Our club has now played several games with this ruleset adapted to the Finnish war of 1808-1809 by the book's author and although not originally designed for napoleonics, it has performed its purpose.
Since I had a free weekend and the house to myself, I invited a couple of friends over to test out the game in a TYW setting.
I created a Scottish infantry 20 pts army (regimental gun, 2 x pike, 2 x shot) and a Swedish cavalry 20 pts army (3 x gallopers, 4 x commanded shot) for myself. One opponent made an army with cuirassiers, field gun and 1 pike + shot and the other 2 dragoons, 2 pike and 1 shot.
We played the Gå på - scenario as it was straightforward for new players and also well adapted for multiplayer games.
The game began with my swedes trying a flanking assault with the cavalry and the scots taking the middle, whereas the opponent tried to flank me with his dragoons.
I didn't take enough pictures to make a turn-by-turn report, so I'll concentrate how the rules performed.
First of all, the rules are incredibly easy to grasp and the random turnover element seems to work. I also like how accumulating casualties tend to crumble the possibilities of a unit rallying.
What I don't like is the double-6/double-1 rule, which tends to happen somehow every other turn and the results tend to be illogical and random. Compared to the Black Powder family of games, blunders happen more often and their effects tend to be worse (including s 1/6 chance of you losing a unit in full strenght). You need to have the blunder tables page bookmarked if you intend to play this game.
Also the officer's background and traits table is a little too random for my liking - and the possibility to acquire several traits doing a canpaigb more or less randomly doesn't reallu help with "fleshing out your character".
Still, the game plays very fast and if you want to play a quick game with friends who also have a busy schedulr, TPL certainly fills that niche.Don't go expecting high levels of historical accuracy though... and especially for large-battle period like TYW it's hard to adapt it to actual historical conflicts (as it is a skitmish game).
I have the Battle of Breitenfeld tomorrow usinh Pike & Shotte rules. I wonder how that will compare.
