From my viewpoint the English Civil War is a gaming period filled with colour and endless scenario potential, from the simple skirmish right through to full scale battles. The problem is that while there have been a plethora of rules none have really captured the essence of the period, particularly the ratio of pike to shot.

The Parliamentarian Army, With Pike and Shot on their right, musketeers and Forlorn Hopes in the centre and Cavalry on the left.

“For King and Parliament” have broken that mold. Base on their ancient set of rules “To the Strongest”, with a card driven movement system (we use the D10 variant) they work well for the period. “To the strongest” has never been a favourite system for me, not because there was anything wrong with it but more because I think there are better rules out there for ancient gaming.

A rather blurry pic of the Royalist centre consisting of Pike and shot and the Lifeguard.

Despite this, For King and Parliament, has really captured the flavour of the English Civil War, and has quickly become my go-to-set for this period. My Montrose Scottish army has remained based but not flocked for some years. I will fast track these and you will soon see these ready to take on those dastardly Covenaters in the next few weeks. I know I know I want to fast track everything!!

The rules are written by Stephen Miller and are available from BigRedBat’s shop

The Right Flank Royalist Cavalry unit.

The rules have several advantages. Firstly they utilize a box grid mat to make movement much simpler; no more arguments about millimeters, or fussing over if a unit can charge a flank or not. The grid system eliminates all of this.

The Parliamentary forlorn hope trying to shoot my finger!

The other innovation is the activation system. You can use either a bag of chits, ten-sided dice, or three combined packs of cards, with the royal cards taken out. ………..The first activation is always easy (usually a “2” or more) but an ace is always a failure. You can attempt to activate a unit more than once in a turn but you must pull a higher pip number than the previous activation card pip number for that unit, with modifiers that depend on what you want to do. The trick is that if any unit fails an activation, it immediately ends the turn for that entire brigade. So, the order in which you activate units is key, but it is always interesting to try to push you luck (see review from Jim Dirmaier).

Royalist Cavalry charge and initially get the better of the Parliamentarians.

The rules are very flexible, because the grid based system allows you to use any scale and is n not reliant on you and your opponent having the same base sizes.

Royalist Pike and shot get repulsed by the London trained band of musketeers losing its general in the melee!

Leaders are crucial, as they were in real life, and if you really need a unit to activate you should make sure a leader is with them.

The Royalist right flank cavalry is now surrounded on both sides by musketeers in the field and Dragoons in the wood.

The dragoons disperse the Royalist Veteran cavalry

The Royalist cavalry on the left are dispersed by light artillery.

This leaves only one unit protecting the right flank which successfully destroys a pike and shot unit.

The sole surviving Royalist cavalry unit redeploys.

Meanwhile in the centre the Royalist infantry continues to fail to activate.

The Royalist left is totally destroyed as the last unit routs.

A long range shot on the last Royalist cavalry disperses them.

With both flanks collapsed and the Royalist centre failing to close their army retires from the field.

The game was very close with a series of bad melee dice on the right seeing the Royalist initial successes turn to disaster. Continually refusing to activate caused the Royalist centre to become stagnate and waste the overwhelming superiority that it had. Despite this the game was a reasonably close affair finishing 7 victory points to 12. The system was easy to understand and produced a fun game, that even up to the last turn was still in the balance.