"For King and Parliament"; A "What If?" Game

[SJWi]

About 7 years ago I had the good fortune to playtest Simon Miller's "For King and Parliament" at his wargames event in Chalgrove near Oxford. A year later I bought his rules when released at Salute in 2018, and three of us from my gaming group decided to start, or for the others re-start gaming ECW.  I last played when I had a Minifigs army back at school in the late 1970s! For various reasons we settled on 28mm, and started to build our armies .Role on 6 years, one member of the group has moved away, the other has pretty much lost interest and I have two fully painted armies set circa 1643 (ie pre Model Army).

Over the past year my interest in the ECW and 17th century in general has been re-kindled by volunteering at the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon ( well worth a visit....small but perfectly formed), and I have finally managed to persuade another friend to try out ECW. He is no fan of Simon's ancient set TTS so this was to be a big challenge.

Last Sunday I put on a small game based on a "what if" scenario I found in Partizan Press' "English Civil War Gaming Scenarios". It postulated that in 1659 the forces of General Lambert didn't melt away as Monck marched south, but stood and fought somewhere near Barnet.  Obviously my units aren't "New Model" but beggars can't be choosers. 

I've attached some photos of the payout and some of the action, but rather than give a blow-by-blow account of the battle thought some observations on FK&P as a ruleset may be of interest for those who haven't heard of or used them.

They are a specific set aimed at ECW, but I have read that people use them for the Williamite Wars and there are "unofficial mods" for Eastern Europe. As with TTS the game is played on a gridded mat, which I guess people either love of loath. There is no individual figure removal which means units can be modelled as single bases and this speeds up play no end. The basic mechanics of movement and combat are very similar to TTS, albeit the base "to hit" under FK&P is an 8 rather than TTS' 6. The rules cover the mix of pike and shotte by listing units as either "standard" , "pike heavy" or "shotte heavy", which have different shooting and melee characteristics. Probably the biggest difference to TTS is the treatment of cavalry.  In the main these are either early war "Dutch style" of later "Swedish style". Cavalry attack with sword and pistols, but also the concept of "dash" or elan which adds combat strength. "Dash" degrades over time and in the end cavalry are "blown" which renders them fairly ineffective. Once cavalry break enemy units they then have a mandatory pursuit which was a common feature particularly of Royalist troops, which means they can be a powerful asset but hard to control.

A nice feature to add colour are the provision of officer characteristics ( optional), plus the facility for units to be "untried", and commanders only find out how good they are once the fighting starts.

We played a small-ish game with 10-11 units a side, and it took about two-and-a half hours, albeit we did have a tea break, only one player per side and frequent rulechecks. I like FK&P so I was happy to see my collection on the table, but was more surprised when my mate who is ECW agnostic and "hostile" to TTS said he had enjoyed the game. You can't ask for more than that.

For the record General Lambert managed a close-run victory over General Monck so the whole history of Britain post 1659 needs to be re-written!               

   

[Basementboy]

Models look beautiful! If you don’t mind my asking, how similar is FKaP to the original TTS?

[SJWi]

Thanks. I won't take credit for the painting; they were all done by Fernando Enterprises in Sri Lanka. The core concepts of movement, combat and morale are almost identical to TTS albeit tweaked for "pike and shotte". As I said the authors have tried to introduce some more "ECW specificities" such as cavalry combat and pursuit, which are easier to do in a ruleset aimed at a specific periods and theatre of war with pretty limited troop types. The co-author Andrew Brentnall is very knowledgeable about the period and has a superb 10mm collection, which was what we used at the Chalgrove event I referred to.

I know there are other good ECW sets out there but these "do it" for me, particularly as I don't have to learn the mechanics from scratch.  They have just released a scenario book for Montrose in Scotland which has piqued my interest. I have a Covenanter army for use in England but could be tempted by Montroses' men. This would bring additional troop types into play such as lancers, clansmen and the Irish foot.