Partizan - BPzG

General de Brigade rules are quick to learn and provide for fast historical games with a minimum of record keeping. There are your guns! develops the original rules to reflect warfare after Waterloo, focusing upon wars in the European theatre. Many of its features therefore mirror or draw heavily upon General de Brigade and will be familiar to players familiar with that system. This is only proper as the military minds of the 19th century were driven, rightly or wrongly, by the lessons of Napoleonic warfare and repeated the tactics of the period. As such assumptions lead to disaster in the face of new weapons and technology, so commanders grappled with new methods of deployment and organization, with varying degrees of success or failure. Thus these new rules include revisions and new features to reflect the changes in warfare as developments proceed apace through the century - which will hopefully prove equally challenging (and more importantly, satisfying) to all wargamers.

In putting this book together there have been a number of considerations at the forefront of my thinking:

1. The rules have been written in traditional fashion with all distances and moves given in inches. Ground scale and its relationship to figures has not been a primary consideration and therefore the system can equally be applied to 15mm, 18mm, 20mm or 25/28mm figures. For players who wish to use smaller size figures, including 10mm and 6mm, on a smaller games table (or to deploy larger forces) then distances and moves can simply be read as centimetres rather than inches.

2. As described earlier the main characteristics of 19th century warfare include the rapid advances and improvements in weaponry during the second half of the century. Such pace of change in the technology of war, unlike say tactical developments, is difficult to capture within one set of wargame rules. I have addressed this by including within the core rules, and the points listings, the main types of weaponry employed at any time during the period. However for reasons of space and to keep the core rules reasonably concise.

3. The game is based around the organisation and deployment of brigades within divisional commands. European armies were relatively similar in the organisation of their forces and a simple approach to constructing and organising forces has been adopted.

4. I have tried to keep record-keeping to the minimum but players will need pencil and paper to hand to keep a note of orders and order changes, unit casualties, and changes in unit performance levels (mainly for those units suffering in the heat of battle).

5. The main aim is to produce a fast-moving and exciting game that can capture the nature and challenge of the warfare in terms of movement, tactics, firepower and command - thereby producing outcomes on the tabletop battlefield that reflect what one would expect from 19th century conflict.

Dennis Williams