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Age of Gunpowder fast play rules for the period 1500-1700 Chipco Reviewed by David Heading |
This is an interesting set of rules, with some neat touches. You get a 24 element army plus two guns and a general. Your army is controlled by a morale clock. During each round, as your elements lose combat or get shot up, they become demoralised, and if more of your units are demoralised during a turn than your enemies, your morale clock is reduced by one. Once it gets to 4 (from 9) one quarter of your army is demoralised. This morale clock number also controls how many individual elements or 'corps' (groups of elements) may be moved. Thus, not only does your army start to worry, it starts to become unmanageable too.
Unit types are pretty well as expected, a neat touch being the ability to integrate pike and shot into one base, giving bonuses to both. Infantry and cavalry can be graded elite or ordinary.
Play is fast and furious, and in my play test of thirty years war French against Spanish, extremly bloody. The morale clock did not play a large role in the game as the number of elements I had able to move was usually less than my clock rating, and many of the bounds of combat were drawn, so neither side rating was reduced. As units were demoralsed, they didn't move out of line, so there was no problem with keeping the line in contact. As combat is quite even, on the next round recovery could take place.
Overall, the game is fun and fast. In my game, the event was decided by the charge of the last French elite cavalry on the last elite Spanish infantry - the infantry won and that was that, although the about 20 dead elements of each side were littering the table top at the time. Bloody, as I said.
The lists are very simple, and the rating of Aztecs as pike is as interesting a definition of pike as I've seen in a while. I think they might as well have been honest and not tried to force the whole world (Ming and Japanese included) into a single rule set deigned for European warfare.
As the rules are now available free over the internet, I believe, they are probably worth obtaining, but bear in mind that they started off being sold and presumably did not make it! Interesting, but I've not been inspired to return to them.
