First Impression Black Powder ACW | Gaming

Well would you look at that, I actually got a game of Black Powder Epic Battles ACW (my God we gotta work on these names) done and dusted. The hardest part was finding anyone willing, and well I had family over so I forced them to play this instead of the usual Warhammer. My final verdict: fun! 

I'm not going to give a play by play of the action, for one a lot happened, and two I don't think I'd be able to relay it in an entertaining manner. I will tell you the good and the bad though. For those not in the know, Black Powder as a system is Warlord Games's answer to the question "How do I field my massive historical collection without getting bogged down in overbearing detail?". And their answer is a game engine that, while not simple, in my opinion is flexible. 

And why is that flexibility important? There's a ton of rules, many of which are easy to remember their purpose but their exact mechanics can be a bit obtuse. For example, we were having trouble remembering how to impart psychological effects from cannon fire onto troops. Normally we'd be sticklers and try to get it to match the rules exactly, but in this case we just chatted, agreed on a method that we thought was fair, and kept going with the game. And it was frictionless; the game worked like we expected it to, and when we looked it up we noticed we were close enough. 

The game also does really well with moving, modifying, or just straight up deleting rules. It's a very plug and play system that allows for "shoot from the hip" style game management that gives it a more relaxed, beer and pretzels style. Now, this might not be everyone's cup of tea, and I get that, but to me this was refreshing coming from game systems like Warhammer. 

The running of the game really, really benefits from a quick reference guide though. There are a lot of interacting systems and it can be easy to forget different bonuses from movement, orders, unit status, cover, etc. The one provided in the book is fine, it gets by, but there are better ones out there. A single page is not enough to cover all of the intricacies, but you can distill it down to about four pages. The four pages basically act like a mini rule book in their own right, and everything else in the book is kind of explaining odd corner cases and interactions. 

One thing we didn't really enjoy was what happens if you fail command rolls multiple times in a row. While yeah, that's a luck of the dice thing, when you fail these command rolls your units get to do nothing. We had a poor player get stuck with some of their units not doing anything for nearly the whole game, which is just not a feel good experience. With some additional rules like a field general there are ways to mitigate this, but some other methods would be nice to have available. 

-The Space Dinosaur