Pancratist

I dont often write about rules, because I am not really that kind of gamer. I paint the figures and will be happy whenever there is an opportunity to put them on the table – and I will try any rules set at least once! But precisely for that reason, I tend to like simple rules sets which enable you to play a game in a few hours. This is the time frame that we are restricted to, and we know from experience that many a game has been ruined by constantly flipping through a poorly structured rulebook. Also, there are many rules sets for wargaming the Napoleonic period. Some may see this as a sign that this hobby is flourishing. That may partly be true, but sometimes it seems to me that there is almost as many rules sets as there are players (at least in a country like Sweden, where I live). This is not a good thing for players, I think, as many find it hard enough to find a group who play as it is.

Now all this makes the recent effort from renowned games designer Jervis Johnson and miniature makers extraordinaire, the Perry brothers, very interesting. Before you even look at the rules themselves, there are many advantages with the Valour & Fortitude set of rules, released in 2022 and then revised for a second edition in 2023.

To me, this is promising in itself. As anyone reading this blog will be aware, Perry miniatures are one of my favorites figure manufacturers. Less obvious perhaps is that Jervis Johnson has designed a number of games that have been particular favorites of mine: the second edition of Blood Bowl (1994) was the first Games Workshop game I really enjoyed playing, and the 2004 edition of the Epic game (Epic Armageddon) was likewise a very good rules set (I never really played it back then, but have tried it out more recently). Ironically, both games, by many, including Johnson himself, regarded as some of GW:s best, were soon phased out by the company. Probably because they didnt sell enough models I would imagine. Blood Bowl is now back however, and the current rules are the same as the 1994 edition with a few small alterations. Epic has also been revived recently, but in that case the game is quite different, which is a shame. However, it is quite clear that Warlord Games’ Bolt Action (2012) was heavily inspired by the Epic Armageddon rules. The basic mechanic for activation, shooting, and close combat is the same, with the addition of the dice bag, which provides more unpredictability.

To return to the V&F rules, they do also have some intrinsic advantages. First of all, the rules themselves, including army lists and scenarios, are free. They can be downloaded from the Perry miniatures website, right here: https://www.perry-miniatures.com/valour-fortitude/. This is great in itself, and it will likely attract many who paint and collect Perry miniatures to the game – perhaps even reconcile some of the differences dividing players of the major Napoleonics rules sets, so that more people can come together and actually play some games rather than discuss which rules set is the best…

Second, the leading principle behind these rules is that they are designed to be simple and concise. The basic rules fit on four pages. Admittedly these are quite densely packed pages, but nonetheless, they do meet the objective: the rules are simple, in a very good way. In many ways they work as a tweaked and streamlined version of the Black Powder rules (written by Jervis Johnson & Rick Priestly). One example of the simplification is that shooting and close combat attacks have been condensed into one and the same mechanic. You use the same basic procedure for attacks, with somewhat different modifiers.

As with Black Powder, units and brigades will be quite fragile. Shooting and close combat will both soon wear down battalions, and as soon as battalions start to route, the whole brigade will be in trouble. This happens through valour and fortitude tests, hence the name. And for all casualities you accrue over the level that your troops can take, you will be required to take a test. Once they start piling up, you will take multiple successive tests, making it more and more likely that you will fail. In a recent test game we played, this seemed to work well. The game was decided after a few turns and a somewhat over-optimistic offensive move on my part. The attacking troops were just too few in number and soon routed.

Another interesting feature, which is also an innovation compared to Black Powder, is the fate cards. Using regular playing cards, each player gets a deck of 13 cards of a particular color. The army lists will then tell you what effect each card has, and these will partly be generic, and partly specific to the nation that you play. For instance a card may allow you to re-roll a morale test or a to-hit roll in an attack, or it may make your opponents activation of units more difficult.

Command is handled in a way that is similar to Black Powder. Your side will have a commander in chief in command of the whole army, and a number of brigades consisting of several individual units (battalions of infantry, squadrons of cavalry, artillery pieces, etc), each commanded by a brigade commander. The brigades are activated one at a time. Activating a brigade has a greater chance of success than, for example, an order test in Black Powder. But the chance will decrease as the morale of your brigade deteriorates and units within the brigade will be more difficult to command if they are far away from the commander.

Furthermore, the Valour & Fortitude rules are obviously designed to be flexible, encouraging people to tinker with the rules in whatever way suits them and the particular style, period or campaign they like to play. The website already has generic army lists and points values tables available, so that one can create ones on preferred lists. In the same way, there are suggestions on how to adapt distances for those of us who have more normal sized tables and smaller units (the Perrys of course tending to play on surfaces of 3×6 meters and the like, with thousands of figures). The size of units can be adapted in different ways: either you used the sizes in the rulebook and play some units as “understrength” (i e half as many figures), or you just use whatever size units you have, and adapt the rules after that. The army lists as they are provided on the website give a range, so that a standard line infantry unit is 24-36 figures, with an understrength unit consequently being 12-18.

One significant difference from many other rules sets is the way attacks are handled. As I mentioned above, shooting and close combat are both basically handled in the same way. You pick a target and roll the number of dice appropriate for the units that is attacking. So far everything is like in any other wargame. However, the difference lies in how multiple attacks are handled. If you want to attack the same target unit with several different units from your own side, additional units just add dice to the attack rather than attack separately. They add “fire support”, “melee support” or “brigade support”, depending on the situation. Obviously, once you get the hang of this, it contributes to the speed of the game. Also, it can make “ganging up” less effective, which is probably intentional. In pre-modern linear warfare the normal situation would be that one battalion from either side lined up face to face with one another and exchanged fire until one side had enough.