2nd Battle of Newbury - 27 Oct 1644 - with The Kingdom Is Ours

Heard about these rules back when they came out, and chatted to the team at a demo game at Wolverhampton just before lockdown hit. Finally picked them up last month and decided to run the 2nd Newbury scenario with them to see what the rules were like, and whether the Royalists could do any better. The ruleset is 84pp, Osprey sized, and has a downloadable 6pp QRS.

Set-Up 

Same as the last game, with the King sandwiched between Manchester and Waller.

How it Played 

Waller was a bit quicker into Speen, but rapidly lot the oomph to actually fight through and clear the town, not helped by the early loss of almost all his cavalry. The King still had a unit on the E edge of Speen at the end. As activity faded around Speen Manchester finally kicked into life. The hedges frustrated early moves on his L flank, but his Horse cleared the Foot lining the hedge N and then tried to take Shaw House but were routed by the commanded shot inside. One of Manchester's Foot came to the same end, and Shaw House remained with the King til the end. 

A sterling defence of Shaw House by some Commanded Foot

The Parliamentarian will obviously failed early as several unengaged units field the battlefield, even before being committed. Once Manchester finally made contact on his L flank both sides were down to about half a dozen units. Two Foot melees results in one of each side routing and ENDEX was called.

ENDEX - a few units back at Speen but otherwise most gone

Thoughts

All started sort of well, but then I came to the first big (well 1 regt vs 1 regt, 4 bases each) cavalry melee and found myself rolling almost a hundred dice! Cavalry and charging makes this more than normal, but even so 20-30 a combat seems pretty usual (once for hit, another for damage, 4 dice per base, doubled for charge etc). By the end of the first evening I knew things had to change - rolling that many dice is just not quick! Another issue was that although the game was "stand" based, stands too 1/4 casualties, so you had to track those too.

So I decided to divide everything by 4 - 1 dice per cav stand, 1/2 per pike, and a kill is a whole stand not a 1/4 of one. Still meant about 20 dice total for some cavalry engagements but I could live with that. The whole game then hummed along.

There were a few other issues though. 

With Foot vs Foot melee I was not only rolling 1-4 dice each, and getting 5+ seemed elusive, then getting 3+ to kill even harder, some melees went at least 6 rounds before any casualty - not fast!

Whilst I liked the random card idea they were just too random. You're meant to roll at turn end for EVERY unit, 9+ and you roll 2D10 for an event. Again way too many dice. I randomly rolled for each tertio only. And as the events are at the turn end they don't link into the narrative, so a unit that's sat in a peaceful corner of the field suddenly runs for no obvious reason.

The random activation again looked KO to start with - but with a token for every unit that's a lot to get through - depending on when the end-of-turn card comes up. So I switched to tertio activation which made more sense. But not tying the activation to a particular unit does mean you get that things where all the focus is on one part of the battle, and then end of turn comes up, and half the battlefield has done nothing.

I also didn't like the fact that routers had no effect on neighbours - other than if in own tertio when take a morale check, so minimal morale cascades. There's also no Army or Tertio morale mechanism so it's more or less a fight to the death. Quite tempted to add in Battlegroup:NORTHAG's chit system.

By the end though my mods were giving me a semi-reasonable game.

A nice fight at a wall S of Shaw House

Conclusion

Played as written I really don't think it delivers as  a "fast play" set - and I didn't even bother with the per unit record cards! As a basis for my own new set of stand-based rules it has more potential, some nice ideas to steal and hopefully make more manageable. I think ECW and probably Medieval and earlier sort of suit an "old school" stand-based mechanic at 20mm, and it would also give a greater difference to my Napoleonic games at that scale. So next time my 20mm ECW comes out it's going to be a new set of stand-based house rules, plus of course whatever other new rules come out by then!