300th Post! My Portable Wargame House Rules (and bonus painting preview)

According to Blogger, this is my 300th published post. I must emphasize published. There are as of late 25 unpublished! (it used to be more)

To celebrate, I thought I'd share some of my house rules/house clarifications for Bob Cordery's The Portable Wargame (the Early and Mid-Twentieth Century in particular) that I have been using in my Fictional Citadel campaign. 

Nothing here is ground breaking but perhaps you'll get some use from them or find some clarification in your own thoughts about The Portable Wargame from these ideas.

My Turn Sequence

I wanted to preserve the two player IGO-UGO turn sequence with the simultaneous artillery fire, but make use of the suggested solo method in some way.

To do this, I keep each side's cards separate, so I can still use a die for initiative, and the cards determine the number of units that the side can activate on their half of the turn.

My sequence also means you have to choose whether or not to fire before you know how many total actions you'll be allowed in the turn. It makes for some interesting choices at times.

Preparation

1. Each side counts the number of units they have.
2. Using a deck of cards, one side is assigned Red and the other  Black. 
3. Each side takes out the cards (of both suits of their color) equal to 50% of their unit count (rounded up), one less than that number, and one more than that number.
4. Each side shuffles their cards separately - so the result is one Red deck and one Black deck.

 The turn:

1. Artillery fire if simultaneous
2. The sides dice for initiative, high roll wins.
3. The winner draws a card from * their * initiative deck.
4. The number shown is how many units they may activate. Subtract 1 if they fired artillery this turn.
5. The remainder of the turn sequence is the same as the rules as written with the following exception:
1. A unit may not fire and then move. The sequence is always move first, fire second. It just makes it easier for me to remember to apply the did-not-move bonus when shooting. It also prevents any move-fire-move shenanigans. (As I play solo, I know my opponent wouldn't try that, but for the rest of you there you go)
6. The side which lost the initiative then draws from their own deck and repeats steps 4 and 5. 
7. Check for exhaustion.
8. If both sides are not exhausted, new turn.
   

Machine Guns -

To me,  rolling multiple dice and counting each hit makes them too powerful - scout cars in particular can mow down a lot of infantry. 

So, I Nerfed them - I still roll multiple dice to hit, but they can only ever inflict a loss of one Strength Point (SP) per attack.

Transports 

In the Rules as Written, I think I finally grasp the intent (the transports can be destroyed while the infantry unit carried by them could continue on foot) but I opted from the start not to count their Strength Points at all. 

The impetus for this is me not being sure if the transport is its own unit or not. It doesn't seem like it would be, but then it's stated that the transport and the unit to be loaded have to be in the same space. To me that implies, they can move independently and that implies, tenuously perhaps, the transport gets its own activation. I wanted to do away with all that.

In retrospect, it seems like I should have added their SPs to the unit total - so the units would have longer staying power. Presumably some of the hits damage vehicles then but not the troops or guns transported.

None the less, as played, in my games, the transport and the transported are the same unit - activation applies to the unit as a whole.  They do not add any SP to the totals. You do not need to keep the transport together with the transported unit, but then it's one or the other for the sake of activation.

This will be a drain on your activation as the vehicles do not count for the purpose of the unit total and thus the median Strength Points which determine the values of the cards in the deck.

Troops in Half-tracks - 

While troops may not have made a habit of fighting from the back of the half track, they tended to have machine guns. . Rather than worry about machine guns or rifle fire and such, instead, embarked troops may shoot or engage in close combat at all times. 

That is, they do not need to disembark to shoot or engage in close combat. This is the advantage of the half track.

Troops in Trucks -

• Units in trucks may not shoot.
• Troops embarking or disembarking counts as the entire movement allowance
  
• They may not embark and disembark in the same turn.
• They may not embark and move the transport in the same turn.
•  Only disembarked troops may initiate close combat.
•  Units on trucks may be attacked in close combat. They can defend but suffer -1 on their roll to score a hit against the enemy. This is the risk of driving trucks of troops into the combat zone.
  

Close combat:

When a unit enters a space that puts it adjacent to more than one enemy simultaneously: the unit may choose which enemy to face, and then the other enemy units will gain a flank bonus in close combat. The moving resolves the combats in the order their controlling player chooses.

Artillery:

There are no spotting rules and while I'm OK with this, it just seems a bit much to allow artillery to fire at targets no other unit can see, let alone fire at. 

Since the maximum range for direct fire weapons are 4 spaces, that's the spotting distance. Artillery can only fire at targets they themselves can spot or that a friendly unit can spot.

The rules state that attacking the same target gains a bonus. If what is meant by "target" is a unit, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Not that it's not accurate but that it's not how I conceive of artillery.

I believe it makes more sense to look at the grid space itself as being the target. That might be obvious and maybe that's what was intended by "target" but that wasn't clear to me.

******

These modifications have served me well over the course of my Fictional Citadel campaign and I feel pretty confident they don't break the game. I make no guarantees of course.

And since a blog post without a picture is like peanut butter without jelly (delicious but missing a little something), here's a completely unrelated blurry picture of a concept for one of my Venusian forces:

I'm not done with this one - the whole front of the figure, the beard ,hair, etc. needs black lining - but it is just a proof of concept. The hope is that I'm invoking Greek red-figure pottery (I know, I know, it'd be better if he was a Greek, but they are in the Hoplite tradition according to one article I dug up online). I think en masse it will be a nice effect even with my wonky little painted elephants on the shields. 

Now how to explain it in the fiction? I don't know. It's Venus, things are just weird there.