Short first impression review of Fire and Fury

Hello.

I got my two fire and fury books last week, to my suprise the regimental version is actualy hardback, it was a nice suprise.

Both books start with a very thurogh intro to wargaming in general, talks about how to buy figures, other ready painted or in bare metal, talks about basing ect.

Also both books have lots of color photoes, and plenty of plates to show exampels.

The big diffrences are ofcourse fire and fury is army sized games, while regimental fire and fury is basicly a ACW version of the classic napoleonic division sized games.

With the army sized games, there is no problem, one reb and one fed army fight eachother.

With the regimental fire and fury, it gets a little more complicated. Since the Confederate and Union armies are quite diffrent at the lower levles.

The rules says for the regimental game, that you should start to collect a union corps or a confederate division. This is ofcourse becasue the union corps really aren't propper corps in the napleonic sense, A Napoleoinc corps start at 10 000ish soldiers and dosn't stop untill you reach 45 000, while a Union corps was often less then 6000, I've seen them under 4000.

6000 is a small napoleonic division, 4000 is actualy not much more then a big napoleonic brigade.

But as long as a union corps and confederate division is more or less balanced it shouldn't be that big of a deal, the only real effect is that if you play larger games, you might need 2-3 union corps to a single confed corps, which just means the union is going to have quite a few more generals running around.

I have mostly read the regimental version, only now have I started on the orignal fire and fury. I plan on using the same figures for both rules, it's quite simple, in a regimental game a single 6 figure base is 80 soldiers, with the army game, each base is 200 soliers. The only diffrence is that with my army game, I'm going to have alot of exess command stands.

Becasue with regimental I'm going to be using 1 command base with 2-6 infantry base.

But with army game, I'm going to be using 1 command base pr. mabye 8 to 17.

Which means alot of command bases over. But thats not a real problem.

The rules are actualy very elegant. Both rules use the same play sequence.

First you have the manouve face, were you "active" units, first I had real problem with the tables given, they were confusing to me, but I'm a little dim when it comes to lists. Luckely the next 2-3 pages gives a very through explenation of the lists, the rules are full of exampeles, so really after reading the rules just once, you have a good idea of how they work.

I must also say I love how "charges/mele" is done in these rules, thats one of my biggest gripes with Napoleoinc rules, charging is such a chore, first you declear, then you do defencive fire, then you have to check if the chargers have enough moral to charge home.

I think it's very over the top complicated, infact I find chargeing in some Napoleonic rules so tiresom I just en up shooting at the enemy, it's not worth initiating a charge.

But in these rules it's so simple, charge, get shot at, depending on how good the dice are, you either charge home or not, it's that simple. No need for alot of more dicing.

And while the rules are simple they are not SIMPLE! in Napoleonic rules, you basicly have only one weapon for the infantry, the musket, some rules have rules for rifles, but since most rifle armed troops are skirmishes, it's rearly an issue in gameplay.

But here you have so many small arms, Rifled musket, smoothbore musket, rifled carbine, repeater, breachloader, even low qualiry rifled muskets are included. Hell even buck and ball ammo for the smothbore muskets are included in special shooting circumstances.

I must say the rules are very nice, it will be fun to try em out, it will be cool to play a regimental game, then change to a army sized game, with very little diffrence, if you can play one version of the rules, you can play both.