Across a Deadly Field ACW rules by John Hill: Initial Thoughts

[Macunaima]

I bought the Kindle version of John Hill's new opus, "Across a Deadly Field" and I have to say, I'm less than pleased with it.

Luckily, the Kindle edition is ever so much cheaper than the paper edition, or I'd probably be seriously browned off.

Let me state two things that I like, at the beginning...

1) The Kindle edition is very nicely put together. No complaint at all here. If you generally don't buy rules as e-books because you are leary about editors who generally don't do a good job, rest assured, this isn't the case here! Plus it's nice and cheap, compared to the paper version.

2) The IDEA behind the rules is just great: brigades are the basic fighting and manuvering units, but individual regiments are the atomic components of the game itself. One can thus see the granularity of the regiments doing what they do (double plus good period color and atmosphere), but without taking up huge ammounts of time and energy (double plus good playablity).

Now, I haven't played the game yet, so I don't know how the promise of playability plus detail actually works out. John Hill has made some very favorable syntheses of these two things in the past (the original Squad Leader) and some not-so-favorable syntheses (the original Johnny Reb). So take what I am going to say with a grain of salt...

But look, friends and neighbors: I don't know about y'all, but the very first thing I do with a new miniatures system is open the page to the basing system in order to see what my figs are going to look like and how much money I'll need to spend to get a decent game on the table.

And that's precisely where ADF falls flat, in my opinion.

The basing system tries to be all things to all gamers, while simultaneously attaching the game to a set number of figures per regiment, independent of the scale.

You have two basing choices in the game: regiments made up of two rectangular bases or regiments made up of three square bases. What are the dimensions of these bases? Pretty much anything you like, really. ADF gives no guidelines. But the key point is that strength is determined and casualties are taken by CASTING. This means that whether you're playing in 28mm or in 6mm, you need to have exactly the same number of figures on your stands.

At an invariable 60 men per casting, this means that your typical 1863 ACW regiment of 360 or so men is going to have 6 figures, in both 28mm and 6mm scale.

Now I don't know about you, but one of the reasons I play the microscales is to get more realistic looking regiments on the table. Think 36 6mm castings per regiment, not 6.

What's worse is that casualties are taken by figure, so you're going to need to mark castings off on your stands with pipecleaners as your regiments take losses. That's easy in 28mm, less so in 15mm or 10mm and incredibly fiddly in 6mm.

Finally, in ADF, you're effectively modelling brigades, despite the rhetoric regarding regiments. This means that unless you want every regiment to pretty much be its own color guard, you're still only going to get one flag per brigade. The real problem, however, comes with the fact that the regiments are individually rated. This means that you're going to have to lable them individually (every 6 or so figures) and with that going on, you might as well just use a loss roster system and screw Hill's figure counting. A pity, because - of course - loss rosters make the game slower and more fiddly and the entire point of ADF is to allow one to play a large ACW battle at the regimental level in a reasonable ammount of time. Alternatively, you could just play Fire and Fury...

Given this, it's hard for me to see how any of the wonderful photos in ADF can actually represent the game as it's being played. We're treated to shot after shot of majestic lines of troops advancing with nary a unit label to be seen. Either John Hill has memorized every regiment he owns by heart or he has the labels written on the botton of the bases, necessitating constant picking up and checking of a unit's identity and stats. This was basically the case in Johnny Reb, IIRC, but then again, Johnny Reb was a fiddly game where rarely more than a division per side ever got onto the table. Doing Gettysburg - or even Shiloh - this same way would truly be a major pain in the ass for a system which is supposed to be relatively quick to play.

To add insult to injury, the ground scale for the only historical scenario provided (Heth's assault on McPherson's Ridge) seems way, way off. In fact, the ground scales in general seem strange.

Hill suggests (but does not out-and-out tell us) that each map square in his scenario system ranges from 12 inches across (for microscales) to 24 inches across (for 28mm). But in the McPherson's ridge scenario, he gives us no scale to work with at all.

Looking at the ground portrayed and comparing it to my Osprey books, it seems that the 2x2 square grid battlefield covers about 1 square mile. That would make each tabletop inch roughly about 75mm, presuming that each grid square corresponds to a square foot of tabletop. But that can't be the case, because elsewhere Hill indicates that 60-80m per inch is what one should use for 28mm scale figures... and 28mm scale figures are supposed to have TWO feet wide grid squares. I've spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out the scaling issues in ADF and I haven't come to any conclusion. All I can hypothesize is that when Hill gives us the game table sizes in the first chapter, he means that the ENTIRE TABLE should be 24 x 24 inches for 28mm (as the text seems to imply) and not each game board grid square (as the illustration is clearly labeled). This would bring the Gettysburg scenario map right in line with the 60-80mm per inch proposed ground scale.

But seriously, man: how did these issues never even come up in playtesting?

Now it might seem I am brutally panning Across a Deadly Field, but that's not the case. It IS a more playable version of Johnny Reb, or at least gives every appearance of being so. What it is not is what it tries to be: a quick playing, yet relatively detailed recreation of ACW combat which uses regiments as its atomic unit. I never did like Johhny Reb as it was far too fiddly for me. ADF, however, is just the thing for a sub-divisional level battle that takes an afternoon to play out on a coffee table. What it WON'T do, it seems (and again, I haven't tried it out yet, so anyone who does this is welcome to chime in), is allow you to recreate Gettysburg in a reasonable ammount of time. Not without a considerable amount of tinkering, that is.

My big disappointment with ADF, however, is that I wanted to play it with 3mm and that seems right out, without a work-around.

I'm thinking of using 20mm x 20mm stands, with each one representing the equivalent of 120 men - or two castings. I would then use casualty markers to mark of losses and, when each stand has a marker, the unit will count as depleted. This way, the average ACW regment will have 3 or 4 stands and a battleflag without looking silly and I can make 10mm x 20mm labels for each unit, listing its affiliation and moral class.

If anyone has played ADF and can tell me if they think this would work, I'd love to hear from you!

[Khurasan Miniatures]

These don't sound like serious issues to me.  If the units are effectively brigades and the regiments are subunits, then you have one flag set for the brigade. That's what you do in a brigade game like Fire and Fury, so all this set is doing is giving you a bit more granularity with some individual regiment capability, an idea I really like.

You can use plastic rings to go over 15s for casualties.  Have done that for decades.

If you need to keep track of each regiment I'm guessing you can just paint on a colour code on the rear edge of each base.  

If you want to play a battle like Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere, and not have it get humongous, you have to go with a high level set which has divisions as units. That would be a very different feel than most people are accustomed to I reckon.

Maybe I'm in the minority here but nothing you've mentioned would keep me from playing the game.  Thanks for the review though.

[Macunaima]

It's not quite a review, as I haven't played it yet.

I don't think people will have many problems marking casualties in 15mm, whether they use rings, pipe-cleaners, or casualty caps. 10mm and 6mm will be far more fiddly, however.

Painting the back of regimental stands won't work without a roster in a huge game. It also looks less nice in the microscales.

I don't think people should NOT play Across a Deadly Field. I think it is OK, especially for the price one pays for it on Kindle. At that price, although I'm less than pleased with ADF, I don't regret buying it.

I think, however, that the game is much more a Johnny Reb III light, ideal for quick divisional-sized battles, and not so much a viable fast-play system for Gettysburg. I'd take a modified Black Powder for that, I think.

Maybe my views will change after I get around to playing it, but that won;t happen until I figure a work-around for 3mm.

[Melnibonean]

Thanks Macunaima for a good heads up.
I was keen to hear something about these rules as I was unwilling to fork out a large cash investment (I'm in Australia so they're expensive!). But hearing that they're available on Kindle is great and a better deal in my book (pun not intended )

12 Figure regiments I can live with but a good read of the rules will determine my opinion.

[Juan]

Thank you a lot for this report. I have been very interested in this ruleset and your opinion is very useful for me!

[Melnibonean]

Well, I purchased the Kindle version of these rules and I found them really hard going. I can't see myself playing ADF.

After making the above statement: "12 Figure regiments I can live with" - I can't.

It seems to me that what ADF is trying to do is take on the larger battles in the style of original Fire&Fury but all it is really doing is breaking down the brigade formation into its component, regimental parts so that tiny individual units take to the field. From what I managed to read (I just couldn't keep going) ADF isn't the game for me.

I'll stick to RF&F for now although I retain an open mind towards other options.

[Captain Darling]

Hi All,

Thanks for your feedback on these rules, I'm holding off on purchasing them until I have seen a large amount of feed back and AARs.

I'm using Longstreet for my brigade scale 6mm games (love it) and am looking for a set of rules to use my figures for corps scale ones.

Cheers
Darling

[Elbows]

Thanks for the review.  I've occasionally dabbled with the dark side (big battalion games).  This looked appealing to me.  Sounds very...not interesting now. 

[Saladin]

The War in the East Scenario book has a lot of information at the beginning on optional basing and casualty removal - as well as a discussion of map scales.

But the main point is that, today, people don't want to rebase their armies and are looking for ways to avoid that.

[General Lee]

I felt the rulebook was unreadable and what I read did not appeal to me at all, so I'll stick to Black Powder