For the Kingdom

A variant for Richard Borg’s Battle Cry covering the English Civil War, which will also be familiar to player of the Commands and Colors games and their variants.

The Swindon and District Wargames club was invited to run a game at the annual Devizes ‘Attack’ Wargames show. Given that Phil and I have fairly extensive English Civil Wars armies in 28mm we thought it would be a great opportunity to dust off the figures for a game.

I suggested that we keep the game simple, with the view to being able to run multiple games to conclusion on each day whilst being able to talk to anyone interested and perhaps getting them involved. There are a substantial number of rules readily available, but few really seemed suitable for these key criteria. I proposed to use a the Richard Borg mechanisms from Battle Cry and develop an informal variant for our English Civil War project.

To keep up the interest across the two days Phil suggested running the games as a series of linked battles in an ongoing campaign, and duly set to work creating a nice simple campaign system to generate the battles. Using the game’s banner board Phil created maps where forces were shown moving as battles were fought. The campaign system was elegant in its simplicity and allowed us to play over 12 games on the two days.

3 thoughts on “For the Kingdom”

    1. Hi Alessandro,
      Most of the rules are similar to the normal Battle Cry rules, and is played on a 9 by 13 hex map.

      I created a set of cards specifically for the ECW, along with unit stats. The main difference is for the pike and musket tercios which are optimised if they operate next to each other, especially when confronted by gallopers.

      The main troop types which we had were;
      Cavalry;
      Gallopers,
      Trotters,

      Infantry
      Pikemen
      Musketeers

      Artillery (to keep it simple we were only using one class)

      Dragoons – a cross between cavalry and infantry, but not as good as either.

      I think that I’ve saved the cards and unit stats off on another post, so will look them out.

      Cheers
      Warren

      1. Thank you for the reply.
        I’m a big fan of Battle Cry and I’m interested in the ECW card set you created, I’d like to use it with the 1/72 ECW figures that I have to create some musket and pike battles.

        Cheers
        Alessandro

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