There's a bit of a thing going around the Portable Wargame community at the moment for the 3 x 3 concept. This was originally devised by Mark Cordone at the start of the year, but has rapidly captured the imagination of players, and is regularly appearing in a number of the blogs I follow and, obviously, the Portable Wargame Facebook group.
The original aim was to produce a game which could be set up and played in under 30 minutes, with an actual playtime of 15 minutes or under, but which still provided some entertainment and decision-making. Bob Corderey has outlined the early history of the concept in THIS BLOG POST, and his blog contains more examples of the genre.
Inevitably I decided I should have a go. A couple of weeks ago I tried a couple of set-ups with my ECW armies in order to get used to teh concepts; not really full games, but just moving things around and rolling dice in order to get a feel for mechanisms. The thing is that like most Portable Wargame stuff, you're dealing with a toolkit, and how you choose to use it is up to you. People have different ways of dealing with shooting, close combat, terrain, and victory conditions, and that's to be expected when they're all using the game for different historical periods and different scales. One of my personal favourites is the idea of fighting a large battle, such as Waterloo, in a series of linked 3 x 3 vignettes, each focusing on a particular phase of the battle.
Anyway I got a few ideas in my head, and yesterday felt ready to set up a 'proper' game or two. The ECW armies have gone back into the box since I was fiddling with them, but my Liberation armies are out on the table, so I used them. The 3 x 3 game basically uses six units per side (shades of OHW there), set up on a 3 x 3 grid, although each side also has a reserve area at the back of the grid.
I used four infantry and two cavalry per side, and diced for deployments (just to keep it interesting). The Patriots massed their cavalry on their right flank, and kept some infantry in reserve, whilst the Royalists split their cavalry on the flanks and had infantry across the line.
I only took one photo; here's the battle partway through, taken from behind the Patriot lines:
As you can see, I dispensed with a grid. The files are easy to see, and once the game got going I marked the three 'ranks' with the rocks you can see to the right of the picture.
I based the rules loosely on my ECW mechanisms, but units only take two hits.
Eventually, after a shaky start which saw their infantry close to collapse, the Patriots secured a victory with their cavalry, breaking through to the Royalist baseline and holding position against a counter-attack from the reserve.
And what of the game? Truth to tell it didn't do a lot for me at this stage. It took me around 30 minutes to play (I had some distractions, it's true), but I didn't feel the rules clicked for me. Don't get me wrong; I like the concept, and I think it has legs. It's just at the moment I can't get the implementation to sit right in my head in a way that excites me. A lot of the discussion in the group about it revolves around the difference between shooting and close combat, and how they are represented. In addition I found the way I run continuing combats - they only happen if an activation is spent to initiate them - didn't feel right here, and I may need to resort to the idea that combat happens even if a unit is not activated.
For now it's something to think about and come back to at a later date.
Still, it's another game to add to my 52 Games project.
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