Waterloo is back in stock with new updated blocks!
This took longer than expected. We put a lot of effort into completely redoing the Order of Battle from the ground up. The Anglo army was a complete train wreck. It took a lot of time to sort all the numbers out. Going down to Brigade level really helped untangle the confusion.
Once we had that, we realized that it changes everything else. So we had to go back and redo all of Quatre Bras, Ligny and Wavre also because they all tie together. We also did a revamp of the main rules too. We re-examined this from the ground up to but in the end, decided on minimal changes.
The good news is that Waterloo is updated now and ready to order!
Congratulations! I only found out about your games a few days ago, but it seems I arrived just at the right time to jump in all the way and order Waterloo will all the expansions. I guess you can call that fashionably late 😉
Your blogs are very cool to read and were a big help in getting me to jump in so deeply right away.
The new smaller blocks are more pleasing to the eye than the chunkier old ones, and assume will lend some additional granularity in play, so I very much approve of the change.
When you talk of traditional wargaming, don’t forget about us tabletop miniature wargamers. We’ve been around for quite a while, too 🙂
For us tabletoppers, the whole hex-no-hex discussion is a complete non-issue. Of course no hexes! 🙂
Why go from pretty minis to abstract blocks, though? Well, playing in pubs sounds great, of course, but that’s not the main reason.
The main reason is your brilliant concept of fog of war. That has completely convinced me.
Painted miniature armies laid out all the way a gorgeous to look at, but that’s not what generals see, that’s what godlike spectators see. So, in the past I might have believed that a tabletop game like De Bellis Antiquitatis puts me in the general’s seat, but what it actually did is put me in a godlike position where I tell the general what to do. And then the PIP system or other abstract mechanics to simulate fog of war, simulated how the general fails to do what I tell him to do.
But your games really do put me in the general’s seat. And fog of war needn’t be simulated indirectly. I actually get to experience what it feels like! That was the big decision factor.
Well, that, and how gorgeous your maps, blocks and utensils look…
Keep it going, guys! You have a new fan!
Thank you! Glad you found us! =)
We have a lot of fans in Europe. Miniature style games are more common there.
Our approach came from Kriegsspiel. Once we started playing that, it became really hard to go back to hexes. They create lots of inaccuracies and problems. You just don’t see them. All the errors are hidden by the designers.
Lots of people are starting to use our rules with miniature games too. They work really well with minis but yes, you do lose some of the Fog of War that way.
Be careful. Our games will spoil you. After getting used to them a bit, most other games will start to look silly to you. We hear back from lots of people that our games have ruined Wargaming for them now.
It’s a different perspective. Realism in what? Real generals didn’t know all the morale, leadership and weapons ratings stats for each enemy unit that opposed them. Hell, they didn’t know most of that for their own units! We try to focus on the perspective of the generals in command. What did they know? What didn’t they know? What could they do? What decisions did they really face during a battle?
Your fog of war system (including drawn orders) is indeed the most convincing I’ve yet seen, at least for the musket age.
You took the core simulationist approach from Kriegsspiel – which is really more stressful than fun – and relieved it of all the tedious logistics to set it up and conduct. And the quick resolution (and pub atmosphere, if you go out) adds the fun that a proper Kriegsspiel would lack. A perfect mix!
Fun fact: I live in Berlin, almost walking distance from Charlottenburg Palace where they are excibiting the very original Kriegs Spiel from 1812. A gift Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III !
I’m mainly a medieval wargamer. I don’t see your system spoiling those for me, yet, but you can try 😉
Those battles had a very different kind of fog of war going on. Especially dark age was so static. The challenge was mainly your troops not doing what you want them to. And as a general you had to be in the thick of it. You couldn’t be caught sitting back on a hill to survey the battlefield. You had to join melee.
But who knows? Maybe you’d find a way to even make a convincing Pub Battle of Hastings 1066 ? That would indeed be a very serious threat to all my medieval wargaming habbits! Up for a challenge? 😉
More realistically though: There is a very interesting period of overlap between medieval and musket warfare in the early renaissance. I could see your fog of war system working really well for battles like Fornovo 1495 or Pavia 1525.
That’s the period that has everything a wargamer loves in one place: Muskets and artillery as well as shiny knights and pikes with beautiful flags.
In my ideal dream world there would be a similarly gorgeous canvas map for Pavia with your blocks and fog of war. And once the blocks are close enough for my generals to identify, then I would swap them for 15mm knights and Landsknechts miniature stands. That would combine the fog of war and maneuver with the beauty and drama of painted miniatures for the ultimate big battle experience.
Where to get that map, though?
Oh yes! The Battle of Hastings. I think our Ancients system would do a pretty good job of that. Let me know once you get it. Once you have the basic system, it should be pretty easy to setup your own scenario for that battle. We’ve been wanting to do some Alexander battles also.
That’s a great idea: blocks to minis.
Yeah, getting a good map would be the tricky part. :/
I Did order the Ancients along with Waterloo, eagerly awaiting the arrival 🙂 Will let you know.
What would you consider a realistic range for someone to identify an enemy type of unit (to exchange blocks for minis)?
In Medieval era I guess you would identify skirmishers by their looser formation and elites by the larger amount of armour that would reflect in the sun.
First you need line of sight. Are they hiding behind a hill top?
Is the ground wet or dry? Troops marching on dry dirt roads kick up dust clouds visible out to 15 miles. That doesn’t tell you what type though.
From our research, we figure that troops types can be spotted out to 1 mile. This assumes clear weather. No fog or rain. Do your people have spy glasses? This can help. If not, this could go down.
Yeah good point. How visible is the target? Infantry vs cavalry is usually fairly easy to spot. Elephants? Spears vs swords? Elite quality spears or militia quality spears?
Patrols, pickets and scouts can increase your ‘sighting’ rang a bit if they are reliable.
With dense shieldwall, mixed equipment based on availability, informal recon… I guess one would just have seen a blurry mass of shields with pointy bits sticking out. I’m starting to think just swap in melee, not before.
Anyway, I’m way off-topic. Thanks for your input =)
It’s a good question. I’m wondering how actionable it would be. Like if you could ID the exact type of unit, what could the generals do about it in time?
Like if you could see that they just had poor grade militia out front, could you shuffle your units around and pick the exact units forward to strike just those units? -and in time before the situation changed?
Most of the time you already kind of knew the formation right? Most armies setup the same. Like several lines of infantry out front, deployed in various grades of quality. Some cavalry on the flanks. Some elite Cav in reserve, probably along with some elite infantry. Archers in the back. Skirmish line out front.
I think you could see Cav moving around but they move quick, so what are you going to do before they strike? I remember reading about several battles where the Cav deployed on the flanks and ran around battling each other. Sometimes they would run off the field and fight it out. If one side won decisively, their Cav could come back and then suddenly strike the enemy army in the flank or rear.
This could be devastating but it doesn’t seem like the infantry army could do much about it. Probably too busy fighting and watching the front. If they did see it coming, they didn’t seem to be able to move any of the infantry units to respond to the threat.
Once things got under way, it seems that C&C was very limited. You see this in our Ancients game. At first, it’s not too hard to advance the whole army forward. After contact, it becomes very chaotic. The number of men you can control at once drops as the formation breaks up.
Oh hey, you want to nerd it out, huh? Loving it!
To tell the truth I’m dissatisfied with the vast majority of rulesets in how they treat the Hastings period, because most try to do one ruleset for everything which really just means Napoleonics dressed up in chainmail.
I have no idea how well your Acients system would do for that as I bought it simply in good faith. But even Roman warfare was closer to Napoleonics than Medieval was.
But Medieval is a different beast. And this goes double for Dark Age. Completely different workings, almost diametrically opposed.
Not because they were stupid, but because at this point the protection vs projection equation was so far on the protection side. That makes for extremely static and grindy warfare.
If the English were showered in Norman arrows, they wouldn’t budge and just sit it out. And it actually worked because protection was good enough. Trying to chase them away would have been a mistake.
As for your example: If I had my troops with me and identified our opposites as elites, stronger than us, what am I going to do about it? If I tried to regroup and charge someone else, I’d make it even worse. I’d just shake everyone’s confidence, break their concentrated protection, and clearly demonstrate the enemy I fear them… making them even more confident in the process. When you’re not just pulling a trigger but using every muscle in your body, then confidence and determination is the most precious thing to have.
A game where every move is basically a mistake is hardly interesting, though. Hard to turn that into something engaging.
What you said about the formation breaking up: Yes, totally, no more control. But by that point most battles would have been over right away with the losers dispersing as fast as possible. Wargames tend to drag on unrealistically long with exaggerated casualties. Why risk your men (and your career) in mindless slaughter for some village loot?
If a king was with you it’s different, but that was not the norm.
The part where the line is still holding, though – that shouldn’t be just combat dice resolution, that’s where the game is.
If I were to boil down dark age warfare to the degree that you guys boiled down Napoleonics, then I would want it to be a resource management game more than anything else. Maybe even disperse with movement alltogether, just some picking attack zones and reinforcements.
And it wouldn’t be general’s perspective, it would be mid level command focus, because that’s where all the decisions were happening:
“Do I rally my guys on my left or send backup to the right to strengthen the wall? If we throw our spears now, do we have time to replentish them to receive the charge? The guys on my right are getting soft and shakey – Should I rattle them up? But if I overdo it, they might go over the top with adrenaline and start charging the enemy without my say so. Or should I – instead of concentrating on my guys – start focusing on this Viking dude in front of me who keeps taunting me? Because he’s making me look bad in front of my men, and I can see how their shame is wearing them down. If I just whooped him, then I might accomplish the rattling and strengthening part for my guys all in one go. But if I lose… Damn.”
Some kind of cohesion / aggression / honor management type of thing. Almost euro-gamey in a way, just way more chaotic.
I’m not expecting to get this from your Ancient Pub Battle – It’s Romans after all – but I am expecting some Punic diversity, Gallic charges, and most of all the mayhem of the elephants backfiring into my face 🙂
Back to the exchange idea of exchanging your blocks for minis, though: I think Italian Wars is where it is most viable.
The fog and visibility was a decisive factor in Pavia 1525 for example.
And there might be decent maps for Pavia, because the historical city centre hasn’t changed that much.
You would have guns, pikes, knights, cannons, maneuvring, elan, deception, intrigue… everything in one game… In the pub. A great crossover thing!
This reminds me of our Pirate game. How do you take damage? On a CRT you lose 1 unit. All units. They retreat 1 hex or 2. In some games you take incremental step losses until you are destroyed. Ok but not very descriptive. This is the way most naval games work. You take accumulated damage points until you are sunk.
Instead, we pull damage cards that specify what actually happened: It caused damage to the sails or rudder. It started a fire. It caused a leak in the hull. It took out some of your guns or killed some of your crew. That is much more interesting than just losing 5 points.
So then you have lots of interesting decisions as a player the next turn on how to respond. You can assign crew to fix these damage cards but you never have enough. So what damage do you fix first? Which is higher priority?
We love the way this plays out. I could see this working well in a battle game too. So like your Corps advances to attack. Instead of crew cards to do damage control, you have so many officer cards you can use. What kind of damage cards do you pull? Maybe a brigade is immobilized. Maybe it is forced to retreat. Maybe it is forced to retreat and then be immobilized afterwards. Maybe it runs out of ammo and has to be resupplied.
So then each round, your officers can resupply units, rally them, order them to fall back or order them to advance forward. Cool but you have like what? 6-12 units to deal with but you only have 4 officer cards. So how do you have them do each round of combat?
If you balanced it right, I could see this being a good system for infantry battles. It is awesome for driving a narrative.
So, in boardgame terms, you’re thinking of a tower defence / deckbuilding game. Except the towers are mobile, they are your army.
It sounds like it could be a pure card game, as well as a miniature game or anything in between, which to my mind means potential.
Yes, thematic cards would be much more immersive than command points tracked on a D6 to spend on some command chart or.
Card based games also seem to be easier to turn into true solo games (rather than just two handed). For better or worse, this has become very important in the last few years, not quite a requirement, but getting close.
Brings to mind some other games that could be discussed in that context for comparison.
I don’t want to spam your Musket Pub Battles site with other games though.
You are invited to write me on the e-mail address I provided here. I could look into some links.
I’m also thinking that multi use cards are an elegant mechanism. For example, you could build up some pool of command cards, but under some conditions (losses or missplay, etc), they need to be flipped and become bad cards. So the Breton commander Eustace II, could have a very useful “feigned flight” command card, very useful, but flipped it just becomes disorder or outright panic.
Not unlike a step loss on a unit token or block, but more about leadership loss of a sub-commander and, as you say more descriptive, more immersive.
Many players crave heroism, hands on leadership, duels, etc – and dark age is one of the few periods where that is actually historically justified and rather appropriate.
Could brainstorm Hastings forever. You’re very welcome to write me about that, whenever you feel like it 🙂
Great job! I feel the smaller blocks make it look a lot more appealing than the older version which could be a mess of bigger blocks. Any updates on your other projects? (eg Bulge, Gruppenfuhrer, etc)