Revising the Insurgent Activity tables for Land on Fire

Following on from our first playtest of Land on Fire, the co-op game I'm designing about the Irish rebellion of 1797-98, I'm re-jigging the rebellion tables which power the AI for the four rebel factions. The British team should be facing a chain of unpredictable insurrections across Ireland while also planning for and coping with French invasions.

Our first game, while we didn't finish it, saw two French armies defeated decisively. The British team seems largely in control of the situation apart from the first couple of turns when there was a large rebellion in the far south between Dungarvon and Wexford. Later in the game there was some fierce street fighting in Belfast but that too was relatively easily contained by one army under Lake. A lot of the rest of the uprisings were relatively sporadic and never seemed to get out of hand.

This is probably a good indicator of what happended in reality, but I am working to make the campaign more of a challenge to the player(s). I also wanted the chatacter of the different rebel factions to come through.

The White Boys I'm still setting up as a very opportunitistic faction with little regional affiliation. White Boys will now really only focus on rural areas, so won't be able to assist with uprisings in urban centres like Dublin and Cork. They don't really have a national coordinating committee and are also intended to represent opportunistic rioting and looting activity. They also have an Achilles heel in the form of the harvest event cards, which will cause them to disperse to gather in the crops. The likelihood is they will contribute to other centres of the rebellion.

The Jacobins are now going to be much more focused on urban activity, with further ability to rise in areas in close proximity to the big towns. Given their roots in the middle class / intellectual end of society, they won't have much ability to organise risings in rural areas, except to support the initial French landings in the west of Ireland. The likelihood of a Jacobin rebellion in one of the cities is now increased, forcing the British to spend their valuable garrison tokens here. I'm still in two minds whether to allow the garrison cards to decisively lock down the big cities as we saw in Dublin with the play-test. Perhaps it requires an army to be in the city and detach troops as well? 

As previously, the Defenders of Ireland will be more regional in character, with even more of a focus on Ulster. In the first playtest the Defenders did create some trouble in the north, and tied down Lake's troops for much of the second half of the game. I'm giving them more chance of rising in Belfast and the Ulster towns, with some chance of also rising in the towns close to Ulster like Drogheda and Longford. Historically the Defenders were more of a legacy movement in 1797, supporting the wider rebellion, but I get the impression much of the original leadership were either dead or too old to play an active role.

This leaves much of the heavy lifting to be done by the United Irishmen outside Ulster. I don't want them to be too thinly spread, but at the same time want their units to be able to contribute effectively to other uprisings. Hence it makes sense for them to have an opportunity in Ulster too, and not to restrict themselves to the other three regions. It does mean they will be quite thinly spread, but there will have to be some towns where they will only have a 1% chance of rising - Enniskillen for example.

The target for the rebels to win is now reduced to 15 counters on the map, down from 25, which was probably a stretch.

This project is part of an effort I'm making to simulate the interaction between regular and irregular warfare in the 18th and 19th centuries, in conflicts where irregulars could make a difference and interfere with the activity of regular armies. A possible future project will look at the Taiping Rebellion in China in the mid 19th century.