Slow Mo Piquet: House Rules

I will try to dig into the Piquet rules by keeping tabs on my first game in "slow motion", i.e. noting down all preparations and game decisions.

Even before the game starts, here are a few house rules I'm going to start with (although I do think it makes sense to play by the rules as written when trying out new games...).

Note: corrections made after the real game start are marked by striking out the original entries.

1. Unit BDVs

One of the things I dislike most about some tabletop rules (Games Workshop, I'm looking at you ;) are army list construction rules that require a lot of game or unit specific preparation. I don't like doing a lot of preparation of unit statistics, and tracking the individual units' stats during a game, especially for one-off games and historical context where you need and want less unit individuality than, say, in army lists for tournament or campaign play, or in a fantasy universe where creating and evolving one's own army is part of the fun.

I much prefer games like Shako with a short list of unit types, or Demonworld with printed unit statistics cards you ust have to select. So I appreciate the "Quick BDV Charts" in the Cartouche rules and will combine these with simple defaults to come up with a Shako-like short list of unit types and statistics.

I will use the following logic:

• Start with BDV 8 (eager) 6 (average) for all (can be varied for campaigns or weather effects)
• sort regular / elite / trained militia by unit type
• Prussian Line Inf (incl. Fusileers) and Cav is reg, Grenadiers elite
• Reichsarmee is reg or trained militia (e.g. 1st bat is reg, or by unit)
• Austrians are regulars, some cav and grenadiers elite, Grenzers elite trained militia
• Then look up on page 68ff of Cartouche to find defaults like

Prussians

Grenadiers       12 - 8 - 8

Line                 10 - 8 - 6

Bad Freikorps  10 - 6 - 6

Cuirassiers        × - 10 - 6

Dragoons          ×  - 8 - 6

Hussars             ×  - 6 - 6

Artillery

Reichsarmee

1st rate Grenadiers    12 - 8 - 8

2nd rate Grenadiers   10 - 8 - 6

1st rate Line               10 - 8 - 6

2nd rate Line              10 - 6 - 6

Cuirassiers                  × - 10 - 6

Dragoons                    × - 8 - 6

Hussars                       × - 6 - 6

Austria

Grenadiers       10 - 8 - 8

1st rate Line    10 - 8 -  6

2nd rate Line   10 - 8 -  6

Grenzer            8 - 10 - 8

Cuirassiers        ×  - 10 - 6

Dragoons          ×  - 8 - 6

Hussars             ×  - 6 - 6

2. Initiative

At some point I'll have to try the original initiative rules, but most of the online content I find for Piquet has variations that try to avoid multiple inititive die roll wins for the same side. 

I will use the normal rules to identify the winner of the next initiative and the number of pips, but always allocate one third (rounded down) of these pips to the loser of the die roll unless the 20 pips that end the phase are reached.

3. Marching to the battle

One of the things I loved about the rules and the game experience of the Shako optional rules for the seven years war was the option to let both armies enter the battle field in columns of march, and allow one 90 degree turn as a free kind of march movement and a 90 degree front change once units have reached their jump off point in the battle order.

I will allow the same in Piquet, i.e. start marching armies on the table with the normal move... cards, allow one 90 degree turn as normal movement on any move card and one formation change from column of march to line with a 90 degree facing change as a single pip on any move or maneuver card.

4. Small Battle Commanders

For small engagement (up to, say, ten or twelve units) I do want to use brigades, but want to scale down the role and impetus expenditure of commanders. So I will put brigade commanders on the table, but not let them use pips to move and not gice them individual ratings. Instead, I will use just one army commander with characteristics determined as for a large battle sub-commander, and only let that one command stand use pips, bring units back into command etc.

5. Unit state markers

Units can have many different states, and some players use markers like casualty caps, pipecleaners in different colors, small dice, or bases with minis or stones as indicators for these. However, I don't like this approach - it clutters the table and means fiddling with lots of small items in many colors and remembering their meaning. On the other hand I'm too lazy to produce lots of markers with painted casualty minis.

I will try to continue what I started for Shako, i.e. using the arrangement of the bases in a unit to indicate status:

• fired (i.e. waiting for a reload card): cotton wool in front of, or (in melee) on top of units
• engaged (not sure I will really need this): cotton wool between two units in frontal contact
• square: six bases can be arranged into a neat square without gaps or weird corners
• skirmish: I think I will not allow units to switch between line and skirmish formation within a game, and base units starting as skirmishers with only 3 minis per base, maybe even 6 minis on square bases (then three per unit, not six)
• out of command: flags in the second rank, instead of the front rank (I'll just have to figure out what to do with units in firing mode where the flags go into the rear rank by default...)
• disordered / blown: all bases slightly unaligned with a few millimeters distance
• unformed: ranks in full contact but "columns" slightly separated
• casualties marked by removing stand (as I have six bases per infantry bataillon, there is always something left as long as the unit is half way usable, I just need to remember that the fourth stand lost means the unit is gone)
• routed: facing backwards, small distance between bases which are not nicely aligned
• unralliable (if losing a melee being tripled): remove the flag as one of the lost stands - this could even be interpreted to represent a captured flag. In all other cases, the stand(s) with the flag(s) should be the last stands remaining on the table. For units without standards, officers and musicians can be removed to show unralliable state.