them recently, and very successfully, to play a solo Jacobite mini-campaign with my new Wofun figures. A unit has four bases and, effectively, two hit points. When hit once, a single base is removed; the second hit removes the entire unit. Assorted variables (flanking, range, fierce enemies) provide pluses and minuses to the roll.

Not having room on my tiny table for four-base units, I used two bases for each, and a casualty figure to mark the first "hit."

This leads up to one of my favorite simple rulesets, if only because it has been used consistently with schoolchildren - Junior General's 18th-19th century rules.

Units in these rules have, as a rule, six bases, with units removed once they have one left. Effectively, they have five HP, but six dice for combat and firing. Smaller units (and, rarely in the scenarios, larger) are accordingly less (or more) effective. One for the Saratoga campaign assigns three bases to all the militia. Two hits and they're off the table.

Most of Wofun's units come in sets of four or five bases.

You might think this is no big deal. But, while I haven't actually playtested it, the writer has, and he probably has a reason for a norm of six. My guess would be that smaller units are significantly less reliable, and disappear from the table quicker. Kids don't enjoy it when they find themselves commanding nothing too early in the game. There is a caveat in that commanders are harder to kill, and a brigade CO can stay on the table and assist other units even with all his own men gone.

Obviously, it's not hard to build up armies with inexpensive paper figures, and the Junior General site has an enormous variety of them. Peter Dennis' Paperboys are absolutely beautiful, and just cutting them out is relaxing like nothing else. And there are plenty of others out there.

But some of the Junior General scenarios require hundreds of bases. This is not that big a deal if you only have two figures per base - even in 1/72 plastic, eight or ten boxes will do you. But Paperboys - with six to twelve figures per base - are so realistic and colorful in comparison I couldn't resist. More fool, me.

It took me weeks, building in spare moments at work, to construct all necessary bases from the Paperboys AWI book for the King's Mountain scenario - ninety to be exact, plus ten commanders. Each base has two ranks. Many for earlier eras have three.

Just the Americans.

Reducing the size is one way to reduce the time and effort. Unfortunately, printing in color at work is not as simple as it could be, requiring several extra steps, and using 8.5"x11" paper (rather than the original A4) also confuses things.

And then I had a thought. Here's the standard Junior General formations:

That line formation looks deep for its width, especially if you are using multi-rank bases like Paperboys. The reason for them, however, is that Junior General uses fewer figures per base, in a single "layer." So to have a proper two-rank line, you need lines to be two bases deep. When playing their scenarios at first with Paperboys, I extended the lines to 1x6 for the look of the thing, as the individual bases are two-rank.

But what if I just use three bases, rather than six? Then with two ranks, I essentially have six "elements" on three bases. And I can use a casualty marker to note when a single rank is lost, counting it as a base for purposes of the rules. When two ranks are lost, remove a base. Ranks can be removed from the Wofun bases instead, but as I've mentioned they're a touch fragile, so the less handling, the better. Also, there are plenty of casualty figures available. It would also be possible to make single-rank bases from the paper figures if desired.

This has advantages:

• More space, either for a more open tabletop or to fit larger armies.
• Larger armies, as formerly six-base units can be split into two. Not as useful for the Wofuns which come as eight- or ten-rank units rather than twelve, but there are some combinable units like Irish picquets and converged grenadiers.
• Smaller units for smaller tabletops.

I'm not positive how well this would work for kids. Teens would probably get it quickly, but for younger players having six bases is still probably preferable. It will, however, work for home games - time to experiment!