Having trouble viewing the flipbook magazine? View and download it instead! The original version of Never Mind the Billhooks (published in Wargames Illustrated 393, September 2020) was a set of rules for wargaming smaller battles in the Wars of the Roses. It had always seemed to me that it would be easy to take the game forward a few decades into the Italian Wars of the early 16th Centuryor back into the Hundred Years' War. Therefore, the publication of the pan- European, late-medieval Never Mind the Billhooks Deluxe (or Billux Dillux) in late 2022 was a natural progression. I had always doubted whether the game's mechanisms would translate well into anything much beyond the late medieval period, as armies became more drilled and disciplined, and Command and Control systems grew moreprofessional, but, in the summer of 2023, there was a flurry of interest on the Billhooks Facebook page, when Pat Stoddart raised the idea of an English Civil War version. Fellow Billhooker Nigel Davie came up with the working title and I began to have doubts about my doubts. After all, apart from the rare, set-piece encounters like Edgehill and Naseby, the Civil War was fought out locally, in a series of minor actions and smaller battles - just the sort of thing toward which my Wars of the Roses game was pitched. If I was aiming at a sort of Adwalton Moor- rather than Marston Moor-level of game, why not see if the Wars of the Roses Billhooks 'engine' might still be a runner in another fratricidal English conflict, fought over the same ground two centuries later? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that, weaponry aside, the essentials hadn't really changed that much. In particular, these smaller affairs seemed to be rather uncoordinated, and short on generalship at the grand tactical level, so Billhooks' carddriven turn sequence would be a good way of representing them. What finally set me going was picking up a very nice, ready-painted 28mm ECW collection (Warlord plastics) at the Nottingham Britcon show in August 2023. With that, there was no stopping me, and I started working on the rules in earnest. I set out to keep the game mechanisms and unit sizes as close to the original as possible (if it ain't bust, don't fix it!), while adding the essential 'chrome' in the form of new troop types and period-specific amendments. Throughout the process I drew on my experience of writing a number of sets of ECW rules over the years. The special ‘Doctrine Dice’ attack sequence, which is a novel and key feature of Matchlocks, has its roots in something I wrote almost half a century ago! Some local
