Post
by quindia » Mon May 06, 2013 11:59 pm
Sorry, gents... Haven't check in a few days.
I've never read Maurice - when I'm writing I actively avoid other new rule sets - I have enough old ones rattling around in my brain. It is very easy to see something new and think 'hey that works with my game'. Depending on the bits you end up with, your rules may start to resemble the inspiration so closely that you might as well have not bothered writing your own rule. I guess my rambling point is that I don't know how cards work in Maurice!
The current variation of the rules that are publicly available are design for 5-10 units, with 2-3 brigadiers, and a C-in-C per side. Yes, it is possible that a unit is stuck for an entire game, but at this scale it is very unlikely, especially if you use your commanders properly... You are not going to go many turns without drawing a unit, their brigadier, or the C-in-C. Players are sometimes struck by the other extreme - you can activate one unit three times in a turn if you are lucky!
But what then? You likely have one enthusiastic unit far ahead of the rest of your line and possibly now out of command range (or the rest of the brigade is out of command range and, yes, you may be at the mercy of the unit cards).
As to the horror stories of a unit not moving for an entire game, that might be more realistic than our units gleefully marching into the enemy guns. For me part of the fun of card driven gamers is coming up with the story to explain the run of cards. Have a unit standing around for three or four turns? Maybe the colonel's true loyalties lie with the other side. Brigadier's card seem scarce? He's been at the bottle again. A horse regiment boldly surges forward and then muddles around in charge range while being shot to pieces? They became mired in a hidden bog! The after action reports of these kinds of encounters read far more like a battle than the precision maneuvers some rules allow.
The published version of the game will have rules for larger games with brigade cards in addition to unit cards, rules for retaining cards in a hand rather than playing them as the come up, and rules for ignoring the cards altogether! The published version of the game is still a ways down the schedule, but one of these days...