Platoon Forward!

I was quite pleased to see this new system by Joe Legan announced last week.

See an in-depth discussion over on the Too Fat Lardies blog. They're available in pdf format for £7.00 here

Platoon Forward! aims to provide flavour and context for tactical games. Rather than being a type of map-driven campaign system, it does three things (and on first scan, appears to do them quite well):
1. Characterisation of major personalities in the unit
2. Scenario generation - including enemy strength
3. Random events - both during and after battles
With further kudos for mentioning En Garde! as an influencing system!

Interestingly the author is a fan of Piquet and an inveterate solo gamer. He's been testing the rules for over four years in a variety of 20th century conflicts. These combinations are a powerful incentive for me to devour these rules in more detail. I imagine they will fit very easily into a contemporary assymetric context as well.

I'm quite a fan of well-constructed campaign systems - in my opinion there aren't enough of them. Campaigns and sieges are the two ugly step-sisters of wargaming (and to a lesser extent military history) with far more attention paid to 'Cinderella' - tactical battles.

On that front I passed along the second draft of my siege rules: provisionally entitled "With Cold Iron" - for use with Command & Colours: Napoleonics - to Mr. Kinch last week, and hopefully we'll get to playtest the hell out of them next month...