From Muskets to Rifles... Fast Play Wargame for 19th Century Conflicts

From Muskets to Rifles… is based upon C’est la Guerre: Fast Play Wargame for the Age of Muskets. This system was designed to provide a fast yet satisfying game play, not necessarily a “realistic” simulation of battle recreation. Bases or ‘Units’ in the game do not represent a certain number of men or artillery pieces but are abstract representations of force.

From Muskets to Rifles… uses

• a simple command structure to manage battlefield movement without dealing with morale or having the players issue orders,
• a troop grading system so that better trained more effective troops can have an advantage over poorly trained less effective troops, and
• a method to account for casualties and losses without an overly complicated accounting system.

At the beginning of the 19th Century European armies were mostly armed with smooth bore muzzle loading muskets and bronze smooth bore muzzle loading artillery. These armies fought in dense formations of infantry, and they relied upon the gallant cavalry charging in mass to break enemy lines. Not so very different from the weapons and methods used two hundred years before.

By the end of the 19th Century we see the introduction of machine guns, breach loading and bolt action repeating rifles, metal cartridge ammunition, accurate and powerful rifled artillery, and even the occasional airplane flying through the skies. We also see the mass production and industrialization of warfare that made these new technologies cheap, uniform, and abundant. This period of dynamic change, between the age of the musket and the ‘modern’ mobile warfare we see today, began at some point after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and came to its culmination during World War I. So that will be how we define the time period of ‘19th Century Warfare’ – 1820s to 1910s.