A Quick Tale Of A New Player

[bddbrown]

I played a game with Andy Bascombe on Tuesday night last week. He'd watched us play one game, but as the others were not available for our regular slot and Andy is my next door neighbour we decided to throw a few troops on the table. This turned out to be very roughly two full size armies of Ottomans and Hungarians. Once I have explained the basics Andy was off and running in no time.

What surprised me was that he was able to make very sensible generalship decisions without fully understanding the rules. He wanted to push foward with the infantry, swing his Royal Banderium behind them and attack the Janassaries in the open (who were running for a piece of rough going like their lives depended on it). He also understood that the undrilled knights could not do this, but that the drilled knights made a pefect mobile reserve (one glance at the CMT chart convinced him of this).

He may have lacked understanding at a technical level about the exact details and how to do certain things, but he was essentially in control of the army for the whole game, understood what was going on and intrinsicly knew what would and would not work.

Personally I think this was the clearest indication yet that the rules fundamentally work, and that all is really required is more work to clarfiy, simplify and remove any final whiffs of "cheese" (or situations that don't immediately make sense to the vast majority of long time wargamers).

[rbodleyscott]

Excellent.

I think this would be worth posting on the Open board Bruce, if you don't mind.

[shall]

I agree Bruce please put it up. One of our earliest objectives was to get a setr of rules that anyone with a general understanding of history would find logical - because they relfect history well. Hopefully this means that many and irregular player can have a great game with someone who knows the rules by relying on thier general strategy skills and knowledge of military history. No neeed to be a rule genius - a military gneius would be fine.

Perhaps these are a set of rules where Alexander and Hannibal would do well even though they have never read the details!!! Course we would all slaughter them at DBM......

Si

[bddbrown]

Will do. I keep forgetting about the open forum.