Perhaps seen as an old school ruleset (which brings a certain charm of its own), Rapid Fire has just been one of those systems that has been solid enough to remain popular for more than 25 years.

It stays with a predominantly IGOUGO sequence of play, while it could be argued that these days, the modern gamer is drawn to something a bit more inter-active or unpredictable, such as variable unit activation. 

It has recently had a shot in the arm through its newest version of the rules …. ‘Reloaded’, which is a more streamlined version of the original, making play a little slicker.  

The Reloaded basic rules cost just a fiver and come in a lovely little A5 16 page booklet and there are now a growing number of similar A5 supplements, containing mainly scenarios, that are just a pleasure to own. 

The picture to the left shows the booklet art that gives us four Canadian actions, each presented for a helpful 6x4 table in the 20mm scale, so smaller scales can keep the same measurements or use a smaller table.

The most recent release covers four battles in north west Europe involving the Sherman Rangers Yeomanary called ‘Brothers in Armour’, inspired and developed in association by Tom Holland and his book ‘Brothers in Arms’.

I have three sets of my own rules, each of which are fairly well developed and quite tight. 

Into Action -  is a WWII tactical set. Each base is a rifle section, a support weapon or an individual vehicle. A game with typically see a company of infantry on a side with support, so perhaps just two or three vehicles.

They use a game clock, so each turn 2D6 are rolled and the ‘game clock’ is advanced by that many minutes. The clock will determine the end of the game and also the point at which any reinforcements etc arrive.

For the infantry, the first hit pins them. A pinned unit that is then hit is removed from play. Units can recover from a pin on a test, doing better if they are in cover!

I like to think that some care has been taken with the ‘to hit’ and penetration engine for armour and that outcomes are not too out of wack from our gaming of reality. 

Command and control is present and a morale clock ticks downwards as casualties and losses occur. When the clock hits zero, everything on that side tests and if failing are forced to retire. This can cause attacks to fizzle out and disrupt even the best looking defensive lines, creating both opportunities and disappointment.

The picture above is an oil painting that I did some years ago to give me a cover for the rules that didn’t infringe any copyright.

Eagles at Quatre Bras - is of course my Napoleonic set. It started out life quite different and much simpler than the current version,  but I have tried to merge the engines of these rules and my ACW rules, which were more advanced and I am happy with the transition.

In my games, cavalry do not have high movement rates. I don’t think they spent forever dashing around the field, so it is only when they charge that you see a movement enhancement, plus once per game, they can dash off ‘somewhere’!

Units cannot charge on two consecutive turns …. Things with lungs need a breather between bouts of dynamic activity.

Units take losses which after a while will degrade them. Then there comes a point when they need to test each turn due to excess loss and lack of cohesion, failed tests cause the unit to fall back and take a further loss.

It all rather develops a momentum of its own. So units generally have an offensive ability, then tend to be more happy defending and then start to fall back and want to be somewhere else, where there are fewer musket balls flying around!

Two Flags - One Nation - these are my ACW rules and have probably been around the longest. All that has been said of Eagles at QB can be said here. 

We obviously have some longer weapon ranges and units will tend to firefight rather than close for combat unless the enemy looks like they are in the mood for giving ground through losses and disorder. Horses certainly do not want to move against all that ranged firepower.

Various activity adds a disorder counter to a unit and these accrue, though regardless of how many counters you have you still only pay the penalty of simply being disordered. Where all the extra disorder matters is in the phase that the unit rolls to lose its disorder, obviously the more disorder a unit has, the harder it is to lose it all in one go, so in effect, we might see a unit that is ‘very’ disordered compared to one that is less so.

The skirmish rules are less involved than with the napoleonic set as virtually all units can make use of open type order, though the ability of units to both change formation and move in the same turn is subject to testing of unit ‘Capability’.

There are many instances in the rules of testing capability and at times I have wondered whether the mechanic relies upon too many die rolls, but as units degrade through loss, these tests become more critical and in my view help with the narrative of the game.

The engine used to have a game clock, but it wasn’t so effective here. Too many things defaulted to 15 minutes time slots and administratively it just made more sense to have traditional game turns based around those 15 minutes.

I have had one copy of all three rule books properly printed at a ‘print on demand’ service so that I am gaming with a ‘proper’ rule book and that adds a nice touch. Notes are added to these, but these days there is less red ink going onto those pages after each play, so they must be getting tighter. Once there are too many notes, I get a new version printed off - a rather luxurious thing to do, but why not :-)

These rules from the Pen of Jervis Johnson are a free downloadable set from the Perry Miniatures website.

Jervis was an author of the Black Powder rules and V&F came about because his gaming group wanted an easy four page fast play system for big games at game conventions, so that games would actually move along.

They have been refined over the past couple of years and it is the authors view that the game engine is stable enough to cover a wide range of periods and that it is the army lists themselves that will drive the period flavour.

They started with Napoleonic lists and have already explanded to cover ACW, the Franco-Prussia war and have gone back as far as the English Civil War, so there is plenty of potential here.

Part of the flavour also comes from a Fate Deck, built from ordinary playing cards (the image above is from my Napoleonic playing card set) and this brings some chaos / random events to play.

I play the rules with two tweaks. Firstly using my Epic scale figures, I dropped all measurements to ⅔ and that looked right and seemed to work rather well.

Secondly, I don’t like card play that builds up a ‘hand to be played’ with the inevitable ‘Gotcha’ type moments that fall out of that. I do however like the Random Event nature of the cards so I kept them in the game, but instead of allowing a hand to build up, in the Fate Phase, the next card is simply turned and played by the player that turn - or lost! It seems to work fine.

I quite like the Double Move action as that does bring the sides into closer contact much faster and allows the game to get going properly. I also like the support rules that allow nearby unit to contribute to a units fighting strength, both for firing and melee. It feels a sensible half way house from allowing units to simply gang up.

I found the Rally rules to be suuitably tame and more often than not will mainly be allowing units to recover enough strength back that they stop being shaken. It feels natural to do this when units consolidate a position that they have just taken, as they catch their breath and I suppose in part, it reflects re-organising the ranks and getting some cohesion back.

I do like that the system makes the action across the table feel like it is being conducted by separate brigades, so that even on a small table there is a sense of several different points of crisis emerging for one side or the other.

As the author of Black Powder, it is very interesting to see Mr. Johnson's evolution of thinking in these rules, particularly in keeping unit fire power very separate from then conducting Actions.