From: Chuck Messenger Subject: Advanced Lionheart Well, just got Parker Brother's new Lionheart (not to be confused with Loewenherz) a couple of days ago. Boy, what beautiful pieces! However, inevitably, I'm beginning to think about improving the game -- if there's every been a game crying out for home rules, this is it! Not that the rules as published are no good -- I think they make a fine introduction to ancients -- especially for kids. However, why let all those cool pieces go to waste? I've heard one suggestion so far on rgb, vis a vis prices for the units. That's a great improvement right there. Here are some more ideas: 1. Use a hexagonal board. A grid is just not as good as a hexagonal board for representing military conflicts. There's a good reason no serious wargame has used a grid in decades (well, that might be an exaggeration, but not much of one). 2. Give the horsemen actual movement allowances, rather than allowing unlimited movement in one direction. Then, it would be possible to have an arbitrarily large battlefield, without making horsemen impossibly powerful. 3. Have terrain. I have in mind drawing a large hexagon map on foam core, then cutting out foam core terrain areas. Things like elevation -- hills, woods, rivers, bridges, etc. 4. Make the Panic result a more prominent part of the game. As it is, Panic's hardly ever happen, unless you get down to 1-man units. There should be a mechanism for getting more Panic results, while still making units with more men less vulnerable to Panics. Something like this: when you roll N Panics, then you have to attempt to "clear" the panic, by rolling that many or more Axes. If you roll 1 Panic, you'll probably clear it if you have 4 men, but you only have 50-50 chance to clear it if you have 1 man. 5. Give more movement points to each side, and limit each unit to using one movement point per turn. As it is, the game is too chess-like -- one knight can just go running all over the field, while everyone else stands there looking foolish. Well, the rules modifications could go on and on, until we end up with something like the Great Battles of History rules -- and, I think, they should! Lionheart gives you quite a large set of very nice miniatures for a very reasonable price, and the concept of having 4 men per platform is simple, workable, and beautiful. - Chuck Messenger