Lace Wars Series #2 - Charlie's Year II - The Last Jacobite Rebellion 1745-46 (Redux, 2nd Edition)

Charlie's Year covers the events of the last real threat to the Georgian regime of Great Britain and to the social, economic, and philosophical gains of the Glorious Revolution. From 1741 to 1748, the War of the Austrian Succession raged on the continent of Europe. From 1743 on, Britain and France were formally at war. In late August of 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed at Loch nam Uamh with seven men, raised the Standard of the outcast Stuart kings at Glenfinnan, and gathered to himself an army to challenge the might of King George II's realm. Composed of wild Highlanders, Lowland peasants, discontented gentlemen and diehard Jacobite nobles, the Pretender's army defeated the local garrison forces and laid all Scotland at his feet. A descent on England should now have given the Prince's reluctant French allies the diversion they needed to invade. Marching on London however, the Jacobites lost their nerve after reaching Derby and retreated, pursued now by the best regiments of the British Army. The French, working with information a couple of weeks out of date, were still not ready to aid them.

Confronting each other at the battle of Falkirk in the winter of 1745, neither side appeared to prevail, and both withdrew to lick their wounds. However the tide of war was now firmly against the Jacks, and they withdrew again into the mountain fastnesses of Scotland, hoping to wage a guerrilla war and so encourage the French. The idea proved impractical, especially in mid-winter, and in the wet spring of 1746, the British Army under the Duke of Cumberland met the remaining Jacobite forces under Charlie himself at the battle of Culloden and crushed them. While Scotland suffered the fire and sword of the conqueror, the Prince flitted through the heather, and after many romantic adventures escaped to France, never to return. His allies the French were unconcerned, as the withdrawal of the British Army from Flanders allowed them to seize the vital port of Antwerp and a number of key fortifications necessary for taking the war to the Austrian Netherlands. At war's end, the price for surrendering these gains would be the fortress of Louisburg, Nova Scotia and the temporary restoration of French colonial dominance in North America.

Charlie's Year is a two-player strategy game. You play one of the royal contenders, with all of Scotland and England as your battleground. You must decide when and where to commit resources, where to feint and where to strike. But you also have command of any immediate battlefield, and must array your forces for battle, deciding when to employ the cavalry, when to release your reserves, or whether to launch a fearsome 'highland charge'. Technically Charlie's Year can be rated as an operational game for scale, but at that time there was no operational theory of war: individual regiments were temporarily banded into armies for a single campaign (often with no clear purpose beyond the seeking of glory by an aristocratic officer corps), and the army commander, or even the King himself, would be in charge on a battlefield still small enough to see his entire command.

The game is played in a series of turns, each representing one month, and broken into a series of discrete 'operations' by your mobile forces, using garrisoned fortifications as bases and pivot-points. As the seasons change, a variety of weather conditions will plague your decision making. You have many sources of assistance, but their employment in this 'sideshow' may ruin your chances of victory elsewhere and thus lose you the game. The primary focus is on the campaign game, but there are also shorter historical scenarios covering portions of the Rising and even individual battles. The campaign game is quite flexible in its victory conditions, allowing you to experiment with different ideas for victory. There are several campaign variant rules as well.