Herewith, a suggested set of quick play rules for English
Civil War, ECW, which I think are good for people thinking about getting into
the period.
I have had a number of good games using these rules and enjoy the possibility of events as well as the card driven initiative system. Indeed, these had been the first ECW rules I had played and my first games were without miniatures simply using cardboard counters. Since then I now play with 10mm ECW miniatures and this works with some simple adjustment to ranges and movement.
"Forward Having been through nearly every set of commercial rules for the period I could find, I decided to take a stab at writing my own. It's not that I found anything wrong with the rules available, but they didn't fit exactly what I was looking for. I wanted a card based system with simple mechanics that would allow me to play battles with eight to twelve units per side in an evening. I also wanted to be able to field my units on multi-figure stands and have a way to keep track of battlefield losses without resorting to rosters or figure removal.
What follows are the results of my efforts. There is nothing revolutionary about these rules - they have been inspired by many contemporary rule sets on the market, as well as traditional authors like Featherstone and Grant. These rules are not designed for competition play and not every situation that could arise is covered. If questions come up use common sense to work them out or, failing that, choose two likely results (usually your interpretation and that of your opponent) and roll a die to decide the outcome.
These rules have not
benefitted from exhaustive play testing, but the games I've run so far have
worked well and seem to capture the feel of the period. Feedback would be
welcome! Nothing is set in stone at this point. The rules are designed for 28mm
figures although they should be easy enough to adapt to 15mm by halving the
base sizes and replacing all references to "inches" with
"centimeters". The title for the rules was the field word for William
Waller's army at the Battle of Cropredy Bridge."
What I particularly liked was the layout and images and that the rules are only 13 pages long as I find many rules sets are far too long with too much fluff.
These rules are free to download and available here:
https://gcooksonblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/victory-without-quarter-rules.pdf
and
http://quindiastudios.blogspot.com/search?q=victory+without+quarter
