Progress report about my Portable Belle Époque Wargame rules

Whilst I was on my recent cruise, I began drafting some period-specific rules for my Belle Époque project.

I find that the days when the ship is sailing from one port-of-call to another are ideal for me to write. I don't have to worry about refreshments (food and drink is available for almost twenty-four hours per day!) and there are few things to distract me ... unless I want to be distracted! (On this cruise I was distracted by going to the excellent guest speaker's talks and the hilarious 'radio play' staged by the entertainment team.)

By the time we reached Cadiz, I had produced almost a dozen A4-sized pages of 10pt text that included several ideas that I wanted to include in the rules ... but when I re-read what I had written when we were on our way between Cadiz and Ibiza, I realised that it was rather verbose and the new mechanisms I had used were not just over-complicated but also extremely clunky!

I chose to start again ... and almost repeated the same mistakes! In the end, I decided that rather than start from scratch, I would base my 'new' rules on THE GATLING'S JAMMED rules that are in THE PORTABLE COLONIAL WARGAME book.

These use units of figures mounted on 40mm wide bases (i.e. standard DBA/HOTT bases for 15mm figures) on a grid of 50mm squares or similar-sized hexes (e.g. the terrain boards that comes with MEMOIR ‘44/BATTLE CRY).

At present, the significant changes I have made are as follows:

• Machine guns a treated like artillery and have their own fire phase.
• The number of units a general can activate each turn is subject to a degree of randomness that depends upon their ability.
• A timescale has been introduced.

I am hoping that I will get the present draft of the rules finished by the middle of next week ... and then I can begin thinking about playtesting them.