Slowness of the game

[richard zamudio]

I am not sure how to say this, but the game seems to take an excruciating long time to come to a conclusion. It seems that there needs to be a process by which entire stands can be eliminated (with an appreciable degradation to their combat effectiveness). I recently played a game which lasted five hours before we quit due to mutual exhaustion. Has any else experienced this or are we the victims of our own, slow playing style?

[Charge The Guns]

Hi Richard – interesting problem!  Our group has found it easier to reach a conclusion. with BP in a regular club game, say 3-4 hours, than with previous rules we’ve used.  The degrading of units’ effectiveness as their stamina reduces, and the removal of whole units as they break, seems to work for us.  We typically play two options for an army losing.  In the first, each brigade ‘breaks’ once over half of the units are shaken or broken, and the army breaks once half or more of the brigades are broken.   Alternatively we play if over half of the units in the whole army are shaken or broken (ignoring skirmishers and artillery).  How are judging the win/lose?  Do you have brigades breaking?

[richard zamudio]

re Charge the guns: We probably should have taken off units once they break. As they can essentially do nothing, there is no point in keeping them around. As it is, they clutter the board and force a player to move them back (spending time to move them) until they reach the edge of the table. Any mechanism to speed up the game is greatly appreciate. Now all I have to do is to convince fellow players to think likewise. Also, most of us are rather new to the game and we tend to spend a fair  amount of time looking up rules! That is our fault, not a problem with the game.

[Nat]

With a number of games I find that having a cheat /crib sheet with the turn order and and event rolls on 1 or 2 sides of A4  + a printed out excel sheet of the stats for the units in my army  + a sheet with JUST the special rules my army has on means that if you ask me a question I’m going to look at 1 of 3 bits of paper & not a book … if I cant find it then I tend to go with what feels right and write down/make a note of it to check out later

Most of the games I play my local club has a chat group for so we can all post up answeres to in game questions the next day or so once we’ve had time to check them out… this speeds up games and means we’re more likely to remember them (oh yeah I cant do X, or if I do Y then Z happens sort of thing)

[Charge The Guns]

Hi Richard – there is a quick reference sheet available on the Warlord site here https://www.warlordgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/black-powder-playsheet.pdf if that helps?

I would strongly suggest you remove units from the board when they break – the core game expects you to do this, and as you say, you’re wasting time by not doing it. (N.B. The Glory Hallelujah supplement has rules to change this but that is specific to ACW games.)

Also, are you using the rules for Broken Brigades?  (p83) With this, if half or more of the units in a brigade are broken, shaken or off table, then the whole brigade is classed as broken and becomes much, less effective.

In addition, once an army has half or more of its brigades broken then the game is over.

With these rules you should find games complete in a reasonable amount of time. 👍

[richard zamudio]

I think that part of the problem is the small number of casualties that a unit experiences in a given turn. Since Epic battles are designed to represent rather large units, it would not be unusual for them to experience large amounts of casualties. Perhaps this is yet another problem that takes place when you try to mesh a game designed for 28mm (smaller units) with the usage of smaller scale figures (larger units). Perhaps there needs to be a new “Black Powder” for smaller scales.

[Charge The Guns]

I’m not sure I follow you logic, Richard?

What ever size of figure you are using, an infantry is typically a battalion if we’re talking Napoleonics. You might have 24 figures in a 28mm battalion, or 100 figures in an ‘Epic’ battalion.  Each would still have a stamina of ‘3’ to represent a regular sized unit.  In Black Powder the number of figures in a unit is irrelevant.  The only thing that is important is the frontage of a unit, and that it is very similar to the frontage of the same sized units in the opposing force.

We’ve played BP with 28, 15 and 10mm without any issues.  We usually adjust ranges / move distances for the smaller sizes (e.g. substitute centimetres for inches).  I’m not sure what else you would want to change?

 

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