English Civil War 6mm - New Rules - War is Our Homeland

Last night we played our first English Civil War battle using a new set of rules, "War Is Our Homeland" by Joshua Rowe

The rules concentrate on the command control aspect of the battle experience using decks of standard playing cards to apply different "postures" to units. The postures being:

• Offensive - allowing charging 3" into combat. This is an extra move on top of the very basic move of 6" (or 9" for cavalry).
• Defensive - allowing an advantage when receiving a charge
• Firing - increasing the number of dice when shooting. Units can always shoot, this just increases the chance of doing damage. Range is just 3"
• Mobile - allowing extra movement. Units can do very simple 6" forward movement even when not in Mobile posture, but not through difficult terrain.

Shooting and Melee is resolved with handfuls of d6 against a target number of 4+ and combat resolution is very simple. There is just two states for units other than fresh; Fatigued and Shaken. A unit can be either, neither or both.

Play is fast and simple, but very tactical. Choice of when and how to use the postures and cards is probably the most important factor. 

The scenarios in the book and expansions are all historical and we decided to play Cheriton in 1644 from the "A Clash of Three Kingdoms" scenario book as it was the smallest scenario. We used my usual minis and didn't bother rebasing or rescaling. My basing is different from the basing described in the rules, but not significantly and we decided it would be fine. We still think it was. Of the other scenarios most had far more units than I have available, so I'm either going to have to paint some extra models (a lot in some cases) or scale those battles down.

The game flowed well. I played the Parliamentary forces and had to break the Royalists to win. Any other result would be a Royalist victory so they decided to stay where they were and defend. Seeing I only had 5 turns to break the Royalists I used a lot of my command cards to move forward quickly. The Royalists were instead able to hold on to their cards to use in the ensuing combat and when we did contact I was soundly beaten. I think on reflection I should have not rushed so much and just used my commander's free postures to advance along with the basic move. I also had moved my Dragoons into the wood on my right flank and this meant they were pretty much unable to go further without me having to concentrate my postures on them. This was a mistake and they should have been out in the open.

Initial deployment from the Parliament side of the battlefield.

Parliament forces rush forward towards the waiting Royalists

Combat is joined. The Parliament forces take are pushed back and only a single unit of Royalist Dragoons is in danger.

Royalist forces fight back inflicting Fatigue and Shaken results.

In the end the game was a victory for the Royalists: Royalists routed 3 Parliament units to Parliament routing just a single Royalist unit. 

We did have a few rules questions for the designer and I'm going to list them here. Hopefully with answers in time... I've also listed what we arbitrarily decided to do so we could continue to play.

1. Can you pre-measure movement, charges, shooting etc? (We allowed premeasuring as we prefer that.)
2. There don't appear to be any rules for deployment. Who deploys which units in which order?. (We deployed as shown on the Cheriton page of the British Battles website)
3. Its unclear if a unit's whole move is halved, or if a unit halves their movement only for that part made in difficult terrain. (We decided to just halve the proportion of the move in the difficult terrain.)
4. Is the bonus Firing posture die for dragoons doubled or is it applied after the normal dice are doubled? (We assumed not doubled)
5. Do units shoot independently or combine dice when considering Fatigue or Shaken results? (We assumed not combined.)
6. If a charge is incomplete (ie the 3" move does not result in contact or a support position) can the unit still make the move or does it remain stationary? (We assumed that it stayed stationary.)
7. If multiple units are in contact or a unit is within range to provide support at what point in the turn and in what order is this decided? (We had a phase before combats were resolved where the owner of each unit decided for each combat.)
8. When a unit breaks off 3" from contact is it them inside or outside of shooting and charge range from that unit (this matters in difficult terrain). (This didn't happen for us, but we realised that it is not covered in the rules.)
9. Are leaders displaced if a their own unit overlaps them. (We manage to move units to avoid them, but it was not clear what would happen if the unit could not..)
10. We read it as clear that shooting dice are unaffected by shaken or fatigue statues but this did not 'feel' right, especially for dragoons which shot at full effect despite both. (We carried on with what we thought the rules said, but Dragoons on firing posture getting 7 dice even with Fatigue and Shaken seemed off.)

Despite the above questions we thoroughly enjoyed the game and will be looking to try these rules again. First off a reverse of the Cheriton battle. I'll get to play the Royalists.