Charge at the Alamo
Designed and Developed by Richard Trevino
Playtesters: David Smith, Jerry Gibson
This is a free Desk Top Published game on the Battle of the Alamo. Feel free to download and to send this link to friends who might be interested. If you would like to contribute to the designer as a token of appreciation, you may use your PayPal account. Richard's email address is: blackland2001@hotmail.com. He would even appreciate a dollar for a soft drink---all voluntary, of course. Address:
Richard Trevino, 6313 Evers Road, Apt. 1410, Leon Valley, TX 78238
William B. Travis
Santa Anna
Design History
“Charge at the Alamo” was born in 2003 as a solitaire, lunch hour friendly game meant to be playable in 10 minutes or less that came with one letter sized map crammed with strength tracks and CRT’s and five playing pieces (the Mexican columns). The point of the game was simply for the player to get two of his columns into the Alamo, before reaching 50% casualties. There were no Texian units or artillery pieces, the Alamo was not divided into areas, the strength of each wall was double what they are now and meant to represent both difficulty in scaling that wall AND the unseen Texian forces. Instead of adding up the total of defending forces to show the intensity of Texian fire, each Outside area had a fixed +2 or +3 die roll modifier, which represented defender strength and the amount of artillery fire that could be directed into that area.
The parts of the original game that carried over to the 2006 version almost unchanged were obliques, the sequence of play, two CRT’s, command checks, special Cazadore attack, and the prohibition against entering more than one column from the west per game.
What got the ball rolling for remaking the game into a more traditional two-player game with units shooting at each other etc. was a suggestion by my old friend David Smith, designer of his own game “Battle Cry of Freedom: A Civil War Card Game,” to give a Texian player a few “discretionary points” to reinforce any wall or attack at his preference, perhaps by placing these points upside down within the Alamo at the beginning of the game to keep the Mexican player guessing.
Well, I carried this thought around in my head for three years before I realized that I could remove 1 or 2 points of strength from each wall and convert these into discretionary points without substantially changing the design. I realized I had to come up with some method to prevent the Texian player from dumping all his discretionary points into one area per turn and so came up with what were, in effect, stacking limits.
I began to come up with goofy rules to prevent the Texian from dropping his points anywhere and when perfectly needed like descending angels. It soon became obvious the best approach was simply to leave the discretionary points on the map, call them Texian units, and come up with rules to allow them to be maneuvered about. That’s how the current Alamo map got the areas you see today, to regulate movement.
The game all but designed itself at that point. The fixed modifiers per area meant to represent Texian fire were converted, surprisingly, into a one for one exchange for the current artillery units, with only a point changed here and there to make it gel with my targeted unit scale. The five big Mexican units were simply broken down into their ten constituent units, the battalions (or actually mixed battalion task forces) that made up each column. All Mexican unit and walls strengths were to have been kept on tracks off-map.
The final big change occurred in October 2006, while recuperating from back surgery. I always hated the record keeping aspect of the game and my muse apparently agreed with me. Each strength point of each Mexican column was simply converted into an on-map playing piece. Voila! One hit scored on the chart still meant one strength point destroyed. This meant each Mexican strength point equaled about 60 men, especially after I added one or two more points and gave the Cazadores a value-added doubling in size.
