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Monday 8 December 2014

One Hour Wargames, Well Almost

This week I again popped over to GHQ, we had planned another Ancients outing using Neil Thomas's Ancient and Medieval rules, I had recently purchased Neil's new book "One Hour Wargames".and we were going to use a scenario from them. Although I have and play his Ancient and 19th Century rules, I really bought this for the 30 scenarios as the previously mentioned rules play quickly and we usually have a three hour window in which to play. It so happened that we were both feeling our age that morning, so I suggested giving the rules in the One Hour book a try. I randomly opened the book at one of the scenario pages and strangely enough it was a dead ringer for how Dave had laid out the boards so that it was just a matter of laying out the required terrain features required. We generated the forces from the tables in the book and set to, the scenarios all have between four and six units per side. To say that the rules are simple would be doing Neil a disservice as clearly he has put some thought into how they represent the various periods, there are rules for nine periods with Neil giving reasons for why he classifies the troops and the relevant rule mechanics for each period, whilst not everyone will agree with him, to me they all have merit and as with all his rules are easily added to or ignored if desired.
For what was to be the first game we stuck to the plan of an Ancients game so chose the units from Dave's Late Roman/Arthurian collection, the game was to last fifteen turns with the victor being the side to be controlling a nearby hill at that time. Forty minutes later that would be Dave's forces, it would probably have lasted longer if not for the fact that I overlooked that in hand to hand combat, the attackers/defenders only inflict casualties in their half of the turn. Did I mention that we were feeling our age that day?  Of course we were up to try another scenario, this time we would use the Horse and Musket rules with the forces selected from Dave's rather splendid and growing French Revolutionary Wars collection. We chose a scenario with the same basic terrain layout and added the different scenery required, again it was a fifteen turn scenario with the victor being the one in exclusive control of a nearby hill. Another victory for Dave with his French being full of revolutionary fervour carrying the day. There you have it, like them or loathe them they certainly do what it says on the tin and good fun to boot.
Below are some pics taken during the games.








TTFN

6 comments:

  1. Certainly great fun and very much 'one hour' rules, but the book is worth it anyway for the scenarios! Enjoy the Lakes!

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    1. Well I liked them, but as you know I'm a simple soul. Will use a scenario for our next game @ OHQ

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    1. Thank you David, have you started your FCW figures yet? I have some more primed for the next two units, BAL rifles and Carlist guides.

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  3. I obtained this book at christmas and my old wargaming chum Steve Sykes and myself have used them for our sunday night game. Given that I live in the dales, and he in shropshire, they looked like an ideal option for a sunday night one hour "facetime' wargame - using our ipads! So far we have played an ACW game ( scenario 5), and a Napoleonic game ( scenario 3) - only rule mod we fancy so far is to allow skirmisshers in the Naps to reduce the effect of fire against them by -2 to account for their open formation. Otherwise they certainly do what it says on the tin! I've painted an mdf 3 x 3 board with the "grid lines ' from the scenario maps to help steve issues his remote rules over the ipad - he does his dicing at his end - it's been genuinely good fun and a lot faster than an old postal campaign! I suspect that a couple of modifications per period would iron out most of the glaring effect howlers - but they really are great fun! Ken

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    1. Brilliant idea. They certainly do what they do, even without the rules the book is worth it just for scenarios.

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