Rules

The question of rules remains a difficult area for the sort of games we run; they have to be fast but still adequately represent Batalion and Squadron action and individual gun batteries, and also be usuable by people who may not have seen them before. No commercial set does this to our satisfaction, we have used WRG, General de Brigade and Newbury fast play for large battles and playteasted Grand Manner, Napoleonic P of W, Shako, Esprit de Corps, Napoleon's War etc etc. None are quite right (in fact some are totally wrong) and we have ended up with a sort of combination ruleset which we keep on amending as we get feedback. Further, no rules I have seen adequately deal with Command and Control (which is probably not possible anyway) and Umpires have to be heavily involved to bring some realism to what players will try and do.

The problem is compounded by the requirement to keep move times down to 10-12 minutes, which means if you are commanding 6-7 units in contact you can not afford to work through too many tables or do complicated sums in your head. We have now developed a reasonably coherent set of our own (Art of Command) which we will use for Eylau and fine tune for Friedland in Jun 06.

Mar 07:Our rules worked quite well a Eylau; and were faster to play than anything we have previously tried. Still a lot of tweaking to do, but we definitely seem to be on the right track.

I will continue to report our progress here.

	The Rules Page
	The question of rules remains a difficult area for the sort of games we run; they have to be fast but still adequately represent Batalion and Squadron action and individual gun batteries, and also be usuable by people who may not have seen them before. No commercial set does this to our satisfaction, we have used WRG, General de Brigade and Newbury fast play for large battles and playteasted Grand Manner, Napoleonic P of W, Shako, Esprit de Corps, Napoleon's War etc etc. None are quite right (in fact some are totally wrong) and we have ended up with a sort of combination ruleset which we keep on amending as we get feedback. Further, no rules I have seen adequately deal with Command and Control (which is probably not possible anyway) and Umpires have to be heavily involved to bring some realism to what players will try and do. The problem is compounded by the requirement to keep move times down to 10-12 minutes, which means if you are commanding 6-7 units in contact you can not afford to work through too many tables or do complicated sums in your head. We have now developed a reasonably coherent set of our own (Art of Command) which we will use for Eylau and fine tune for Friedland in Jun 06. Mar 07:Our rules worked quite well a Eylau; and were faster to play than anything we have previously tried. Still a lot of tweaking to do, but we definitely seem to be on the right track. I will continue to report our progress here.