Early playtesting of a new Horse and Musket game

One of the things I have been working on recently is the early draft for a set of "mass skirmish"rules for the horse and musket period. Roughly from Napoleonic Wars to Early ACW.

The reason I started to write them is, as with every set I write, I could not quite find a rule set that hit the spot for me. 

I want to see units degrade during a battle, but I don't want the whole unit rushing off the field at the first round of firing. I also wanted something different to IGO UGO rules or straight alternate activation (and I did not want to involve a bag of tokens).

The current draft of rules have a split activation system, and a morale system where enemy fire will slowly degrade a units morale and the effect of fire a unit takes will worsen as morale lowers.

Retreating a unit away from enemy contact will let you recover morale to an extent and as stragglers run away from their original units officers behind the lines can try to shepherd them back into combat by forming them into rag-tag bodies. They are unlikely to storm the enemy lines, but they might be persuaded to hold a piece of terrain long enough for others to move into position.

To make sure the rules give a realistic feel I am running some basic scenarios. Today was a thin Union line holding out against an onrushing Confederate advance.

The Confederates are being run under the AI model of "Commander doesn't know his musket from his elbow" and so they have only one aim, reach hand to hand combat. (The final version will have some rules for playing solo where the enemy general will hopefully be more of a challenge).

The Union troops used their actions to pepper the Confederates with fire as they spent all their actions advancing.

The Confederate morale started to waiver, and a handful of troops fled their parent units, but the advance carried on into the musket fire.

Finally the right flank of the Confederate force made contact; the left flank faltered and the Union troops took their chance to charge into them. After a brief tussle both Confederate units broke; the Union side suffering a small number of casualties.

I was pleased with the end result as the although it was a fairly simple win for the Union, they did not come through it completely unscathed. And the Confederates proved that it's wiser to soften up an enemy before advancing across an open field (you'd have though they had learnt that at Gettysburg).

There's a lot more polishing to do on the rules front, but I am happy with my progress.

I plan to post some more of these playtests as we do them, though next one I hope to include photos of miniatures