Mustering is done in three phases:
-1. Fortune: your portion of earthly influence
-2. Recruitment: your loyalists and coconspirators
-3. Impressment: dredging & dressing up your cannon food
…
Fortune
Your portion of earthly influence, was, through most of human existence, regarded as having been apportioned by Heaven. However, fortune and luck, once equated with destiny and fate, now means mere chance or accumulation. In any case, in a theistic or atheistic society, life is not fair. This pertains, most particularly, to War.
The Portions of Fortune are:
-1 heads up quarter
-1 tails up quarter
-7 dimes
-8 nickles
-40 pennies
The antagonists will shuffle a deck and cut to determine who is most Fortunate. Card values should be established here.
-Deuce through ten are obvious.
-Jack = 11
-Queen = 12
-King = 14
-Ace = 15
-Low Joker = 16
-High Joker = 17
When two cards are equal, suit rank is from high to low:
-Spades or Swords, the ruling class,
… the Ruling faction token is the quarter
-Hearts or Cups, the noble class
… the Nobility token is the dime
-Diamonds or Pentacles, the artisans, mercenaries or merchants
… the Mercenary token is the nickle
-Clubs or Wands, the common folk
… the Subject token is the penny
The deck is shuffled.
The shuffling player discards a card, face up.
The second player may take that card or pull from the top.
The face up card is now dead.
Each card that is drawn, in turn, is discarded and out of selection.
The player who wins the first draw decided if he begins play with 1 tails up quarter and 4 dimes, or 1 heads up quarter and 3 dimes. The choice is between assets or initiative. Will you be Alexander or Darius, Caesar or Pompey, Charles I or Cromwell, Washington or Cornwallis, Lee or Grant?
Recruitment
The following phase is designed to familiarize players who may not be familiar with the key command and control component of the game, the card deck. Cards impart rhythmic memory in the player and help him develop a recognition and understanding of patterns. Recalling the cards that have been pulled, played, that are held in your hand, enables you to effect predictions of what cards your opponent is most likely to hold and to play. Just as Tamerlane, best general of the Old World played chess by night, his analog, Nathan Bedford Forest and many another excellent American officer, played cards in their spare time.
Now that the Fortunate Player with his 4 of 7 loyalist tokens has conceded the initiative in marshaling and battle, he maintains the advantage in the muster. Every card drawn by this player is regarded as a Spade.
[Both jokers are spades, a high joker and low joker, each higher than the ace of spades, as in the card game Spades.]
The two first draw cards having been discarded, the Fortunate Player draws first, all of his draws regarded as spades, meaning he wins all ties.
The winner of each tie chooses either to draw 1 nickle or 5 pennies.
Any draw in which the Unfortunate Player wins with a spade, grants him a bonus penny.
Cards are chosen again.
This continues until all $2 in change has been apportioned. The results could be quite one-sided, such as the Spartans versus the Persians or Montrosse of Scotland against the English.
While your quarter represents not only your person, but your fanatical die-hard loyalists, such as Alexander’s Companions and Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, the dimes represent your leadership cadre, at the head of high initiative horse soldiers, knights or cavaliers. This is very important, this one dime advantage, not only in tactical flexibility, but in the rout phase. Battle features this post-Battle phase, when the loser tries to survive with enough force to fight another day and the victor attempts to gain total victory by wiping out the leadership.
The nickles reflect your faction’s influence and commitment to the mercenary class, the money oriented portions of society that hold many keys to victory in the area of technology and expert cooperation. Most battles prior to the deployment of repeating firearms were decided by the actions of such small portions of an army, with the more passive masses of the army, the “infantry,” providing most of the dead bodies.
…
End Note
Infantry, meaning foot soldiers, comes from the same Latin root as child, and meant a person too inexperienced in war, and/or too poor to own a horse. One who was forced by circumstance to fight on foot was typically regarded as subject to the scythe of Doom. Medieval battles were fought and decided mostly by horsemen, who tended to capture and ransom each other and then engage in recreational class slaughter of the abandoned footmen of the losing side. The infantry were merely a base for maneuver at best.
Towards the end of the Medieval Period, specialized Genose crosbowmen, Swiss pikemen, Welsh knife men, English yeomen, and other expert foot soldiers played highly effective roles due to encroaching technology on the battlefield. Once the combined arms equation was sorted out and military foot soldiers largely standardized, there remained only two divisions: brutalized conscripts, and favored slave soldiers, grenadiers or guardsmen. The birth of ideology in the French Revolution introduced higher morale infantry to the battlefield.
Of interest is the fact that the French Army outmaneuvered other European forces because the infantry could be trusted not to desert, while pressed soldiers such as the Hessians in America, deserted in droves anytime there was an absence of upper class horsemen to keep them from running away in mass. Tribal forces in America further specialized combat on foot, even as increased technology made room for the middle class on the battlefield, largely as artillery men. Interestingly, the only members of the standing American military at the time of Sinclair’s Defeat in 1791, were the officers and the roughly 100 artillery men, almost all slain, as were most of the conscript soldiers.
