This is a set of house rules a friend and I have come to use, after four games. I share them here for the benefit of others, and in the hope of feedback for future development. All are given with a description, and a motivation why.

SEPARATE MORALE TRACKS

Instead of morale being a zero-sum game, both sides count morale separately. Two morale markers are used, one for each house (objective control markers work). Both start at the centre and gradually fall towards the rout space independent of the other. All eliminated units inflict morale loss normally on the side losing the unit (1 for green, 2 for blue, 3 for red), but the side making the kill only gains 1 morale for eliminated red and blue units, and none for eliminated green units. Eliminating a commander causes an additional morale loss and gain of 1, respectively. End of turn morale recovery to morale breaks is ignored. Using a flag token to recover morale increases it by 1, but doesn't affect the opponent's morale. Using a flag token to rally a unit doesn't decrease morale.

This has the effect of making routing the way battles usually end, as the morale of both sides gets progressively worse (unless a side is doing awesomely well and killing a lot more than it loses). It's not only more realistic than zero-sum fight-to-the-end morale, but also provides a much more satisfactory "clock" limiting game length than an arbitrary, fixed turn limit.

CONTINUOUS FIGHTING IN ENGAGEMENTS

If a unit is still active at the end of a turn and is engaged with an enemy, it is allowed to make an attack. If both units in an engagement are active, the side which owns the engagement marker gets to attack first. The attack counts as a normal attack for all purposes, including allowing counterattacks, etc, the only exception being that advance and pursuit isn't possible. Also, if a ranged attack unit has conducted an attack against a target and executed no order after that nor been in melee, it continues firing at the same target until it is either ordered to do something else, gets engaged, or loses its target. If it is active at the end of a turn, it makes a shooting attack at it. If both players have shooters eligible to shoot, the player with initiative conducts all his shooting first.

This is both realistic and gamistic, units ordered to attack a certain target would keep doing it until ordered otherwise, they wouldn't stand idle when the enemy is standing next to them hammering away at them. They have that much of a sense of self-preservation, and unit commanders should at least have that much initiative. Also, it frees a player from having to continuously spam orders at troops already engaged to keep up the attack, and would free them to be used for actual maneuvering, rewarding tactical play rather than making maneuvering a liability that directly decreases the damage output of troops already in combat.

PIKEMEN HAVE COMPULSORY ADVANCE

Pikemen count as having the Advance keyword, but must advance whenever they are able to.

This is simply to cover the consistency gap in not letting pikemen have Advance, despite all other melee infantry (except for super-heavy Lannister heavy infantry) having it. Pikemen if anyone should have it, their combat style effectively based on pushing on and creating immense pressure. There's a reason for why the term "push of pike" was coined. Making the advance compulsory is thus justifiable, and it offsets the benefit they gain from advancing.

HILLS GRANT EASIER STALWART

Instead of limiting the number of dice that can be rolled against it, a unit on a hill attacked from below it needs only be adjacent to one friendly unit (rather than two) to count as stalwart.

This makes troops on a hill enjoy a defensive benefit that's appropriate to their situation (having higher ground should make it easier to hold the line against anyone trying to push you back), instead of inflicting a rather arbitrary penalty that only disfavours some, hard-hitting units instead of everyone.

MINOR HOUSE RULES

An attacker rolling retreat results is allowed to choose whether to inflict a retreat or not. The benefit from Toughness is only applied to the first hit suffered in a turn, not the first hit of every attack. Commanders have "hitpoints" like units, capture requiring a cumulative total of hits equal to capture rating (rather than all in one attack). Jaime's (Kingslayer) ability instead reads as: Whenever you inflict at least one hit on a commander, you inflict an additional hit.

These are all fairly common house rules, already debated lengthily elsewhere so I won't say any more on them.

I dont intend to use almost all the house rules that you have put here

But the one who seems to me to be the worst is the continuos fighting engagment

When two units are engaged, in a realistic point of view, they continno to fight each other but not necessary making huge casualties

You dont have a real army with only 4 or 3 trops, so when using a commad to atack with a unit what you are doing is causing major casualites

But if those House Rules makes more sense to you and it makes the game funnyer, why not...

Mancini said:

Using a command isn't equivalent with causing casualties, as it's possible to use a command to attack without causing casualties (if rolling poorly), as well as cause casualties without using a command (via stalwart counterattacks). And why should there be equivalency? Troops don't magically fight better simply because they get an order from above to.

I can see your point in that two engaged units of which neither is commanded to attack would technically be in combat, but neither side would press the attack, and as such the engagement would be of too low intensity to cause casualties on a major enough scale to remove figures. However, this interpretation breaks down if one side does use a command to attack, and the other doesn't. If one side presses the attack and engages the enemy intensely, there's no way it'll suffer just as few casualties in return as if it wouldn't press.

I guess it depend on how you see the things

I imagine, and sorry for my childish imagination(lol) that when you are using a order token to atack (assuming that the units are already engaged) you are, somewhat, using "mini-tatics" that cause major causalites

Talking in a game view, did this house rule worked well on the game??

About that house rule that atacker choose if the enemy ubits retreats or not, i guess it´s a nice rule, and i use it in almost every game

The pikman rule is also interesting

Mancini said:

I hadn't thought of it that way, though I wouldn't say it's plausible either. In a skirmish-scale clash certainly, but not really in a pitched battle with formations vs formations, where really the smallest tactical "unit" that it would make sense commanding would still be hundreds of men large. Mini-tactics, to the (limited) extent to which they'd be useful or even possible, would be the job of the unit commander anyway.

I say the rule worked pretty well. It did do its job of letting you use command capability for maneuver and fine-tuning your battleplan, rather than having to commit it to keep your units fighting. Still, the actual number of units that made "free" attacks because of it at end of turn, for both sides combined, was typically no more than 1-2 in a round, so nothing that radically changed the way the game works. A few times the number was as much as 3, only once during 3 games played with it did it get as high as 4 in a turn.

The biggest anomaly it caused was that rallying units became a cheap way of getting an extra attack by just waiting for the turn to end, rather than having to also use a command to get that attack out of the unit. My limited experience doesn't indicate it to be overpowered (rally all units card tend to be rather weak in the core game anyway), but it's possible that I haven't just learned to exploit it yet.

Anders,

I remember your threads about some of these house rules over at BGG. It sounds like you have played with them and fleshed them out somewhat.

I hadn't thought about the realism of Pikemen not advancing, as I don't know that much about war. And I'm not sure if I need this to be more realistic. But, intuitively, I like your hill rule. Obviously, the original hill rule was transplanted from Richard Borg's C&C designs. I may adopt your hill rule as it feels more simple and right than the dice restriction that doesn't affect all units equally. But what about just simplifying it to units on a hill are stalwart? It makes sense that, with the high ground, they would be less apt to retreat and more apt to retaliate, even against a stronger foe. I can't really see how a nearby unit on lower ground would help support that unit with the high ground.

Regarding separate morale tracks, it's a nice idea, but seems more convoluted than it needs to be. And it's not really that much less arbitrary to only gain one morale for eliminating red and blue units and none for green. At this point, I really don't have a problem with a fixed clock (round limit) and the zero-sum morale, as I feel it gives a solid sense of tension and pacing for players. Of course, I have a house rule that adds a commander's command rating to the morale gained for eliminating that unit. So, for example, you would get 6 morale for eliminating the King in the North (3 for Red and 3 for the command rating), so the possibilities of a rout are increased.

I see your point about having units continue to fight if they are actively engaged at the end of a round. But, again, I don't want to add bookkeeping to this already complex game with a number of easy to forget rules. On the contrary, I would prefer to remove a few unnecessary layers, trim the fat, so to speak, from the hand management part of this game. I started a thread recently about this on BGG, but I don't expect a lot of activity or support there. Basically, there is redundancy in the hand limit, number of cards you can keep at the end of the round, number of command tokens each commander can play, as well as the number of times units can be activated in a round.

I played the game yesterday for the tenth time and, even though I had already house ruled that all commanders have a command rating of 3, the hand management rules still felt overly restrictive. So, my opponent and I decided to see how it felt to play without the command tokens altogether. We just set aside the cute little command boards and played cards as we wished. This felt a lot more streamlined and more fun without all that bookkeeping of which commander can play this card. Oh, that card costs two tokens, so she can't play that card, etc.

Not even the more powerful two-token cards felt all that powerful without paying "extra." I've looked at all the command cards in the core set and the Lannister expansion and I think I will play from now on completely without the order tokens.

Further, I think we have decided to let people keep any and all cards from round to round, if they wish, and to give each side a hand limit equal to two times the number of commanders on their side, no matter if they lose one during the game. Then, you can keep all your cards or discard them before drawing back up to your hand limit each round. This should enable both sides to see pretty much all their cards, if they wish, and will give more opportunities to have powerful rounds. Also, it reduces rather than adds complexity.

I would love to see your comments on this rule change either here or over on my thread in the BGG forums. No worries if you're not interested, but I'm fairly certain that this will allow all or almost all units to be activated from round to round, depending upon if the leaders are captured and/or well-placed on the field.

Regarding your other house rules such as the making Karstarck's toughness only affect the first attack in a round, I'm pretty happy with the "enhanced" rules from the FAQ, I think those rules are working well to balance his ability somewhat and to negate the annoying "helpful retreat" and the dominance of calvalry (because withdrawals are so excellent against cavalry).

Good reply, Ken!

Regarding pikemen, well, pikemen were trained to push forward and bring as much of the pike-heads to bear against the enemy as possible. Since making the OP, though, I've revised pikemen to only have compulsory advance when in hedgehog formation. It hardly makes sense that they should have it in a defensive formation made for holding their ground.

Letting any unit on a hill attacked from below count as stalwart works too, though I'm concerned it might make hills too good. The published scenarios are, after all, based on an assumption of hills doing something completely different and much weaker. And the requirement to have at least one friendly unit adjacent to you at least makes keeping your troops together, or keeping your opponent's troops separated, count for something. I realized later that my hill houserule actually makes it sensible to "anchor" a flank by letting the unit farthest out be on a hill - in that way even it gets stalwart from being adjacent to the second-last unit.

Another thing I've thought about hills is that they should maybe take out the momentum of a cavalry charge. How about: A cavalry unit attacking uphill changes any Pursuit keyword it has to just Advance.

As for already engaged units continuing to fight, I've found it requires fairly little bookkeeping. Whether any engaged unit makes an end-of-turn strike is seen directly from it being engaged and active, no remembering or marking is required beyond what's already in the game. As for ranged units, I've found that the three special archer tokens from Scenario 5 can conveniently be used to "mark" targets picked by ranged units. They're quite unique and there's little risk to mistake them for something else. To each their own, naturally, but I'd suggest trying it out. Makes those Rally All Units cards to be of some use too.

As for your revisions on the command card mechanism, removing it entirely inituitively sounds like quite a drastic thing to do. During my latest games, I've been able to move most but not quite all units during most turns, which is I think as it should be. But then, playing with the houserule of already engaged units fighting on their own, I'd have it easier than one would under the core rules. Also, I've played with another simplifying rule simply because I managed to remember one of the FAQ optional rules wrongly. While the rule said that any command card could be played as "Order 1 unit" and costing one command token, we had played it as "Discard one card to order one unit anywhere on the table without spending a command token". Felix culpa, perhaps.

If you play entirely without command tokens, what do you do about cards with several command options? Do you let all options to be carried out for free? I'd think that could advantage certain commanders with many such options unduly (Eddard, Tywin, Jaime).

As for the issue of certain commanders (Maege, Gregor) being unable to play two-token cards because of a command limit of 1, I've been annoyed about that too. And even for those with a command limit of 2, putting both tokens into a single card tends to be too much, making the commander unable to do anything else (and if you're paying for the extra, chances are you're doing something big which needs several command cards). One possibility I've thought about (but not tested yet) would be the following: The command limit determines the maximum number of cards that commander can play, not the total number of command tokens that can be spent. Keeping track of this could be done by stacking those tokens used for the same card on top of each other; thus, the number of "piles" of one or more token on the card would show how many cards have already been played.

By the way, have you noticed that it's possible to order any one unit by spending any two order tokens of the same type? Just saying since I only discovered it myself very recently, and found that it made a surprisingly big difference, especially in scenarios where you have few green units and green tokens are of little use.

I haven't tried playing using withdrawals yet. How exactly do they affect the flow of the game? I'm simply speculating, but my gut feeling was that it would make it even harder to get red infantry units into combat, something which is almost too hard as it is. And it doesn't feel right that slower infantry should be able to "dodge" out of the way of cavalry (or at least the cavalry should be able to use any remaining movement to catch up).

Yay, some life on this forum.

Thanks for the well-reasoned and interesting reply.

Regarding Pikemen, I think I would need to photoshop the cards to show the different abilities on the different sides before I adopt that house rule. Also, I heard someone on BGG describe that a hedgehog is actually the defensive formation and pike square is the offensive one, so potentially the formations got mixed up in the Wardens rulebook? You would know better than me, probably.

I hope to try out the hills make units stalwart rule tonight. It just seems to simplify hills somewhat and make more sense, not sure if stalwart is so good that it will unbalance things. Remember, all the other C&C games now have automatic counter-attacks as long as a unit stands its ground.

Withdrawals are great, IMO. Having to pay morale and particularly make the unit inactive is huge. You don't do that without real incentive, like if the heavy cavalry are charging your archers. Also, it gives you a reason to not order your archers to make that futile 2 dice attack against red units. As far as realism, I imagine it as they see the charge and scramble out of the way. But, really, I think it is an excellent mechanism to balance the overwhelming force of cavalry in this game.

Ok, I see your point about using the Merry Men archer tokens for targeting purposes. But then you'd have to come up with a different system for the Whispering Woods scenario, not a biggie, I guess.

And I will continue to playtest my rule of eliminating the command board/tokens. I've looked through the cards and I really don't think there is too much power in any specific card to justify the extra cost. Anyway, yeah, I just allow every part of an order card to be played without extra cost.

Also, I would rather make hand management more fluid and streamlined rather than restrictive. I think your rule of having engaged units continue to fight basically accomplishes a similar result as my elimination of the command limits and costs for cards. If my rules don't hold up to the more powerful commanders cards, then I will definitely try out your rules.

Yeah, the two order tokens rule to order any unit is a necessary rule. Generally, I like the order token rules and I'll continue to use them as they are.

One other rule that is wrong in the rulebook and not addressed in the FAQ is that tactics on order cards affect the entire board. The designer, Rob Kouba, clarified this over on BGG. He also promised to include the error in the next version of the FAQ, but he must be a very busy guy cranking out those new expansions and working on other projects for FFG because he has been absent online since then.

Personally, I want to simplify tactics, too and I will probably end up just letting players play them without checking their order tokens or morale. They have had almost no effect in my games so far and I would rather not have pointless effects in my games.

Thanks again for the detailed reply.

Ian

Seems like FFG got the names mixed up in the rulebook then. Can't really tell from the names, I don't know of any historical use of those names. A hedgehog sounds a bit more defensive though, so it's possible.

What other C&C games have come out after BoW? I'd like to take a look at them just for ideas.

What I meant re cavalry and withdrawals is, sure the archers could run, but the cavalry could give chase, and catch them due to being faster. It hardly makes sense that a cavalry unit one hex away from an archer would only use one point of its movement allowance, and none to catch the fleeing enemy. If cavalry needs a nerf, I'd rather do something else, like make them suffer from valor results like everyone else. It seems rather inappropriate that the worst enemy of cavalry would be enemy cavalry, that the role of infantry is to pin enemy cavalry frontally while your own cavalry flanks the enemy cavalry, and that red cavalry is able to frontally charge stalwart pikemen in defensive formation and win.

There are no normal archers in the Whispering Wood scenario, so there won't be any conflict of interest in the use of the Merry Men tokens.

I too remember wondering whether tactics affected the entire board or only the immediate vicinity, thanks for clarifying that.

On the issue of command cards, have you played with Tywin or Jaime using your latest rules? Jaime, in particular, has two cards which, all options involved, order 3 units and give all of them +1 attack and +1 movement. All for a price of 3 command tokens if you want everything, meaning that most of the time people would simply buy some of the options. Yet, with all of it for free, that seems quite over the top. I'm not that bothered by the fact that buying the additional options of command cards usually isn't worth it. I think it adds to the game to have an option to do something which isn't worth of the time, but offers a possibility to throw additional emphasis at a specific part of the board, at a diminishing return. Or to pull off some spectacular stunt which your opponent hadn't counted on (ever seen a red Lannister Heavy Infantry charge at you at movement 3 and attack?).

All in all I'm trying to strike a balance where players can count on being able to order most units and one which avoids silly and unrealistic aberrations (like units not fighting back when attacked unless ordered to), but where players still have to make relevant decisions on what to do with their command resources.

Speaking of that, I wonder, what would follow if commanders were to be allowed to play any number of command cards, but Command Limit would be redefined to mean the radius of their zones of command, rather than letting everyone have the same radius of 2? In that way, no bookkeeping with command tokens would have to be done, but there would still be better and worse commanders, and better commanders would effectively still be able to get more done due to simply having more troops inside their zone of command.

If you don't use command tokens, how do you determine advantage? Do you simply let the player with momentum have it all the time? Personally, I think struggling for advantage is a nice tactical aspect, a gambit where you sacrifice the use of command counters in order to get to strike first on the following turn, something which can be quite decisive if both battlelines are about to clash.

As for letting tactics be played without checking for tokens or morale, I'd be wary of that. Some of the tactics are quite nasty, which is balanced by the fact that they are harder to trigger. I'm particularly thinking of Robb Stark's tactic, which inflicts a hit on every engaged enemy unit on the board. Its requirement (a red and a valor token) makes it happen appropriately rarely, but to have it happen every time a Robb card is played, ouch!

Regarding units on hills, I just came to think of something. What about if, instead of getting stalwart for free easier, it would get Defender? It would represent the unit closing ranks down the slope. It would allow any unit on a hill, even an isolated one on a lone hill, to get stalwart, but it would actually have to pay for it by abstaining from a possible attack. Biggest problem I could see with it would be that it shouldn't get any advantage against an attacker striking it from another hill hex, but it'd be a hassle to track which units are in defensive stance against everyone and which are only against ones attacking from below.

I hope to play with Jaime and Tywin tonight in the first downloadable scenario, Fighting Ice with Fire. Jaime's tactic lets the commander usually have at least one of the extra orders for free already, so I don't see the problem. Maybe I will when I play. I also want to see how fire affects a battlefield and scenario 9 didn't really do that for me, because of how slowly they start and how far back the Mountain and his Reavers start. so I'm pretty excited to have fires already on the board.

We calculate advantage by numbers of cards in hand after voluntary discards. Remember that my house rule also lets players either keep or discard any and/or all cards in their hands at the end of the round. Then, you draw back up to your hand limit at the beginning of the next round, hand limit being equal to the number of commanders you started the game with multiplied by 2. So, advantage is determined after you discard and before you draw new cards, so if you want to ditch the less useful cards, you might sacrifice advantage. Ties are still broken by momentum.

Truthfully, I'm not too worried about Robb's order card tactic. It's only five cards and it's dependent upon units being engaged at the end of the round. Tywin has a resurrection tactic, too, so that seems to balance out somewhat. I've yet to play with either Tactic, but I think its silly to have it be yet another random element of checking order tokens on top of the already considerable randomness of the card draw. Plus, Robb has one of the worst order cards in the game with his "Order all Cavalry" card that will only ever possibly order 4 units, but most likely will only order him and one other unit because of its huge restriction.

Well, only C&C: Napoleonics came out after Westeros. But, Richard Borg said that all C&C games have "automatic" counter-attacks from now on, as he doesn't believe it's realistic that any military unit wouldn't fight back. He even "retrofitted" the rule into Battlelore, to mixed opinions from the fans. C&C: Ancients was the first to have this rule standard, I believe, with stalwart, or supported, allowing the unit to ignore a flag.

Just saw your new reply: I haven't actually acquired Wardens of the North, so I've yet to play with Defender. I hope to pick up that expansion very soon, though. What does it do?

So, I played Fighting Fire with Ice last night with my house rules. The final score was 8-7, the Lannister Lions were victorious over my Stark Wolves.

We played order cards, including tactics, for free on any leader and kept as many cards as we liked each round before drawing back up to the hand limit of twice the number of commanders we began the game with, six cards. The scenario is only 3 rounds long, so at most we would see 18 out of the 25 cards in each of our decks.

We checked for advantage by counting the number of cards left in each player's hand after they chose whether or not to discard at the end of the round. The player with momentum broke ties and got to decide to discard after the other player.

We also played that hills only make units stalwart and the former "command limit" of a commander was a bonus to morale for capture (add it to the normal bonus for the color of the unit). Both of these rules work well and are easy to remember.

Overall, I felt like Lannister's cards were better than mine, but generally I never felt like the game was unbalanced by the effect of the leader-specific order cards. The major unbalancing effect was, as usual, the Rally All cards. Both of his were in the top ten cards of his deck and both of mine were in the bottom five of my deck. And, really, the Rally All cards did not swing the game that much, as you can see by the final score. We both captured a leader, him harassing Rickard Karstark, who had gotten trapped at the side of the board, and me running down Tywin, even after he resurrected one of his figures with a tactic. But, in the end, my opponent won by strategically withdrawing his archers from Greatjon and by obliterating one of my archer units that was stuck in a burning hex.

As far as issues are concerned, neither side could be routed and tactics were free, so morale was totally meaningless. It's not even specifically mentioned as a tie breaker in the scenario notes. I think I will add the house rule that you can only play tactics if morale is in your opponent's green area or worse.

Some other issues with the house rules are that several commander abilities and tactics that deal with order tokens or order card costs are totally worthless. Tywin's static ability and Jaime's order card tactic are examples of the affected powers. Personally, I'm fine with this being the case, as I feel like these commanders bring quite a lot of power to the table already.

Konrad von Richtmark said:

By the way, I got Wardens of the North and I think having units on hills get defender is a great idea. I added it to my house rules.

I also house ruled that units on hills do not give or receive support (so they do not make other friendly units stalwart and they cannot be made stalwart by other friendly units) and that units on hills gets Defender against everyone, including other units on adjacent hills. This means that units on hills are strong, but isolated. And I think of each hill as its own little outpost.

I also house ruled that engaged units lose Defender.

KenToad said:

I also tink that units on hill should get Defender yet i dont see hills as isolated if another hill is in a adjacet hex, i see it more as a more extend hill

Yet in a hill "standing alone" i have to agree with Ken Toad that it makes sense to "isolate" it