In Good Company : Some Thoughts

In response to requests for a copy of the rules on my previous post, and in light of my lack of scanner I went to the Lone Warrior site hopeful that perhaps the rules had been uploaded there. To my great surprise, I found that In Good Company is available for download as of March 2019.

I recommend checking out the entire site - especially the downloads of rules and sample articles, and if you aren't already a member, consider it. The price is reasonable and you get four PDF issues of the magazine per year.

In any case, I digress.

My purpose here is just to add some of my thoughts on the rules as I played them the other night, what I liked and what I thought was missing, etc. There are barely three pages of rules, and a  "quick reference sheet", so it should come as no surprise that I might have questions or encounter areas where I felt something could be added.

Modifications:

The first thing you'll notice if you follow the link above is that the rules use hexes for measurement. As I have been reading Lone Warrior on and off for ten or so years, I recalled that Mr. White mentioned on more than one occasion that his table had 1.5" hexes. Knowing that makes converting to inches easy enough.

That said, for my game, while I used the conversion for movement, my table space was a bit spare - I was too lazy to get the plywood out. So, I opted to shorten the weapon ranges to about half of what they are listed as in the rules.

The second is that the game mentions Zulus specifically and I chose to treat that as "native" units - Martians in my case.

Now on to the rules themselves:

The hospital is clearly the most obvious point of interest in the rules. I chose to remove the figures from the table, but you could leave them in place, on their side for example. Removing the figures though did lead to the question, if the entire unit is in the hospital to where do they return?

I chose to have them go to where they last were. With only three units per side, it was easy enough to remember.  But, I think a good case could be made that if the entire unit is in the hospital, then it is out of the game.

Melee worked well enough - there was a chance for back and forth, and I liked that the lancers got +2 on their first attack (At least that's how I interpreted the rules). But I didn't like that cavalry stopped dead even if they defeated the first figure encountered.

For some reason, this doesn't bother me with multi-figure bases (as when I play Neil Thomas's OHW Medieval rules) but it bothered me with individual figures. I imagine I'll have the same problem playing G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T.  In the future I might house rule that cavalry can continue on into the second rank if they defeat the first figure they encounter.

The machine gun jamming on two ones was a nice touch and happened in my game on the first attempt to fire the gun. I assumed the roll to un-jam replaces the roll to shoot (and  no movement allowed) but it never came up as the crew was overrun shortly after.

Now, with three-ish pages of rules, obviously not every eventuality is covered.  Morale is missing and there are no way to differentiate troop quality explicitly defined. However, as I'll mention in a bit, there is a way to account for this rather easily.

Perhaps my favorite part of these rules and something I will try with G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. is that it uses multiple cards per unit. For a small game, this means the deck still has some size and shuffling feels like you're actually doing something. In comparison, G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. decks for a game this size are too small to really feel like you'll be able to mix up the cards enough to not know which is which.

It should be obvious (but wasn't to me until I thought about it), but you can simply adjust the cards up or down to reflect leadership / morale / troop experience. Say, 1 card for green infantry, 3 cards for veterans and so on. It requires no changes to the rules otherwise and allows for better units to possibly take more actions per turn, although not guaranteed, of course, because of the Stop card.