Tag Archives: Altar of Freedom

A BBB version of Shiloh

Games & rules, News,
End of Move 2 I think the French attack on the Prussian right develops

Last night Terry and I used my cloth for the Altar of Freedom game on Shiloh to refight a Napoleonic version using our version of BBB. It was fought using my Napoleonic French and Prussian armies. It is interesting to compare the two systems.

The distance scales are the same, which meant there was not problem in using the same terrain layout. The main difference in game layout is that BBB is played using brigade units (two or three to a division), while BBB has division sized units. Each AoF brigade corresponds to two BBB bases. That means a two brigade division has four bases and a three brigade one six. That makes BBB a bit more compact, but the frontages are broadly similar using the 40mm bases for AoF that we have being doing. Using the recommended 60mm bases would mean that two brigades could cover five inches easily and six at a pinch. A BBB equivalent division would cover four inches. Artillery units are pretty much the same between the two systems. Cavalry is different mainly because of the different cavalry role between the Napoleonic and ACW eras. In BBB we use a much lower figure ratio, since firepower is unimportant. A typical BBB cavalry unit is a brigade, the same as AoF, but it has a bigger footprint.

In putting together the armies I wanted to keep my standardised 1815 units rather than do a new lot of labels. The French took the Confederate role. Bragg’s corps of six brigades translated into three four-base divisions, but otherwise the conversion was quite simple. Command and control was harder. I did not provide leaders for the counterparts of Polk and Breckinridge, but Bragge and Hardee’s counterparts were on the table, as well as Johnstone represented by Napoleon himself. On the Union side all the divisions were three brigades, so it was quite easy to give them Prussian six-base units as equivalents. I divided them into two corps, each with a general, and a commander. I gave the French a slight quality edge: with one Aggressive infantry unit (the Young Guard in the reserve corps) and veteran cavalry. The Prussian had one Raw infantry unit.

We started a bit earlier than a normal club night and got three hours of game time in. In that time we played four and a half moves. That was no quicker than AoF, in spite of the smaller number of playing pieces. But there were only two of us (rather than four) and more did happen. The French (played by Terry) started with an aggressive assault on their left and centre. This went badly, with some effective firing by the Prussians, followed by a good close combat result. In the second move one of the French units was destroyed, and that left three of the smaller French units facing off against two Prussian ones in a static stalemate. I was mulling a counterattack.

But with this failure, the French decided to switch to the left, throwing in their reserve corps against the open Prussian flank. This fared much better, with the Prussians struggling to hold off superior numbers. A spectacular cavalry counterattack managed to do for a second French infantry unit, but the two front line Prussian infantry units were flagging to the point of near collapse, though the lead French infantry was similarly flagging. But they had two fresh infantry units (including the Young Guard), backed by two cavalry units, to face one not so fresh Prussian infantry unit and the triumphant cavalry. Meanwhile the wooded terrain was making the artillery hard to organise. I thought the Prussians were losing at the end (given that we had only reached midday), but it wasn’t hopeless. It was an exciting game.

How did the systems compare? The French/Confederates were able to deliver a much quicker and better coordinated attack in BBB. The Prussians/Union were not able to organise their defence so easily. Vital movement throws failed to come up on several occasions, limiting my ability to pull the defensive line back (something that the Union did very effectively in our AoF games). Not that I can complain too much: I had good combat dice on several critical occasions. The BBB game was much more decisive. By the end of our game the French had lost two infantry divisions and a battery out of action, two spent and another one damaged (one base loss), and one cavalry unit damaged. The Prussians had lost no units, but two infantry units were spent and the other three damaged (they only had five, until the possibility of reinforcements much later). At the equivalent stage in our AoF games at most one brigade had been put out of action.

This reflects each system’s strengths and weaknesses. In AoF command and control limitations were much greater on the Confederate side, making their attack much slower to progress, and limiting them to two or three divisions a turn. The Union side had much more flexibility. But BBB combat handles attrition much better. A lot of this is due to my modified rules for Napoleonics. Core BBB would have meant many fewer losses. This may be a fair reflection of the difference between the two eras, before the needle gun and chassepot suddenly upped the casualties.

Another difference is that artillery movement is much more flexible in AoF. In BBB you cannot limber and unlimber in the same turn, which makes it harder to move artillery around. We have made it more flexible in our version than core BBB (so that you can limber/unlimber and move a full move), but it is still hard, as I found as the Prussian line faltered. If the infantry gave ground it effectively meant the accompanying artillery couldn’t operate; it was similarly hard for artillery support to keep up with the attack without pausing it. The artillery needed to fall back further to occupy a new defensive line behind the infantry. This is something I should have been thinking about as the Prussian player. It is exactly how the French approached their withdrawal at Vitoria in 1813, so I don’t think BBB is unrealistic.

Overall I’m quite pleased with our house BBB system. It is working much as intended, and produced an exciting game. The skirmisher system remains scrappy and needs some cleaning up. The cavalry flowed through the woods and conducted attacks there a bit too easily. I am planning a substantial revision which will also address the disruption issue: inflicting disruption on a unit that is already disrupted doesn’t affect it. But I’m also working on something much more original that deals with some of BBB’s deeper problems. Meanwhile I think AoF works perfectly well for ACW, and represents command and control issues much better.

One more learning is on terrain. I have constructed a terrain cloth for Shiloh, with painted masking tape for roads and revers, and patches of felt taped on for woods. It can be folded up and is very portable, while representing complex terrain much better than using just standard club equipment. Last night we put the cloth on top of another felt cloth – this didn’t work well and led to it rumpling easily. Felt needs to be placed on a frictionless surface to lie flat. I think the idea can be developed – though hills are an unsolved issue and the rivers don’t work as well as the roads.

Altar of Freedom: Shiloh again

Games & rules, News
View across table towards Pittsburgh Landing: about Move 3
I different angle, with Pittsburgh Landing off-picture to left

My usual club partners were intrigued enough about the Altar of Freedom rules to give the Shiloh game another go: this time as an all day game. The verdict remains mixed.

We used Terry’s 15mm figures again, put together on ad-hoc bases, about 8cm by 4cm in size. We played these using the standard distances for 6mm figures, where the the bases are usually 6cm by 3cm: which was no real problem. We were able to take a bit more trouble with terrain. I put together a felt cloth with masking tape painted in gouache tempera for roads and rivers (with a bit of gloss impast gel for the water), and felt patches for the forests. We didn’t have access to supplies of tree models, though. The small streams and hills were ignored as of not being of major significance for this rules system. I even bought a 1/600 model of the USS Tyler at Salute and painted it up, which came out rather nicely. So the table looked much nicer, though hardly exhibition standard.

We played the same teams of two a side as the original – I was part of the Confederate team with Terry, and Bernie and Pete taking on the Union. We started at about 10.30 am and finished after 6pm after 9 moves of the 11, with an adjudicated Union victory. The Confederates made better progress than in our first game. Our right, played by Terry, got quite close to the objective of the Pittsburg Landing, but they were flagging and the Union line was holding. My left tied down three Union divisions and steadily pushed them back, but did we put too much effort on that side? The Union strategy was to steadily retire and hold a coherent line. Only when their right had very little further ground to give did the fighting get really up to pitched battle level, and the Confederates were looking the more battered, although consistently being able to push forwards.

So what of the rules? We were disappointed that the game did not play more quickly, as we had been led to believe from the blurb and one or two of the rules, though we were getting quicker by the end. The command phase, where the Priority Points are allocated, can be a bit tricky, and if two of you are playing as a team takes a little time. There are quite a few units to move around, and the turn system, which flips from one side to the other, can slow things down. BBB, the nearest rules set we have in scope, is faster, with fewer units, each side moving all its units together, and not allocation of PPs to manage. Overall we seemed to take about 45 minutes per move. The first moves took about 30 minutes, and our last moves were even quicker – so clearly there was some kind of an issue in the moves after lunch!

We were getting the hang of the PP system, which is the most innovative part of the game. It is a clever evolution of the “PIP” system first made popular with the WRG’s DMB game, forcing players to choose which units to move and which to leave. As with our first game, the Confederates suffered with many more limitations on hows its PPs oculd be used – which was realistic enough. This pushed them into a broad front strategy, and nothing very clever was possible. It was very hard for the two corps which comprised two divisions to be able to move both their divisions in the same turn, and one of the two single division corps had a very limited PP ration. Another problem for them was that it was very hard for them to control the “turn clock”, which was therefore controlled by the Union side for all except the first and last move. That allowed them to run it down quickly, also limiting the Confederate options. However, by focusing on moving just three or four divisions in a single PP round, by giving them all three or all four PPs each, the Confederates could still get a lot done before the move closed (with four divisions on three points each that was definitely risky – so it was mostly three divisions on four). But this leads to one of the other criticisms of the game system. A lot of effort needs to put into crafting your bids – which is a bit of a distraction from the tabletop and does not closely mimic any real process of battle management.

The movement and combat rules are very stripped down and simple. This is a bit abstract and generic, but that is a justifiable design decision given the focus on the command side. Though I’m no expert on the American Civil War, I think it actually captures the flavour of the rather loose ebb and flow of the era quite well. The main problem is that the rule book is too stripped down for my taste, and leaves too much unsaid, with only a short FAQ to help out, and no official online forum. So lots of details have to be worked out if players are unfamiliar with the rules, which clearly slowed us down. When can artillery interrupt advances to close combat? Can you shoot through narrow strips of woodland? If a unit starts on the edge of a wood, can it move at the full open-ground rate? And so on. Many rule writers (Iron Cross another case in point) deliberately keep the rule book short and loose, since adding extra detail makes the rules harder to read, and opens things out to rule-lawyers, as well as contradictions if you don’t do it quite right. I get that, but I don’t think these rules (or Iron Cross) get the balance right. We were able to settle down to a modus operandi, though I don’t think we got everything right. There’s only one thing I really don’t like and that is the total flexibility over movement and direction changes. Actually this works fine most of the time, but if a lone cavalry unit faces an isolated unit in the open, including another cavalry unit, it can almost always charge it in the flank (and without that unit being allowed to evade, as I found out afterwards). Also if a cavalry unit got into the rear, it is very easy for it to pick off generals even if they are in contact with their units. I can’t make too much of this. There aren’t many cavalry units (in this game one for Union, two for the Confederates), and moving them around requires command resources for their parent division. And historically they did harass rear areas. Flank attacks are easy in the rules by design – this is to liven up close combat, and in this context (i.e. the ACW) that’s fair enough. If I was modifying the rules, I think I would go down the BBB route of limiting direction changes during movement, but not as severely.

So what is the verdict on Altar of Freedom? I have criticised the command system, but it has a huge virtue in being a hook to hang command characteristics of different armies on. The system invests a lot in giving different generals different characters, not only in PP allocations, but on how they may use them. These characters were in fact too much for us: none of us remembered the re-throws which different generals were entitled to. But for Shiloh it allowed the game to simulate the different command strengths and weakness of the two armies, which added a lot to the game. This would be very difficult in BBB. However this works less well in a multiplayer context. It is quite important that the different allocations from across the army are coordinated. Because of the turn clock it helps for the army to use as few different bid numbers as possible – unless you are deliberately playing for time and need to run down the clock. However this is problem with all variations of the PIP system of game management.

Will we keep playing it? The time it took us was a bit discouraging. But we may well speed up, so I wouldn’t rule it out. If we do, I want to write down a number of game conventions to cover the vague bits in movement and combat, so that we are all agreed in advance. We were probably a bit too loose in this game – which tends to happen when you are making this sort of thing up in the heat of a game. One thing is for sure, though: playing AoF has added to my appreciation of game design!

The Peter Pig model of USS Tyler. The rear flagstaff MIA

Altar of Freedom ACW rules

Games & rules,

First an apology to my email followers. The email system broke down due to a technical issue, which is now fixed. So my most recent post a couple of weeks ago on our latest game of BBB didn’t go out on email.

For the last two weeks we have been trying the Altar of Freedom American Civil War rules. This started from a suggestion made as a comment to this blog, as the rules combine a very interesting command and movement system with simple movement and combat mechanics.

Last week we tried a scenario I devised based on the first day of Gettysburg. My fellow players liked the mechanics, by and large, but the game didn’t work that well. Partly that was to do with the way the game was set up. Our brigade units were made up of pairs of bases of 15mm figures that were put together on the night, using folded paper labels. These would not stand on the club’s sculpted hills. Also as an encounter battle there was a lot of manoeuvring and very little combat, as the Union side decided to pull off a withdrawal rather than try to defend the Seminary area.

Given the this failure, this week we tried the Shiloh scenario from the rule book, described as “small” for 2-3 players (we had 5…). It is of a similar size, but this time there were no hills, and the units were pre-based and labelled. We still only got through about five moves, and only in the last was there a major combat. The Confederates found it slow going amid the forests, and the Union side once again pulled back to defend a more cohesive defensive position.

The main point of interest in AoF is the command and bidding system. Each side gets a number of priority points (PPs) based on their leaders. These are allocated to divisions, to controlling the “turn clock” or to end of turn adjustments. Controlling the turn clock gives you the initiative and some control over how long the turn lasts. Each turn is effectively divided up into a number of moves depending on the number of PPs allocated to divisions. So, for example, all those with PPs of five would move first, then any with four, and so on. Their may be as few as two moves in a turn, or as many (theoretically, in the Shiloh scenario) as 12; more likely three or four. So if you allocate just one or two PPs to a division, it is quite likely that the turn ends before you reach it. This is all very interesting; players need to consider their bidding strategies very carefully – and there is also a lot of scope to vary different command structures for different armies. One of AoF’s design principles is to focus on these differences in command rather than different troop or weapon types. In the Shiloh game, the Union side is one combined army under Grant who has a single block of 20 PPs to allocate as the player chooses; the Confederates have 22 points but split between an army general and four corps commanders, each of which had further restrictions from leadership characteristics. That, and given the more passive Union stance in the earlier phases of the battle, meant that it was easy for the Union side to control the turn clock, and the Confederates soon gave up trying.

The movement and combat systems are, on the other hand, very simple. That caused some grumbles amongst players who expected some rules to work in ways that they didn’t – in particular that firing and close combat were alternatives, when players expect a fire first and close combat later system (such as in the Fire and Fury/Bloody Big Battles system). But it is one of the things that makes the rules playable, once you are over how they work and stop arguing that such-and-such looks wrong.

The verdict? Too early to tell. The command system is intriguing, but a bit gamey. Allocating your PPs and the various strategies needed to outwit your opponents in the bidding do not correspond closely to anything in actual warfare. It was quite slow going to build up forces for the attack. The combat did not play out to be quick and decisive, as billed. A lot of this is learning curve. Perhaps the Confederates needed to push forwards with a smaller number of divisions, and bring the rest up later once the path had been cleared. Because of the way the PPs were distributed between the corps commanders, it wasn’t so easy to refuse one flank and concentrate on the other. And the combat could be more decisive once we’ve worked out how to play to best advantage.

Another problem is that the representation of the battlefield was not very accurate, as we had to set it up quickly using whatever terrain pieces the club had. Perhaps there were more ways through without having to plough through forest… though the forest was very much a feature of the historical battle.

So far it looks as if we’ll appropriate the game as a club regular, once we’ve learned how to speed up, and represent the often rather complex terrain – based on actual battles. I’m less sure that I’ll be copying the mechanics for my Napoleonic venture. But the rules are a lesson in good game design.