Comparing Skirmish Rules for the Boshin War
Being a bit of a prolific collector of rules, I thought I'd procrastinate a bit on finishing off various other projects in order to go over the ones I've used for the Boshin War over the last few years. To just lay things out in advance, I think all of these rules work both about equally well as games in their own right and for the Boshin War in particular, even if there are a couple I gravitate more towards than others.
What I will do in this post is run very quickly through each set of rules on its own (on the off-chance that any given reader is unfamiliar, but I suspect that's only likely to be true of one of these rule sets), then cover how they, or supplemental material, cover the Boshin War, or can be made to. At present this post only covers four sets of rules, but that could go up over time as I try adapting other sets for use with the period (I'm already eyeing Test of Honour and Bushidan, for instance).
Sharp Practice (2nd edition) (TooFatLardies, 2016)
Sharp Practice was the only one of these sets of rules that I'd already played beforehand, and it was the existence of an official set of army lists for the period that got me to bite the bullet and branch into the period.
Sharp Practice is a Lardies skirmish game through and through, with a heavy emphasis on chance and friction. Command and control is handled using a pack of cards (or in my case some tokens drawn from a bag), corresponding to specific Leader figures who can in turn activate and/or rally a certain number of units within a certain radius, both of which depend on their Status. Also in the pack is a Tiffin Card which ends the turn, so rarely will all Leaders get to go during a turn. Interspersed with these are Command cards that can be used to pre-emptively activate units or Leaders, to activate certain unit abilities, and to activate 'left over' units after the Tiffin card is drawn.
Movement, as in most Lardies games, is randomised, with units typically moving 2D6 inches. When firing, each firing figure rolls 1D6, with the chance to score a potential hit depending on range and a few other factors, followed by rolls for the effect of those hits depending on cover. In melée, by contrast, the number of dice rolled is instead tied to the number and type of units involved (and whether they are above or below half strength), with sometimes quite substantial modifiers for terrain. All combat and some forms of movement tend to incur Shock, which penalises most forms of activity and can, at high levels, force units to retreat or even rout. Such reverses, as well as killed and wounded Leaders, cause players to have to roll on a 'Bad Things Happen' table to test for the effect this has on their force morale; a force will lose once this reaches 0. As alluded to, there are actually quite a few tables and lists of modifiers to keep track of, which may put some off, but in my experience they're not too hard to deal with.
Sharp Practice, unlike the other rules I've played for this period, offers a lot of latitude for including special objectives, non-player characters and the like, although it's not something I've taken much advantage of in the past, especially as some of this would require umpiring. What I also give Sharp Practice some extra credit for is that it has relatively granular rules for dealing with terrain, which as an avid collector of buildings and foliage is a very helpful touch.
As someone who tends to gravitate to bigger games with more figures, I do find that things can really start to drag if you try and bring much larger forces. The Lardies suggest increasing the Command Card limit for each side, which I think works well, but note that it is probably a bad idea to combine this with adding a Status IV Leader (something that is also an option for expediting play) because it will probably synergise just a bit too strongly with the 'free' activation you can get from four Command Cards. From experience, ten or so Groups with four to eight Leaders per side is still practicable for what I'd term an 'evening-sized' game, but much beyond that and you'd be at what I'd call 'afternoon-sized', with maybe 20 units and 10-12 Leaders per side (and on a larger table, preferably at least 8' by 4') as a pretty hard upper limit.
For the Boshin War in particular, a force list can be found as a free download here, with a standard suggested core force for each of the Imperial and Shogunate armies (technically each has two, but the difference is simply whether the two higher-quality line infantry Groups are armed with muzzleloaders or breechloaders), as well as a couple of extra unit options outside those core forces.
There are some aspects where I find that Sharp Practice doesn't fully scratch the itch for the period, relating mainly to how I feel that it is a set of rules that works a lot better for the musket period than the rifle period. The line/light distinction was one that eroded heavily even during the Napoleonic era, and having super-skirmishers running circles around rigid line troops and blasting them to bits just doesn't really gel with my understanding of 1860s warfare. I don't think that's fundamentally unsolvable, though, and I've been looking at a couple of suggested optional rules in the Lard Magazine (see Simon Walker's 'Pushing the Envelope' in the 2019 issue and/or John Savage's 'In the Age of Rifles' in 2022) which might mitigate most of my prior issues. There's also the fact that rifle-armed troops tend to cost about twice as much, but support points for scenarios are not adjusted accordingly and are all based on the musket era; that's more easily fixed by either halving unit costs (although you may want to correct for differences in core force value), or alternatively doubling the support points given for scenarios, while also doubling the costs of options in the Generic Support List.
In short, if you're after a set of rules with a good deal of of 'fluff', lots of scope for making use of interesting terrain layouts, and a relatively moderate figure requirement, then I'd go with Sharp Practice.
Smooth and Rifled (Dadi & Piombo, 2011)
A rather obscure skirmish game from a somewhat less obscure publisher (D&P are also behind the IMPETVS series of ancients rules), Smooth and Rifled was actually the first set of rules I used for the period (despite originally planning around Sharp Practice) thanks to the fact that it required fewer figures.
There's a lot to commend about these rules, with the caveat that it's quite a mathsy game at times, especially with more troops involved. At the start of each turn, you roll 3D6 for each unit, which generates its pool of Action Points (AP) for the turn, and units can also hold over up to 6 AP from the previous turn; units then activate in descending order of starting AP. Rather than automatically activating as a whole, you instead activate individual figures and/or groups, led by an officer or NCO, within those units (though there is no limit to group size, so you can potentially move the whole unit as a group). Individuals and groups can make up to three actions (move, fire, reload, and/or aim) per turn, with increasing costs for each successive action. Ordinary line troops are usually 1/2/3 (so the first action by an individual costs 1 AP, the second 2, and the third 3), conscripts tend to be 2/2/3, and elites as good as 1/1/2. Groups can be of any size as long as they come from a single unit, and are activated at twice the cost of an individual figure.
Movement is pretty straight-forward, but has some interesting nuances. The first movement action that an individual or group makes is faster than the second or third, and individuals move faster than groups unless moving in column of march. Similarly, individuals performing aimed fire can theoretically score more hits than if they all fired in a group, but AP is rarely likely to be high enough (particularly in large units) to allow this. The result is that the rules create some interesting cost-benefit decisions in terms of how much to spend AP on large group actions versus individuals.
Speaking of firing, this again is a bit of a mathsy thing: when rolling individual fire, you roll 2D6 and need to reach a certain target number depending on range. In a group, you roll 1D6 per figure, give or take a few depending on modifiers, and you divide the total result by the the same range-based target number. On a hit, the figure may be killed or simply Shaken; Shaken men require an individual action to unshake. The result is that once you have firing lines lined up against each other, they can (depending on how you interpret the rules around unshaking men) lose cohesion over time, which I think gives a nice degree of period flavour, particularly for linear warfare.
Melée is simpler and actually quite satisfying, but force morale adds in another layer of maths. Each figure in a unit contributes to its Morale Value (MV); once that falls to one-third of its starting value (rounded up), the unit needs to start taking morale tests every time it suffers casualties, and will rout from the table the first time it fails. In a multi-unit game, one side will break when it suffers 50% losses (including routed figures). This means keeping track of yet more numbers as you work out which units have become fragile and whether you're near your 50% breakpoint.
Unfortunately, because of all this calculation, the rules really do have a limit to how large of a game you can play. A ~1000-point, three-unit-per-side game can just about fit into an evening in a multiplayer setting, but I've found that even five units will be a bit of a stretch for an afternoon (and that's with one of those units being artillery and thus a bit easier to manage).
Moreover, because individual figures have a cost, which can be subjected to a lot of modifiers, army-building can be a slow process, especially without an official calculator app like some more modern games provide. I personally took to simply creating a series of roughly 300-point preset unit profiles that my players could pick and choose from.
A Boshin War force list can be found here, also implicitly covering potential Western intervention forces. While individual unit compositions are not suggested, they do have some suggestions for the number of each given unit that various types of force should be allowed to have. But, as noted, under these rules a game with any more than three units per side will probably take up most of an afternoon.
The rules can definitely be a little clunky, but on the whole I think they work quite well when engaged with on their own terms, and I actually don't have any significant gripes with how they fit the Boshin War setting. The one thing I will note is that I have increased the cost of breechloaders from +5pts to +7pts per figure, because breechloaders come with an implied melée bonus equivalent to equipping a figure with a sword at +2pts (this sounds a little convoluted but makes more sense in context!) and I'm not entirely sure it was intended that halving reloading times should only increase the cost of a typically 17-point figure by just +3pts.
I think these rules are definitely worth having a go at just to see how you like them, because I suspect some people will be pleasantly surprised (even if others will not). It is very much like Sharp Practice in terms of what sort of game it's trying to be (i.e. halfway between a 1:1 skirmish game and grander, brigade-scale formation fighting), but with a lower figure count, a little less fluff, and a little more historicity. The barrier to entry is going to be the amount of maths, which is definitely not for everyone, and I have to confess, it's not for me more than a few times a year!
Ronin (Osprey, 2013)
Craig Woodfield's Ronin, rated by some reputable authorities as one of the best rulesets in the Osprey Games catalogue, caught my eye when I found out that it does in fact have some extra army lists and optional rules for the Bakumatsu period tucked in at the back.
While I have some plans for going deeper into Feudal Japan stuff in the medium term, I have to admit that Ronin is sliding slowly down the list as far as rules go, not because it's a bad set, but rather because I think it has a lot of kinks in it, helpfully ironed out – quite successfully in my opinion – by its successor, En Garde. As of writing, I haven't yet tried adapting the Late Edo optional rules for the latter set yet, so my review here focusses on Ronin, though I will be pointing out differences in En Garde where I think they're relevant. For the most part, the En Garde rule changes can be back-ported with little issue, though for my part I've instead gone the opposite direction, updating the Ronin army and weapon lists to En Garde.
Compared to the funkier command and control in the other rules discussed, Ronin runs on simple alternating activations: the player with Priority activates their first model, the other player activates one of theirs, and so on until everyone has gone. En Garde adds some variety by allowing models with the Commander attribute to perform a group move or shoot activation with themselves and a number of equal or lower Rank models equal to their own Rank value (e.g. a Rank 2 figure with Commander can activate themselves and two other models of Rank 2 or lower), which makes winning the initial Priority roll quite a bit more important than in the earlier rules.
Once movement is done, you enter the Combat Phase, in which all melées are resolved. This is where Ronin's key mechanic, which I understand it shares with GCT Games' Bushido, comes in: each model has a Combat Pool which determines how many Attack and Defence counters it draws; in turn, Attack counters allow models to make attacks, while Defence counters allow them to make Enhanced Defence rolls. Attacks always have 2D6 effect, although in an Enhanced attack you roll 3D6 and discard the lowest; models always defend automatically, but roll only 1D6 normally, and 2D6 if Enhanced. Unless a model has quite a high defensive modifier thanks to armour and/or a higher Fight stat than its opponent (and even then), going into a fight and not taking Defence counters can be quite a risky approach.
While Ronin has a decent amount of complexity, it is largely concentrated in its combat. The remainder of the game is really quite straight-forward, which is in many ways a good thing. You can probably get through two smaller games (100-odd points) in an evening with less experienced players, and three or four mid-sized games (150-200) in an afternoon is probably doable. Troop costs vary depending on the army list, but for a 100-point game using Boshin War forces you're really only looking at about 5-8 figures a side, so it's definitely a game suitable for those with limited budget, space, and/or carrying capacity. Because it is so mechanically straightforward, forces can also scale up a good amount without being enormously unwieldy: 400-500 a side as a multiplayer game would fit comfortably into an afternoon.
The thing that drags down Ronin a bit for the Boshin War is the fact that firing is not particularly satisfying when that is the main difference that distinguishes that latter period. There is a lot of luck involved in getting good hits, without the sort of mind games and strategising that you can have in melée. And, as an aside, there is a bit of a gaffe at one point where the rules claim that the Shinsengumi were a pro-Imperial force in Edo, not a pro-Shogunate force in Kyoto...
I'm not saying to avoid these rules by any means – they are good! – but I personally have ended up with slightly more reservations over time about using them for the Boshin War specifically. I think for things like the early Yakuza or scenarios involving Shinsengumi patrols rooting out anti-Shogunate agitators, you can still have a good deal of fun with these.
The Men Who Would Be Kings (Osprey, 2016)
The chronologically latest in what might be termed Dan Mersey's 'Rampant Series', The Men Who Would Be Kings (or TMWWBK or Kings for short) takes the basic formula of Mersey's medieval rules and reworks them quite successfully for the colonial period. While I picked these up mainly as a source of ideas, they've quite quickly managed to become my mainstay for my Boshin War games.
As Mersey notes in his preambles and other commentaries, he goes by the idea that command and control becomes a lot more fluid and flexible over time. Whereas Lion Rampant requires that all units test to activate, gives each unit type a different target number on 2D6, and (most controversially) causes the turn to end immediately once you fail a test, Kings is a lot more forgiving in that units have certain Free Actions that require no test (e.g. rifle-armed infantry can always Fire), they have only a single Leadership value which is their target for all activations (though this target number is generally higher than for other rules in the series), and a failed activation only ends the unit's turn, not the whole army's. While the turn sequence is a simple IGOUGO, the activation tests mean that units don't all necessarily get to go – especially troublesome if your plans depend on them.
Movement notionally takes place at fixed rates, but there is the option of attempting to move At the Double which grants an extra 6" on top of the base rate. I know there are certain house rules saying that you cannot make two consecutive At the Double actions, or that units can only perform a certain number of such activations in the course of a game, but in my view there is a certain logic to how the free actions and non-free actions work alongside At the Double, so I think the rules are fine as written.
Firing and melée are both handled basically the same way: units roll 1D6 per figure, with a target number to hit (typically 5+ for most purposes). Typically one hit results in one enemy casualty, but long range and cover can increase this number. So a unit attacking a fortified position will need to inflict 2 hits per casualty, while the defenders only need to score 1 hit per casualty on the attacker. Units firing at enemies in hard cover at long range will need a whopping 4 hits to cause a casualty!
When units take casualties, they then need to test to see if they are Pinned as a result; Pinned units must attempt to rally on the next turn, and if they succeed they will cease to be Pinned, but perform no other action that turn. If they fail, they will be forced to retreat half a move, or even rout altogether. Pinning is probably the one mechanic that grates the most, especially for units with low Leadership values who have a hard time avoiding Pinning in the first place, and an equally hard time recovering from it. On the other hand, it adds some layers to your decision-making: units that aren't supported are more likely to end up stuck in a Pinned state until destroyed, creating a risk-reward proposition in terms of how far to keep your force concentrated versus dispersed, especially if a scenario's objectives require that you cover a relatively wide frontage.
Where Kings really gets a lot of its flavour is in the way unit leadership is handled. Before starting, units roll for Leadership quality, usually ranging from 5 to 7 (though Irregular units can sometimes be saddled with an 8). This then becomes the unit's target number for passing any sort of Leadership test. Leaders can, however, also have Traits, of which there is a list of 36, with slightly more of them being negative than positive (and with many of the negative effects being more substantial than the positives). While some effects can be quite crippling and I do sometimes allow re-rolls (e.g. artillery with a Short-Sighted leader who cannot give orders to fire at long range, or shock troops with a Yellow-Bellied leader who cannot order them to charge), it is generally quite interesting having leaders who can quite drastically affect how certain units can be used. A cavalry unit led by a Coward might be more reliant on the carbine than the sabre; a Sporting Umpire in charge of a rifle unit might be quite annoying to deal with if he is unwilling to deliver the coup de grace to a Pinned opponent, and so on.
In terms of scale, Kings armies can vary a lot in size, but my Boshin War forces tend to be in the roughly 60-figure range for the standard 24-point scenarios found in the rulebook. I often scale up to 32 or 36 points while still doing scenario games, while for bigger, 'defeat the enemy' bashes, even 60-point armies could still be pretty manageable on a wide enough table in a multiplayer setting. Unit size can also be tinkered with a bit: the rules suggest a 'Skirmish Kings' variant with half-sized units and that seems to be decently well-liked; for my part I've at times contemplated doing units at 1.5x size, but that might just make Pinned results a bit too frequent to be particularly fun.
Although Kings doesn't cover the Boshin War directly, its unit builder is very flexible, and while I have been tinkering with a period-specific unit list for a while, even the core rules give you a lot to work with. A typical force for me will be built around a core of Regular Infantry downgraded to Obsolete Rifles, which are a pretty good way to represent typical domain troops. Supporting elements can be drawn from all across the troop types in the book, such as Crewed Weapons (both field guns and, in Nagaoka's case, machine guns), cavalry, Irregular Infantry (mainly for 'genuine' irregulars as opposed to non-fully-samurai troops called 'irregulars' like Kiheitai or Yugekitai), and Tribal Infantry (which I use to represent Shinsengumi-style shock troops). The one thing not really covered are 'heavier' shock infantry like lightly-armoured spearmen, but I've found that just taking the movement bonuses off Tribal Infantry in exchange for making them take an extra hit per melée casualty is something that balances out pretty well. One other thing that some may find more of an issue than others is that at Kings' level of abstraction, firearms are distinguished by range, but not rate of fire. While I am happy to say that the Snider and Chassepot are 'Modern' rifles with 24" range while muzzleloading rifles are 'Obsolete' with 18" range, others may prefer to instead distinguish breechloader from muzzleloader troops by increasing their firing dice or their to-hit number.
And it would be remiss not to mention the game's solo rules for pitting a 'colonial' against a 'native' force, which aren't without potential applications: the Aizu campaign in the northern mountains would be a good way to 'play it straight' by pitting a relatively well-armed Imperial column against a mixed Northern Alliance force, while the Second Chōshū Expedition of 1866 flips the script in quite an interesting way by having a heavily traditional Shogunate coalition army harassed by rifle-armed Chōshū guerrillas.
Kings I would characterise as being the easiest game to just pick up and play and tinker around with, as long as you have the forces for it.
Summary
As noted, this is not intended to be the final word, nor even my own final word, and I'm happy to hear any thoughts or suggestions people have from their own experience.
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