Discussion Around Review of Et Sans Résultat

A couple of weeks ago I posted a report of our play-test of these rules. This has generated a bit of discussion in the comments on this blog. It was also picked up in a discussion on "The Miniatures Page".

I decided to weigh-in, somewhat hesitantly, knowing the reputation of that forum for some fairly unsavoury exchanges, particularly when compared with the respectful comments, discussions and critique that we experience amongst our wargaming bloggers. I have been pleasantly surprised and have entered into a bit of a detailed, forthright 'discussion' with one Bill Haggart (who goes by McLaddie), who seems to have been a play-tester.

If you are interested in reading a bit more about these rules and resulting discussion around interpretation and expectations of wargames rules, then you may wish to look at the discussion thread.

One of the reasons that we knew that these rules were not for us, irrespective of the outcome of our review, was the large scale at which they operate. Here is a direct comparison of the table at the beginning of Quatre Bras using Et Sans Résultat (above) and our earlier version of the same game (below). It needs to be noted, once again, that the divisions in the game for Et Sans Résultat game are twice as far apart as they should be (due to the scale at which our terrain was set-up compared to that of those rules), but the difference in density of figures is still there--at the same stage of a game in which there are few figures on the table to begin with.