Freedom and Tyranny: Mass Skirmish American Civil War wargame rules

Freedom & Tyranny is a set of wargame rules born out of a re-examination of our massed skirmish wargame rules set Sacre Bleu, which has been very successful and popular with players.

We’ve streamlined and deepened the system, and after much play testing created a series of rule sets which share common core mechanisms heavily tweaked for different periods. These make up our Streamlined Play Rules Series.

We’ve provided different ways of choosing your wargame armies or forces, and numerous different ways to set up the game to give good variety.

Weather features, as do rousing speeches (!), and heroes take on an uncanny cinematic ability to survive in situations where lesser mortals would fall by the dozen.

Command and control is covered, but as with all the mechanisms the emphasis is on keeping things simple during game play. With that in mind the means of establishing hits when shooting and in close combat is deceptively simple, once you get the hang of it.

Smoke can interfere and buildings can collapse, morale tests are straightforward, but can result in lengthy or short routs, while most forms of cover bolster the chance of soldiers standing their ground, again while avoiding complexity. In fact we found making everything complicated would be really easy to achieve, simplifying things was far harder to do, but through our development process we believe this has finally been achieved.

As with Sacre Bleu, our most controversial decision is to make it possible that one side might be able to act, if very lucky, several times in a row before an enemy can. Taken at face value this seems illogical, unfair and crazy, and the same goes for all shooting, movement and close combat.

War, however, is not fair, and can be illogical, unfair, and crazy!

In practice this system allows reality to be reflected rather better than normal wargame rules can manage.

In real actions we have situations where troops are frenetic in their activity, shooting for a short period like there’s no tomorrow (which for some there won’t be) while the other side crouches down and takes it, barely letting off a bullet. Equally one side can get the local initiative in a melee, putting the enemy on the back foot and reducing them to defending for a time. This doesn’t happen all the time, but can, and the game system reflects this. The alternative was to use some sort of pinning system, but they only provide a basis for not shooting back immediately if taking a lot of suppressing fire from an enemy. Real life is far more random than that; perhaps the men aren’t shooting back yet because their commanding officer has told them to wait until they see the whites of the enemies’ eyes? He could be wrong to do so, but in battle it happens a lot. Then again, it might be the men were caught with too few bullets, or the cartridges are too damp from exposure in the night, or they just need some more bringing up or distributing among members of their u