Chainmail: My First Engagement

  Last week I attended North Texas RPG Con, and it was a much-needed breath of freedom and return to gaming in person.  NT is a big family, and we all revel in the love of old-school games.  This year I got to play three games for the first time that I had never before tried: Champions 4th Edition, Gamma World 1st Edition, and Chainmail.  I thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of these games, but I felt like I needed to write my feelings on Chainmail as it is a foundational piece of the original 1974 D&D rules.

  Thanks to the debacle that was RPG Labs and the ill-fated video series I was involved with, I have played 1974 D&D using the Chainmail combat tables.  It was extremely illuminating to my understanding of where many of our terms and mechanics come from.  But I'd yet to actually throw down some miniatures and play out a battle using Chainmail.  Our referee was Paul Stormberg, who deftly explained the basics and gave us the choice of three armies - Europeans, Mongols, and... I can't remember because they didn't get chosen.  My was teamed with James and his daughter Neve, who we quickly named our General.  We grabbed the Mongol army.  Our opponents, the Europeans, were Robin, David, and Scott.

  Each team had 100 points with which to build our forces.  We chose two units of five archer figurines, a unit of five horse archers (an option not available to our European enemies), a unit of five medium cavalry, and a unit of heavy infantry.

Our opponents had two units not available to us: a pair of knights, much higher quality fighters than our infantry, and a 10-figure unit of crossbowmen.  These gave us beaucoup trouble, as you'll see here in a moment.  After unit selection  came terrain.  Paul had us draw four random terrain features from a deck for each side of the map, and drew the indicated features onto the battlemat with a wet-erase.  We ended up with a battlefield that had two hills facing one another on the eastern end, relatively flat terrain through the middle, and a hill opposing a marsh on the western end.  Center-right on our side was a ditch Paul ruled we could use to conceal troops- but they could only exit into the center of the map, northward.

General Neve listened to her advisors, and decided to conceal our horse archers in the arroyo, our medium horse behind the hill, and our archers just beneath the summit so they could deploy to the northern face of the hill and take advantage of the range bonus they would get from elevation.  Once we deployed (or didn't, as none of our troops were visible) the European team deployed.  The odd thing is, we were able to deploy hidden units, yet we were somehow the attacker...  Anyway...

The Europeans send their medium horse off to their right flank, but brought the bulk of their force face-to-face with our army holding the hill.  Their infantry charged, and we cut them to pieces with concentrated arrow fire.  That was the best result we got for the entire engagement, for it was at this juncture our opponents realized their crossbowmen outranged our archers by several inches.  They moved up and starting showering us with arrows.

At this point, we revealed our horse units, and charged with our infantry.  The idea was that the crossbowmen would have to split fire or choose one or the other threat to deal with.  They countercharged with their heavy horse, and our medium horse met them after some archery shenanigans.  Our infantry was reduced to two figures, who then refused to fail a morale check and fought to the death.  Our horse archers did respectable damage with their bows, but got in too close and were engaged in  melee by the European medium horse.  The force mismatch in both cavalry battles meant our cav didn't last too long.  Victory: Europeans.  But General Neve's forces did quite a bit of damage before accepting defeat.

So, now that I've played Chainmail, how do I feel about it?

This game is definitely an artifact of it's time.  There are many charts and tables, and different mechanics for different troop types and engagements.  This makes it difficult to get a hang of the game for a first-timer.  I imagine if I played it more often, I'd get the hang of it.  Sometimes the results were static, and sometimes random.  That was interesting, and made me want to look closer at the troop versus troop tables to see if there were combinations that offered a guaranteed disadvantage.  Medium Horse versus Heavy was brutal, as was Light Horse versus Medium.  Archery was suitably brutal, and the crossbows trading the ability to fire twice in a turn (once as a reaction and once on their fire phase) for range was certainly a compelling choice.

I found the amount of movement cavalry had to sacrifice to change direction extremely restrictive.  1/4 move for up to 45 degrees, 1/2 move for 46 to 90, and all movement for 180 degrees.  This seemed overly restrictive given the ranges of our cavalry on both sides, and had a major effect on the employment of the cavalry by the combatants.

So... would I play it again?  Sure.  Especially if I was playing with others who are exploring it for the historical context.  If I am going to play a miniatures game for its own sake, this would probably not be my first choice of rules set.  But it was enjoyable, and informed my feel for what people were playing as our hobby dawned.