Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1992 11:14:30 EST From: "Robert S. Dean" Subject: Royalists and Roundheads (Review) ROYALISTS AND ROUNDHEADS (3W Games) A Review I received an advertisement for Royalists and Roundheads (R&R) a couple of weeks before Christmas, and requested my local hobby shop to order a copy for me as soon as it was available. I picked it up from them on 11 January 1992, so I've only had it for a few days now. The cover price is $25 US. I ordered it sight unseen because I have been very interested in the English Civil War for the last year and a half, and have been reading up on the history of the period, as well as painting and preparing armies of miniatures. I'm by no means an expert on the period, but I have read eight or ten books specifically covering the topic, and have assembled and studied five or six sets of miniatures rules in preparation for the day when the armies will be done. OVERVIEW: R&R is a quad game covering the battles of Justice Mills, Kilsyth, Naseby and Marston Moor in the English Civil War (1642-1647). For those less familiar with the period, the first two battles were comparatively minor affairs fought in Scotland between the Royalists under the Earl of Montrose and the Scots Covenanters, who were essen- tially an independent government loosely allied with the English Parliament. The back cover of the box indicates that this is supposed to be a fairly simple set of games, with high suitability for soli- taire play. It is basically a tactical level game. Turns represent 30 minutes. No ground scale or troop scale is given anywhere that I could find. (A problem!) COMPONENTS: What do you get for your money? The flat box (barely deep enough to hold a plastic counter sorting tray, not included) contains one standard size wargame map sheet, printed with two half sized maps on each side (4 maps total), two sheets of 200 counters each, an eight page rulebook, a four page scenario booklet (which must be separated from the rules by opening and reclosing the staples, a pet peeve of mine) and a separate sheet of paper that is the melee combat table and the turn record chart. The maps are competently done in four colors, with nothing much to say either for or against them. The counters are adequate--silhouettes of two types of cavalry and three types of infantry are color coded into command groupings, and numbers are reasonably legible. I don't particularly care for the silhouette of a man with a halberd chosen as the standard infantry symbol, since the halberd was pretty much restricted to use as a badge of rank for sergeants in this period, but that's a minor quibble. THE RULES: The rules are fairly straight forward, but included a number of obvious errors (and perhaps some less obvious ones that I didn't catch), which I cover further below under "Problems". Units are rated for fire ability (yes/no), melee strength, movement rate, and morale. Play is sequential, with each turn starting with a "Command Phase", and then each player turn having a movement phase, an enemy fire combat phase, a friendly fire combat phase, and a melee phase in which both sides roll for attacks if applicable. Being a tactical level game set in a period where battlefield flexibility was not the norm, the recommended command rules are fairly restrictive, and units are required to be oriented toward a hex point to show their facing. (Units have two front hexes, two flank hexes, and two rear hexes, and may only move through their front hexes, paying extra movement points to turn.) The command rules are similar to those used in some minia- tures games, particularly the WRG series. The armies are divided into commands (three or four) and each command has a leader who is given an orders chit at the beginning of the game, which can generally only be changed at the beginning of a turn. Orders are Attack, Advance, Stand, Retreat, Reserve, and Muster in order of decreasing aggressive- ness. Commands with attack must move all units forward at least half a move. Commands with advance must move forward at least one hex. Commands with stand may only move one hex. Commands with retreat must move away from the enemy. Commands with reserve may move at full speed but cannot approach the enemy. Muster is a special command which may be used to rally a command with numerous routing units. The command rule looks like the best part of the game, and would work fairly well in practice. Units have zones of control of their front and flank hexes which stop enemy movement, which is probably not unreasonable at this scale and period. Units may not generally move through each other, and may only be stacked if they start a scenario stacked. If they unstack they may not restack. (More on this under problems.) Combat is of two varieties: Fire and Melee. For reasons that I might question, melee is the stronger and more common. This is the proce- dure for fire combat: If a unit can fire (during an offensive or defensive fire phase), one die is rolled and any modifiers for extend- ed range and terrain are added. Possible results are 'M' (for morale test) and '1' (for step loss on the target--units usually take four steps to destroy, and are marked with a chit for the first hit, flipped over for the second hit, marked with a chit for the third hit, and removed at the fourth hit.) Musket armed skirmishers and cavalry with pistols may only inflict 'M' results, and only 5s and 6s are hits. Don't expect much from fire combat. Most units have morales of 8-10 which are rolled on 2d6, so units almost always have a better than 60% chance of passing a morale test. If units are still adjacent after fire combat, they may proceed to melee at the phasing players option, providing that they are under attack or advance orders. The procedure would be typical for a minia- tures game but feels strange here...the attacker checks morale to see if he can attack. if he does, the defender checks morale to see if he will stand. If the defender stands, then both sides total the melee strength of the units involved (units, by the way, may be attacked _from_ multiple hexes as one attack, but may not attack multiple hexes, and combat is not mandatory, so there is no requirement for "soak off" attacks) and each side rolls on the melee table. Since units may not generally stack, and most units have combat strengths of 4-6, it follows that many attacks will be on the first two or three columns of the melee table (divided 1-3, 4-6, 7-10, 11-15, etc), which means that a unit usually has to throw (you guess it) a 5 or a 6 to inflict an 'M' result. '1' results are available at a roll of 8+ at 1-3, 7+ at 4-10, and 6+ at 11-15. The combat table includes columns up to 46+, but I can't quite see how such a situation could ever arise, since it would require using all 6 or the surrounding hexes to attack from, and would require that most of those hexes be filled with a stack, which cannot be built after the start of the game. The result of all of this is that combat tends to be very drawn out, and require a lot of die rolling. In the worst case (which looks like it could happen fairly often) an encounter between two units could re- quire as many as ten separate die rolls (once for defensive fire, causing a morale check, once for offensive fire causing another morale check, once for the opportunity to charge, once to stand, two rolls for the melee, which each might cause a morale check) and leave both units standing there to do it again the following turn. Victory is calculated on the basis (usually) of total combat strength destroyed (which seems to be rather difficult!!). At the end of any turn, the point totals for each side are compared to their objectives, and two dice are rolled to see if victory has occurred yet. This seems a little bit screwy to me, but there it is. To give an example, in Justice Mills, if the Royalists have lost 20-24 points, the Cove- nanters win on a die roll of 9-12. If the roll is unsuccessful, the game continues. In this particular game there is a turn limit, and if neither player has rolled a victory at the end of the game, it is a draw. What happens if both players roll for a victory on the same turn and succeed? I don't know, and the rules don't say. To make matters just a little bit more confusing, units which have suffered two step losses and been flipped to their reduced sides do count the difference between the reduced strength and the original strength as part of the total losses. I'd advise that you keep track of this on a sheet of paper, because the thought of searching around the board reading both sides of counters doesn't appeal to me. PROBLEMS: As I see it, there are several problems with the game from a mechanical point of view. All of my reading leads me to believe that fire combat was much more important in the tactics of the time (at least between infantry formations) than the game depicts. Combat is also too slow, both in terms of the number of half hour turns needed to produce a result (I don't get the impression that cavalry melees typically lasted for hours at a stretch before one side or the other broke off or retreated), and in terms of the amount of real time needed for all of the die rolling. The amount of die rolling might be acceptable it led to a result more often. Formation is given only a passing nod in the game, and I can find no effects for being attacked in the flank or rear, which disturbs me in a game with an emphasis on facing like this one has. There is very little real distinction between cavalry and infantry apart from the movement factor. >From a production standpoint, the rules do not appear to have been proofread well enough. A rule on zones of control states that units with retreat, muster and reserve orders may not move out of ZOCs, when it is clear from the command rules that it is intended to read "may move". Two terrain types appearing on the Justice Mills map do not appear on the terrain effects chart (Corn and Marsh), and a couple of the range modifiers appear to have the signs reversed (artillery drops drastically in effectiveness at point blank range?). By current standards R&R is not an expensive game, especially if viewed as four SPI style folio games ($6.25 each), but in my honest opinion is not a very good game either. I would not recommend it to anyone who was not interested in the period because I think that the cumbersome game mechanics will make for a slow an unexciting two player game, and players with strong opinions about warfare of the period will probably want to tinker with the rules to eliminate some peculiarities. Rob Dean ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1992 13:18:26 EST From: "Robert S. Dean" Subject: R&R: A few additional remarks (pt. 2) Sorry about stringing this out like this. Typing this review has gotten me interested in going back and rereading the rules. I don't like the rout system. It's fairly hard to get a unit to rout in the first place, as mentioned under combat, since most of them have morales of 8-10, and can add a bonus if stacked with their leader. If they do rout during the combat phase, the rules are unclear as to what exactly to do with them (do they face to the rear?), and they are moved 1-3 hexes at the owner's choice. This will frequently leave them in command range of their leader (who typically has a three hex radius), which means that they get a chance to rally immediately on the turn that they rout. They succeed on a roll of their morale with a one point penalty (i.e. need a 9 instead of a 10 or less), which means that there is a very good chance that most units with their 8-10 base morales will rally immediately. Overall, it seems like a lot of work to get someone to retreat one to three hexes at his option. Rob Dean ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1992 13:01:58 EST From: "Robert S. Dean" Subject: R&R: A few additional remarks There are a few more little things I meant to include in my review. Despite a back cover blurb mentioning that units armed with muskets, pikes, etc., are included in the game, there is no differentiation of infantry by weapons type for the most part. Skirmishers (exclusively musket armed) are treated separately, and some of the Scots militia in the Justice Mills and Kilsyth scenarios have no fire ability (and are presumably armed only with a mixture of traditional Scottish melee weapons). The bowmen fielded by Montrose at Justice Mills are ridiculously deadly, using the same combat table and having the same range (with slightly lower modifiers at short range --no grapeshot) as artillery. This was what I particularly had in mind when I was commenting on tweaking the rules. Artillery is allowed to move in the game, which is a bit of a change if you are familiar with the SPI Thirty Year's War Quad. I'm not really sure that it is justifiable, but looks like it would have no serious effect. Since there is no game scale given, some comments about realism can't be made. I don't like the idea of having 25 melee points of infantry (however many troops that is) firing having the same effect as 5 points firing, but that is the way the rules are set up. The rules state that multiple 'M' effects from the fire of several units are only rolled for once. Don't know about multiple '1's (step losses), since it doesn't look like it would come up very often--infantry and artillery at point blank range are the only units that can cause a step loss from fire, and with a range of one, a target unit would have to be completely surrounded to get six attacks on it. With a 1 in 6 chance of getting a '1' result per infantry shot, even six shots doesn't give you a really large chances of getting two '1's. Rob Dean