One Hour Wargmes Medieval : Changes for Next time

As I was clicking around reading blogs (I check for people posting new stuff several times a day and when that fails, I just start looking at "most popular posts" and following links), I found that  Alex addressed many of  the grey areas in the OHW Medieval rules in a post on his Spear to Strife blog in 2017, followed by a version of the rules featuring his own clarifications integrated into them.

Image from Friday night's battle. I use three colors of dice - green for the first 6 hits, yellow for the second 6 hits, and red for the last 3.

The biggest thing that was bothering me was what constitutes contact for melee purposes. I have been saying any contact at all, even a corner on the flank edge for example, would be enough for the devastating flank bonus. But even as I ruled that was the case, a corner contacting an edge didn't visually look enough like charge into melee and didn't sit right with me.

Having read Alex's posts and thought about it a bit more (and given my use of 4" square bases) I will use contact/overlap-with-half of the edge (he suggest 3" in his version of NT's rules linked above and that's probably better, but I'll start with half, or 2" in my case)  as indicative of melee being reached. Thus, a corner making contact alone would not be enough, nor would contact with the enemy's corner alone.

I can recall clearly instances where this would have slowed the destruction, as units would have had to moved to a better position before they charged into an enemy's flank, or they may even have lost the flank advantage entirely, as the enemy could have gained an opportunity to rotate to meet the threat. Would this have changed the outcome of  either game? I don't know.

His use of just two movement rates will be taken wholesale into my game.

There's a typo in the Kindle edition I have, where  the movement rates for the Medieval rules reflect the unit types of an earlier rule set. So, infantry, skirmishers and warband, and cavalry are given rates rather than men-at-arms, archers, knights, and levies, and you're left to figure out which should get what. I was allowing levies 9" but had no particular justification (remember, the bulk of what I know of the history for this period, comes from Neil Thomas's chapter preceding the rules).

Both of these will eliminate some grey areas that took me out of the game and into the rulebook (which, seems silly given how few pages the rules are).