Song of Drums and Shakos

Song of Drums and Shakos is a fast play Napoleonic skirmish game based on the popular Song of Blades and Heroes game engine. While Song of Blades and Heroes was nominated for the Origins Award, Song of Drums and Shakos actually won the Origins Award “Best Historical Rules” in 2009. Unfortunately, there are enough bugs in Song of Drums and Shakos to question the validity of this award.

Contents

• Title: Song of Drums and Shakos – Napoleonic Skirmish Rules
• Period: French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
• Type: Skirmish Game
• Time Scale: n.a.
• Ground Scale: 1:91 (10 mm = 1 yard) for 15 mm figures
• Troop Scale: 1 figure = 1 man
• Firing Ranges
  • Cannon: n.a.
  • Howitzer: n.a.
  • Canister: n.a.
  • Musket: 360 mm = 36 yards / 33 m
  • Rifle: 360 mm = 36 yards / 33 m
  • Carbine: 160 mm = 16 yards / 15 m
  • Pistole: 100 mm = 10 yards / 9 m
  • Bow: 100 mm = 10 yards / 9 m
• Author: Sergio Laliscia
• Format: 50 pages, soft bound
• Language: English
• Publisher: Ganesha Games
• Published: 2008

Evaluation

Song of Drums and Shakos is a simple and easy to learn skirmish game using the popular activation system originally developed for Song of Blades and Heroes. When it is the player‘s turn, individual miniatures may be activated by rolling one, two, or three dice per figure. While multiple successful activations allow a single figure to perform a string of actions in one turn, there is the inherent danger of multiple activation failures which may end the player‘s current game turn prematurely. As a result, player‘s are encouraged to activate their best fighters early in a turn, rather than risk losing the initiative when less experience figures fumble a multiple activation die-roll.

Song of Drums and Shakos is an incomplete set of rules, it entirely ignores the historic role of battalion guns, mortars, rocket flares, and other supporting artillery in skirmishes. As a result, sorties and night attacks against enemy gun batteries are beyond the scope of these rules.

Song of Drums and Shakos is the derivative of a skirmish game which explicitly discounts ranged combat, because hand-to-hand combat allegedly makes for a better game. As a result, firearms and bows have had their effective ranges cut so vigorously, that they are virtually unrecognizable. Clearly, an effective bow range of 10 yards has got to be a joke (in Song of Blades and Heroes bow range is 36 yards, with both games using identical ground scale), and 36 yards isn‘t exactly effective musket range either! Not only that, but relative ranges have been manipulated as well, completely castrating the bow in favor of the pistol, carbine, and musket. Perhaps Song of Drums and Shakos might have been a better candidate for Origins “Best Napoleonic Fantasy Rules”?

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British army seriously considered re-introducing the bow, because its effective range of 300 to 400 paces and exceptionally high rate of fire made it far superior to the musket or rifle, not to mention the devastating visual spectacle of seeing fellow soldiers pierced by arrows. Unfortunately for the British, this idea could not be implemented, because there was no longer a pool of trained archers, who typically required years of training to become proficient. By comparison, a musketeer needed less than six weeks of training to learn to load and discharge his weapon in the general direction of the enemy. Emperor Napoleon is reported to have been quite impressed by Bashkir horse archers who routinely bested his infantry. So, one way to repair the faulty firearms table in Song of Drums and Shakos (p. 49) is to give the bow the same effective range and modifiers as the musket or rifle, but make trained archers significantly more expensive than musketeers and riflemen.

Using the random terrain generator on page 6, players are likely to encounter “wooded areas”, a “building”, “fence”, “low wall”, “hill”, and “rough terrain”, but Song of Drums and Shakos fails to explain the effect of hills and rough terrain on movement or combat. While the section “Broken and Impassable Terrain” on page 12 lists the effects of “difficult terrain” like marsh, rubble, sand, snow, or wooded areas, no mention is ever made of “rough terrain” outside of the terrain generator. Is it conceivable that, of the four people engaged in writing, editing, proof reading, and additional proof reading, not a single one noticed the muddled terrain rules?!

Song of Drums and Shakos prohibits mounted troops from entering “wooded areas” (p. 12), which is another obvious bug in the system, since there are countless instances of 18th and 19th century cavalry, particularly light cavalry, chasseurs, hussars, dragoons, and mounted irregulars, moving through woods, using the cover of woods to infiltrate deep behind enemy lines, ambushing couriers, launching charges from the edges of woods or the wooded edges of defiles, evading pursuers by dispersing into woods, and so forth. An absurd restriction like this makes it impossible to recreate the petty warfare these skirmish rules are expressly designed for.

Song of Drums and Shakos conveys a +1 “Better Weapon” melee modifier (p. 14) to account for the longer reach of the lance, vs. the spontoon, sword, musket, or axe, which was not included in the original Song of Blades and Heroes, but might easily be employed there as well.

In the section “Firing from Horseback” (p. 19), Song of Drums and Shakos makes the wild claim that “A notable exception was Dragoons who could be deployed dismounted ...”, completely ignoring the fact that all cavalry was trained to fight dismounted. Prussian cuirassier and dragoon officers were routinely posted to hussar regiments, and vice versa, to learn everything they needed to know about heavy and light cavalry duty. Cornet Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Seydlitz-Kurtzbach, who would one day become a famous Lieutenant General of Cavalry, was captured during a stubborn dismounted action he fought in command of 30 Prussian cuirassiers against superior Austrian forces while on outpost duty at the village of Strandorf, 3.5 km southwest of Kranowitz, on May 20th, 1742. In the Seven Years‘ War unhorsed French hussars were posted to the Chasseurs de Sombreuil and Chasseurs d’Origny until such time that enough horses might be procured to remount the troopers.

Song of Drums and Shakos allows a “model inside the woods” to “shoot out of it if it is adjacent to the inside edge of the wooded area”, but the target, “a model outside the woods cannot shoot a model inside the wood” (p. 20). Now, that is an amazing bug in the rules, turning wooded areas into impervious bunkers. Did the awards committee at Origins not catch this mistake when they declared Song of Drums and Shakos the “Best Historical Rules” in 2009?!

Song of Drums and Shakos prevents musicians from conveying their unique activation re-roll bonus, if they are “engaged in hand-to-hand combat” (p. 26). Bandsmen are non-combatants, typically unarmed, they are never singled out as targets or engaged in melee. Civilized historical gamers will refrain from cutting down an enemy‘s musicians, and it‘s weird that an “historical” miniatures game would even consider this a playable option, unless the game featured combat against monsters and savage brutes.

Song of Drums and Shakos unfairly advantages “Austrian Light Cavalry Scouting” with a +1 modifier (p. 28) in addition to any actual scouts in the unit. A silly attempt to give these generic rules at least some kind of national flavour, even if there is no evidence to suggest that French, Russian, or Prussian light cavalry was any less adept at scouting.

Song of Drums and Shakos rates the British Rifleman (47 pts., Q4, C2, Rifle, Light, Élan) exactly like an Austrian Jäger (47 pts., Q4, C2, Rifle, Light, Élan), but the Prussian Jäger is mistakenly listed as a musket-armed light infantryman (42 pts., Q4, C2, Musket, Light, Élan). While the Prussian army did have musket-armed Bajonettjäger serving alongside rifle-armed Büchsenjäger in some unit, particularly in Freiwillige Jäger units, the regular Jäger battalions were entirely rifle-armed. This is particularly the case in the Prussian Guard Jägers which Song of Drums and Shakos also mistakenly rates as musket-armed (p. 37).

Song of Drums and Shakos oversimplifies, claiming that grenadiers of the period were required to be the “tallest” men in the formation, and light infantrymen were supposed to be “smaller” (p. 43). In fact, the Prussian army originally issued grenadier mitre caps to shorter men, to make them look more imposing. The key recruitment criteria for light infantrymen, on the other hand, was their ability to take the initiative in the field and do their job under minimal supervision. Physical height has little to do with that. Intelligence, creativity, marksmanship, and superior field craft matter.

In its background notes, Song of Drums and Shakos claims that “two ranks could fire their weapons all at once (a volley)” (p. 44) when this is actually true of all three ranks of infantry deployed in line. The first rank knelt, the second rank crouched, and the third rank fired standing.

Song of Drums and Shakos suggests that, in the light infantry, “the entire battalion could deploy in an open formation” (p. 44), when in fact it would have been courting disaster to do so. When skirmishers deployed forward in pairs, the greater part of their unit formed soutiens for the skirmishers to fall back on the instant they were threatened by enemy cavalry.

Song of Drums and Shakos is well suited as a solo wargame, because the activation system helps counteract much of the bias a solo-player may feel towards one or the other army under his unified command. If blatantly reckless actions can be avoided, and activated miniatures are ordered to act in the most productive manner in any given situation, Song of Drums and Shakos will assist the player in automating the rest. If in doubt, an AI chatbot might be asked to make the most critical decisions.

Given the number of historical inaccuracies and bugs in Song of Drums and Shakos it is actually quite surprising that the game won the Origins Award “Best Historical Rules” in 2009. While the most serious bugs may be fixed with a little common sense, the question remains why a sloppy product like this was permitted to go to print.

Wargame Rules