First of all - why the title "Battle Command Ancient and Medieval"? That's not nearly as captivating a "Swooshing Blades of Death" or "Pikes and Javelins" or "King Tut to Edward IV".
Well. I'm a Mechanical Engineer. I prefer things to be well designed, clean, and smooth operating. Flashy titles are....not my cup of tea. "Battle Command" is the basic procedural skeleton of the series of rules that began a year ago with the publication of "Battle Command Musket to Rifle 1700-1900", continues with "Battle Command Ancient and Medieval", and will there will also be "Battle Command Pike and Shot" and "Battle Command WW2". I much prefer a title of a set of wargame rules to just tell me what era is covered rather than make me try to guess what is covered. I guess it is easy to guess that I'm not a fantasy gamer....
The basic impetus of creating the rules began a couple years ago when we had to reschedule our group's game day. I had the troops set out (for a Peninsular war game) and the terrain set up, so I just went ahead and did a solo development play session - I just used 1/3 of the cards from Field of Battle, made up a matrix of decision combinations, and started to play. My goal was to eliminate as much of the downtime as possible - those turns of a card where everybody just says "that's no use - can't use it". Even in the first development game, it was clear that it was going to be a unique system and that it was also going to achieve my goal of reducing downtime and also providing games with a TON of decision points.
I'll add more in subsequent posts. I'll end this with a few photos from some Battle Command games (both Musket to Rifle and Ancient and Medieval).
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