One Hour Wargames: American War of Independence

This was my second game playing the OHW system by Neil Thomas. It was an encounter battle set in the AWI and based on scenario 2: Pitched Battle. There were a couple of objectives to make the game interesting and set some tactical problems for both sides to address.

 

The basis were the H&M Rules in the book but I did overlay a few house rules and utilised my solo amendments to simulate command friction. I also extended the random events table so as to allow a D20 determination of events. This generated a lot of interesting variations and kept both sides on their toes.

Initially the British looked set to eliminate the Americans who had adopted a more defensive posture but a series of poor rolls, the British general being shot and the US Militia faring better than expected, buying time for the Continentals to wear down the British left flank, meant a gradual recovery for the US forces and an outcome after 15 turns of a decisive victory for the Rebels.

Reflecting on the game. Again I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed the experience. Despite being on the face of it a simplistic simulation of period warfare it actually had some intriguing tactical choices and outcomes. Coupled with the friction generated from my solo rules it played out in a evolutionary way and I didn't feel limited by the sparseness of the rules. On the contrary I think that in this case it is it's strength. As has been mentioned by other commentators of these rules the author deliberately reduces the rules to a bare minimum which hits the core aspects of each period but allows an easy overlay of any particular preferences a gamer has to add to these without breaking the core system. Some special rules for each game and army can be incorporated without much issue. This is what I did in this game e.g. for Militia any hits against them were doubled to account for their fragile morale. This means they are extremely brittle and likely to run after one good volley against them, unless of course they are positioned in defences which neutralise this penalty.  

Going forward I've developed some OHW rules for WW2, again incorporating my own house rules. A bit more tinkering here as I wanted to represent a few more features of this period of warfare which I felt needed to be simulated. The playtest will confirm whether this works.