Test of Resolve ... test

Having a quiet Sunday and decided to try Test of Resolve, a War of the Roses-specific ruleset with some simple but innovative mechanics.

I'm trying the first scenario in the book. Each side has five units of two bases each; two archers, two retinue (billmen) and one household (men at arms, includes command base). Household are rated Superior, the others Average. Each melee unit has four Resolve Points, each archer unit three. I mark these with dice.

I kept pausing to post questions on the Test of Resolve Facebook page; luckily several members and one author lurked, ready to answer them swiftly. Great community!

I start the game with a play deck of mixed red and blue cards relating to each side. The first two cards drawn are red. The first, Move and Melee, means I can move all units D12", and fight at the end of the move if possible. Since the units are 20" apart, that won't happen. I rolled one inch. The second card is Milling Around, which means just what it says.

• Next, Blue gets a go. Another Move and Melee; one battle only, but as there is only one battle (ie division) on the board... I roll a three. 

• Next, Red draws an Event card (which it turns out is only for special scenarios, so I ignore it) and a Missile Supply Card. I roll eight, and the Red archers still have plenty of arrows to shoot with. Then Red draws Flabbergasted!, which impacts the next card: Milling Around, which changes to Move and Melee. I roll six, and the Red battle surges forward. I'm now in shooting range. Then I draw Flummoxed! This normally means that the inactive side (Blue in this case) gets to use the next three Red cards, but that was actually the last one.
• Blue's next and only card is Flabbergasted, which effectively makes it "dead" as there are no more Blue cards to boost with it.
• Red draws a Fire/Strengthen Resolve card. Time to try the shooting rules. My two "wide" companies are 11" out, so roll at -1. They target the enemy archers and roll 9+ to hit, but both miss.
• Blue goes next, with Move/Melee and a roll of 8". Interpenetration is allowed, but there's not quite enough room for the melee troops behind the archers to pass through, so I nudge up to the 9" standoff line. My command base fits neatly between the archers, though this makes it a target for Red... Blue gets two more cards; the first Fire and the second Move and Melee. Both volleys miss again.  I roll 8" for the move and pass the melee troops through the archers, then reform the archers into "mass" formation (losing 3" of movement, but that's okay as they're now behind the melee guys anyway.
• Red archers fire now, at close range but still -1 for targets wearing plate armor, and miss. Bugger this for a game of soldiers. 
• Blue draws a Fire/Strengthen Resolve (but no targets at the moment) and a Flummoxed!.
• Red Move/Melees 4"; the archers, fed up, reform into mass formation.
• Blue draws Move/Melee, for two inches, then End Turn. Time to shuffle the deck.

So close!

• Red draws Move/Melee. At an inch apart, no need to roll. Let's get stuck in.

In the first combat, two retinue units face off. The Red side gets +1 for Shock (attacking) and rolls 12 to Blue's 10, thus winning by three and causing one Resolve Point loss. OK.

In the second, the Household companies collide, but Red is attacking, Superior and Outnumbering, so rolls at +3 to Blue's +1. Blue rolls a 12, Red a 6. 13-9 is 4, so Red's Household loses one RP.

The third is retinue vs. retinue again, with Red outnumbering, so +2. Red rolls 6 and Blue 8; tied.

Better resolve this fight quickly!

Losing companies take Resolve Tests. For the Superior Red Household, I need to roll a one or better, +1 for Superior, +1 for Commander present and -1 for losing one RP. Natural ones auto-fail. I pass with a five. The Blue Retinue is average, so rolls with -1, thus needing 2+. I rolled 7.

Each side loses one Morale Point for each Resolve Point lost; both are down to 10. Down to zero and you break.

If melees are not ongoing, the loser can Turn Tail or fight another round. Let's try the latter.

First combat: Blue is at -1 for having lost a Resolve Point, but rolls a 9 to Red's 8. Ongoing.

Second combat: Outnumbering and Superior Red rolls 11(+2) to Superior Blue's 6(+1). Beaten by 6, Blue loses two RP. They need a 2+ for resolve, +1 for Superior and -2 for RP loss, so 3+, and roll a 12.

Third combat: Red outnumbers Blue but lost a Resolve Point last turn - straight roll off. Blue rolls 8 to Red's 3; Red loses 1 RP. Red requires 2+ for resolve, -2 for lost resolve, so 4+, and also rolls a 12!

Blue now has eight Morale Points, Red nine. Let's have the Blue command company Turn Tail, D12 inches - 11! That's not good, but at least the enemy mayn't catch up. The other combats go on. Since companies that win may pivot, Red flanks the combats to either side.

First combat: Blue loses by one due to being flanked and outnumbered; ongoing. Third combat: Red wins by three thanks to the flanking and outnumbering, so Blue loses another point. They pass the 2+ Resolve roll easily. Blue is down to seven Morale Points.

This is becoming a slog, so I'm going to have both Blue units Turn Tail and try to open this game up again. They roll low and must go around the archers behind them, so settle down not far away.

• Not positive at this point what happens, I return to drawing cards. Luckily Blue gets to move and melee next. Turning around costs three inches, and I rolled a six. This enables the melee chaps to form into line, facing forward, behind the archers, who charge in to flank the Red troops who are caught flat-footed. Them's the breaks.

One archer unit tackles the enemy Superior Plate-Armoured command, so that'll be a straight roll-off. Oh, except the command company lost an RP earlier, so is actually at -1! The other Blue archers hit Red archers, at effectively +2 for flanking and Shock. 

In the Archer-Archer combat, Blue rolled 10 and Red 1! That's Red eliminated AND down three Morale Points. In the Archer-Command combat, Red wins by two despite the -1. Morale Points are six-all. The Blue Archers retreat three inches.

• Red's turn to fire and Strengthen Resolve. Neither unit is in a position to fire, so let's check out the Strengthen Resolve Table:

There doesn't seem to be a way to flip this; sorry!

The command base passes and gets a point back; the archers were at -2 and rolled a 9, so failed.

• Next, Blue passes a Missile Supply check, and then gets to Strengthen Resolve; Blue command gets a point back.
• Red Mills Around, then Moves and Melees. The combats are inconclusive, but Blue loses another point.

More combat. Each side loses a point. We're at four (Blue) to five (Red) Morale here. I think. Several units retreat. Red draws a Strengthen Resolve card, but the retreating archers roll a one and thus are eliminated. At this point the (second!) turn mercifully ends.

The sides are tied for morale, but Red has lost all its archers and Blue is still down four Resolve points, though Red's surviving units are all at full health. 

• Red moves and melees again. It is at this point I realize archers have a -2 in combat. They still manage to beat men at arms in melee, but the outnumbered Blue side loses two points and barely passes its Resolve test, then runs. Blue, I think, is down to two Morale and Red to three. A continued combat causes Blue to lose two more points and run. Zero Morale; another check and Blue may lose the battle.
• Blue Strengthens Resolve, then Turn 3 ends.
• Red Moves, but not fast enough to Melee. Both sides fail to Strengthen Resolve, then turn ends again.
• A Blue unit rolls a 1 on Strengthen Resolve and is eliminated! Blue rolls a 2 on the Battle Morale table and disintegrates! Game over - though Red actually has taken more casualties. (They were archer-peons, so probably not important.)

Finally, my losing Blue commander rolls a 4 and then a 12 on the Fate table. He's captured ... and changes sides!

Messy endgame.

While (having had the encouraging assistance of David Knight and several others on the Facebook group) I feel I could run this game through much quicker next time, it was another disillusioning mess of close combats, and the next game I may try to retreat from combat more often and keep the game more free. It does, however, seem to match the historical records of internecine combat that could go on longer than one might expect.

The rules themselves are, I think, easy enough once one gets used to them. Where I got hung up was edge cases - pivoting, whether units could flank or move past each other, and so on. Combats are slightly easier in that effectively only one company is fighting on each side, with all else providing modifiers. It felt complex while I was running it; a lot of games do for me, especially when I am doing them solo and with constant interruptions. This is not a slur on the authors of the game, but on my own stick-to-it-iveness. And I must give a shoutout to the Facebook community, who jumped to my assistance to the point that I barely had to pause the game between answers!

The complexity seems to lie in tracking the Morale and Resolve points, and I could see simplifying the table a bit to change them to either "retreat" or "break" in a more Free-Kriegspielish form. The cards, on the other hand, provided excellent solo guidance. Despite the work, I found the game fun and will try it again after a break. See you next time...

WoTR Paperboys

I finished assembling the Wofun Games War of the Roses starter set, and decided to try them out with the starter rules from the Paperboys book they're based on. The rules are gridded, so I tried out one of my new Melee Mats too - they're very nice, and the markings seem to come off easily, which is a good thing. Already wasted one of the four markers they came with, sadly, by leaving it uncapped. Since the bases are 30mm wide and the squares one inch (25.4mm), I marked the corners of two-inch squares in a 7x10 grid.

Setup and Turn 1. Each side has two men-at-arms bases (one of them the commander); four billmen bases, and six archer bases.

Turn 2 and 3. Shooting has short and long ranges - the caveat is that arrows are limited and if you shoot with more than one base in a turn you expend them. You have six "multi-volleys" per game - at this short table-width it turns out not to be a big deal as units will be in combat inside two turns and the game has a fair chance of ending in less than six.

End-game. Combat is basic; units have a variable number of attacks based on level, hitting on 5+. The side that scores more forces saving throws on the opponent. Fail and the base is removed; pass and it is pushed back. The goal is to remove half the opponent's "points" total, each type being worth a differing number; the total in this game is 20 a side. The command base is powerful enough, with four attack dice, for the player to want to use it. But lose it and you lose the game, like the King in chess, and that was what happened here. I put up the Red commander against a weaker billmen base, but lost the combat and failed one of his two saves.

I like this simple ruleset, which is a lead-in to the full rules and represents a single ward or battle of the three normally found in an army of the period. I'll need to play it through a few more times to internalize the rules, but I don't expect that to take long. It's very chess-like, but with different (yet not complex) combat resolution that rewards consideration of risk. I might try it at work when the library's chess club starts up again.

On a related note, I received some nice Lancashire Games unit markers I ordered on a tip from Jonathan Freitag, intending to use them for Test of Resolve with these same figures, in units of two bases. The slide-under bit is smaller than I feared, and is hidden completely under a 20mm-deep by 30mm-wide base. Well and good.

Unfortunately, they don't fit standard 12mm Chessex dice. Though they do fit these smaller ones I have ... but I only have a handful! I have lots of teensy but possibly-too-light plastic dice that may work.

More new books

 Just got in three new books from Dennis Shorthouse at On Military Matters, plus a couple PDFs.

The Men Who Would Be Kings - One of Osprey's "blue" series which feature their illustrations and some innovative rules. This is actually a replacement copy - I lost my first and recently found it in my car - under an soaked umbrella I'd stuffed in there months ago, thus wrecked. I hadn't actually played it much, because the turn mechanism - passing a morale check to do anything at all - was frustrating in my test games. (There are default actions to fall back on, but if your default is "shoot" and you are out of range, well...) My regular group was also not enamored of the possibility of their units doing nothing for turns on end - but more importantly are wedded to The Sword and the Flame.

(The abbreviation - TMWWBK - also doesn't roll from the tongue as easily as TSATF!)

But I asked recently about alternative mechanisms on Facebook's Colonial Wargames group, and got some useful suggestions. One is to allow moves regardless on a failed roll, just at lesser effect - say, the unit halves its move, only half get to shoot, etc. I like this, especially as I am likely to play with easily disappointed kids.

I also like its solo mechanism, "Mr. Babbage's Instructions." Mr. Babbage (named after one of the inventors of the computer - I might rename this "Miss Lovelace's Instructions" in my own games) is not present at the club, but has left very clear instructions for his opponent. They're very straightforward, though are focused on fighting between a so-called civilized force on one side and a massive ill-equipped horde on the other, and can provide a fun game to my knowledge.

Test of Resolve - A newish game specifically on the War of the Roses, not too deep into it yet. I know almost nothing about those save what little I gleaned from reading Shakespeare and watching Blackadder. Oh, and from Peter Dennis' WotR Paperboys book which, if I ever do play this, will provide the miniatures. (My adult group has expressed enthusiasm for my Paperboys and willingness to play with them, and WotR would be atypical for our group and thus hopefully intriguing.) It's a card driven game, and would benefit from a bespoke set rather than xeroxed - or maybe I can use card sleeves. Reminds me of another thing - Dennis' WoTR and 1066 rules are both gridded, which may be easier to get by bosses at work (looks more gamelike); but the cards even without the mechanism may be useful in a Free Kriegspiel-style game. (Two interesting inclusions are a Flabbergasted card to "supercharge" the next card drawn, and a Flummoxed card that allows the inactive player to take the rest of the active player's move.) If I do ever try to run a full-fledged game, I'll probably buy the cards and one of the available scenario books to choose from - I haven't read far enough yet to see how "pickup" games work.

Glory 1861 - A wargame with significant solo and roleplaying potential. I bought it on the strength of an "author's notes" article in Wargames Illustrated. I've already spotted one repeated paragraph, but the concept seems sound. You build an ACW regiment, rolling it up in the same way as a bespoke character in Dungeons and Dragons. The field officers receive traits, as do all companies and their captains, and all of these have game effects. Might be tricky to keep track of on the battlefield! I spotted an interesting combo of dice-holder and identification slot in a demo game of Test of Resolve and am looking for them on Thingiverse - I have access to a 3D printer at work. With cats at home and kids at work, I am not enthusiastic about tracking hit points on units with easily jounced or stolen dice.

This would be so useful.

So far, I've only found the die-box, with no little Scrabble tray attached.

The illustrations are nice, except for the cover which has an "uncanny valley" effect to me. The figures used for illustration seem almost toylike, but the best thing is a handful of color illustrations by the late Bob Marriott. I was introduced to his characterful style by some of Charles S. Grant's books.

One thing that seems askance is that it is assumed regiments will fight two engagements per month. (Engagements, as in DnD, are how you gain experience.) Seems unlikely - for example, the average three-month regiment fought, at most, one engagement, then went home. There are mechanisms for reenlisting, though the reinforcement mechanic is another problem; very few regiments reinforced much at all during the ACW, their states preferring just to raise more (and thus provide more patronage to potential officers). That meant they got steadily smaller over the course of the war. But the creation phase looks quite engaging. I recently read two histories of the US Regular Infantry in the Civil War, and am considering an eight-company "new battalion." This might be considered a bit "gamey," since the regiment starts with fifty building points and spends four on each company; this would leave me with nearly twice as many points as normal to give skills and abilities to my officers and units. On the other hand, that's appropriate for Regulars, who even in the newly raised units would have a core of peacetime vets. I could in that case use the reinforcement mechanisms, as they did take new enlistments to cover casualties. But I'll have to weaken them, since from what I've read a lot of officers spent more time recruiting than they did in camp, to very little effect because volunteer regiments provided bounties!

I'll have to experiment (of course), but I wonder if this "regimental character-building" would work for the Napoleonic era as well. It also reminds me of a game by Jim Wallman I've been itching to try ever since I discovered it, Over the Hills and Far Away, which is set in the 1740s and has even more roleplaying to it. Players are colonels spending money and influence to run their own regiments, but while there are occasional "expeditions," the social life of an British officer is the focus, complete with balls, races and weddings to attend, and the temptation of pocketing the pay of more troops than you've actually enlisted. There is much jockeying for position, with a bidding mechanism that determines whether your political influence goes up or down compared to your fellows. The combat mechanism is very simple, with no more than four bases needed per regiment - but how much of your limited time and money you spent on discipline, drill and shooting practice will definitely come into play. I would love to run this for my adult group, but am not sure they would sit still for a glorified RPG session - even if it is historical.

Secrets of Wargame Design - The last two books are by Wally Simon, compilations of a wide variety of articles on rules-writing. There are around ten volumes. I ordered the first because I like tinkering with rules myself and thought I could get some ideas; I ordered the ninth because it focuses on the English Civil War and has a basic ruleset in it. Also, it was available in PDF so I could get it faster while waiting for my physical order to arrive. I'll have to see if there are more!

It was worth it; I'm glad I made the purchases. At $20 USD, $16 for the PDF, they're a touch pricey for forty pages apiece, but are A4 size and with large type. Each seems to have around thirteen assorted articles drawn mostly from an old publication called the Potomac Wargamer's Review. I was first introduced to Wally by favorable mentions of his rules mechanisms in the Paperboys books, which use an interesting "three-card" method of initiative akin to that of TSATF, and by a couple articles found in the Wargamers Digests I mentioned in my first post on this blog. His writing style is infectious, very enjoyable if a little caustic. That's probably to be expected in someone who seemingly spent his life critiquing and tinkering with rules! They are also scattered with sketchy illustrations apparently done by himself; I was reading one article at the computer the other day when the table and terrain used to illustrate a scenario caught the eye of a coworker who asked if I was going to build that. (I do a lot of crafting at work, and a lot of my projects for kids are inspired or guided by wargames books, especially Games Workshop terrain from the days when they built it from scratch.)

The first volume has articles on card movement systems and sequences of play. I can already say these will be useful, because I am planning an almost RPG-like ACW skirmish based on Picacho Pass, fought near my hometown of Tucson in 1862 between just a dozen men on each side - basically a large gunfight rather than a real battle. While there are plenty of Wild West rules that would serve, I've been struggling to work out how initiative should be handled, in part because I can't guarantee how many players I'll have when I run it for my group. It could have anywhere from four to a dozen players, meaning anywhere from two to six figures for players to handle. Wally is very much against making players wait in the UGOIGO system, and seems to like allowing them to "break" the sequence in consequence. I wonder if this is why Games Workshop is so enamored of armor saves, as they give the inactive player something to do? Another related element he clearly hates is "gotcha" rules, which bypass saves or otherwise "pin" and frustrate the inactive player, allowing him no chance to make a difference to the game. I can definitely remember that happening in my 40K games!

He has some card-driven systems, and one thing that comes up (in Test of Resolve, too) is the decisions about how many and what type of cards players should be allocated.

- In TSATF, it's one card per unit; turn over a red and the "civilized" player moves or fires a unit, on a black the native player moves or fires. It uses a standard 52-card deck.

- In Test of Resolve, the cards are specific to the game, with one that lets you move all three of your "battles" (the three main portions of your army), three that let you select just one battle to move, three that let your firing units fire or reform, etc. Each side has its own deck, they mix together, and initiative turns over when an opposing card appears.

- Wally tested a number of others, such as (in a Wild West skirmish) assigning each gunfighter a mix of shoot-n-move or blank cards, with more or less of each depending on their ability. You could go more granular than this, with very specific cards for movement, shooting and melee by specific characters, but then the players would get bored waiting for their card to turn up!

The main things I need to think about in my Picacho Pass scenario are initiative (who moves, fires and fights when) and not making players wait for their move. Luckily, there are numerous possible mechanisms suggested in these articles, and the volumes will reward careful rereading. I hope to run the game for my group around its 160th anniversary early next year, and expect to post more as I prepare it. In particular, I hope to playtest it at work, so mechanisms that don't bore or disappoint kids are a must!