Lestrades_Game

Being a man who likes diversity I bought / pre-ordered 4 games for Christmas about dudes in flashy coats with muskets marching around road networks. I’ve already Quick looked at Nappys Nemesis 1813, Metz is yet to be released from P500, Autumn of Glory is on the shelf, so this weekend I have played Washington’s Crossing. The Patriot opening more or less followed the script. Washington moved with his stack, crossed the Delaware with decent movement and ferry rolls and come morning was sat just outside Trenton next to Rall’s Hessian garrison. The American gets a rather scripted +5 to surprise rolls when attacking Trenton, plus it being dawn and a prepared attack gave Washington very favourable odds but the roll was terrible and Rall escaped with only 25% losses and a retreat. Further south Greene collected a few detachments of militia and drove the other Hessian garrisons north. The Hessians forced marched out wide forcing Washington to either hunt them dow...

The American Revolution (rebellion!) isn't really covered by the curriculum over here in o'l blighty, in fact I've never seen a documentary on it, nor a book on the shelf of a local library. In some respects this isn't unusual as you don't hear a lot about things that aren't Waterloo, World War 1&2, Henry the 8th's wives or the Romans in the UK. But it is  a significant piece of world history and a major blind spot for me, so when I saw a copy of 1776 going cheap on the geek I picked it up. Sometimes the notion gets kicked around that modern games are great, and old games are rather bad and best left to the collectors shelves. 1776 tells me that War game design was as good in back in 1974 as it is today. The pitch is roughly thus; The rebel scum need to be put down, every few turns for the first year you will get a fresh skill stack of troops landing along the coast. You must engage the enemy where you find him and spread out your forces to occupy ...