18TH CENTURY AMERICAN:
Washington's Wars

Any morale system that allows units to hang around until 100% casualties is way off the mark as far as realism is concerned. Units do fail morale checks, but look at the morale failure tables. There is only a 33% chance of routing after losing melee, regardless of how bad you've been beaten. The "Other Failed Morale" table has no rout result, the worst being a retreat disordered for 2 turns. Consequently, in the 2 games I've played using these rules, although units have failed morale tests, the result of that failure has meant the unit has hung around for more punishment. This could easily be remedied by modifiers to the roll on the morale failure tables, but in such a well-produced set of rules you would have expected some consideration would have been given to this anomaly. Of course, I could be missing something!

I'm personally looking forward to trying Patriots and Loyalists (written by Scott Holder with assistance from Arty Conliffe).

I feel the rules are generally sound and give a good game once the mechanics are fully understood. I have only used the rules twice and so I am still in the playtesting stage, but there are a few tings that I would question:

• American militia seem to have a better fire factor than British line in most situation. I am not underestimating the Americans' ability to handle firearms, but their ability in a battle situation to maintain the rate of fire - especially in the war's early years. (I raise this even though I prefer to play the American side!)
• The "mass" formation seems to be of limited value, and there appears to be no great benefit to troops using it.

The rules are very playable, and I feel that if the spirit of the players matches the spirit of the rules, then most queries can be sorted out. The rules are quite elastic, which I feel is a positive thing.