There is this wargame called "Piquet" which is quite unlike other wargames out there.  In particular, the turn sequence is completely random, and a player may not even get to do ANYTHING in a turn, while that same player also has the chance to move his forces like mad in another turn, or even get a lot of chance to do things he doesn't want to, and no chances to do what he does want to.

Piquet is really great at modeling the effect of the difficulties of commanding an army.  Things never go quite how you plan them, orders get lost, enemies close quicker than you think they will, etc.  All of that is abstracted behind an "army deck" which contains cards like "infantry move", "artillery reload", and "do nothing" which let you know what you can do with your initiative points (IP).  IP are randomly generated by rolling 1d20, with the winner getting the difference in IP to spend on flipping cards and using those cards on their units.  There's no guarantee that you won't lose initiative every time and be immobilized!.  The deck is customized per-army [years before Magic did it], and elegantly models different national capabilities.

Unfortunately, Piquet is also a little on the "fiddly" side, and games can take hours to set up and play.

Enter "Field of Battle".

The Piquet guys recently released FoB, which has been described as "Piquet Light".  Though it's clearly a "cousin" to Piquet, employing essentially the same combat resolution and card system, FoB is quite different once you get past the surface similarities.  The biggest difference is in the PIPs system.  In FoB, a phase starts off with an opposed dice roll, but the commander's dice is used instead of a d20.  The difference in the two rolls controls how many PIPs are available, but for BOTH players.  The "winner" just gets to choose to go first or not.  PIPs are not spent to act on cards anymore, only to pull new cards.  The cards themselves are a bit simpler, and the "Lull" card now affords your opponent a chance to "steal" the rest of your turn!  Piquet's "morale chip" system has been replaced with a much simpler one, and pre-game setup time has been drastically cut back as well.

I've always been fond on Piquet's basic philosophy, but the few games I've played have left me cold, both from the slow pace of the game and the multitude of details you need to keep track of during play.  A game should be either leisurely OR intense, as I don't have a very good attention span!

[Volley & Bayonet is a good example of a "leisurely" game - the game takes hours to play, but the "off" player isn't very involved, so can take a restroom break, chat with friends, etc.  Chain Reaction is the opposite - the games end in less than an hour, and the "off" player often has more to do than the "on" player!  Both kinds of games have their place, naturally.  I guess it's "Baseball vs. Basketball".]

FoB sounds like just my ticket - I get the essence of Piquet's abstractions, but in a game that plays in 1/2 to 1/4 the time.

FoB is focused entirely on the "age of the bayonet", from around 1700-1900, which includes the "Lace Wars", "Napoleonics", the "Hyphenated Wars" [Franco-Prussian, Mexican-American, etc], and every American war up to WWI.  Personally, I'm most interested in the Seven Years War [Prussia not playing well with Austria] and the Mexican-American War [James Polk's Southwestern Land Grab].  If the rules covered the Thirty Years War as well my joy would be complete, but alas they don't stretch back to the age of "Pike&Shot".

People are hard at work adapting FoB to other periods though, and a "Chariot Era" variant is already floating around, which is of even greater interest to me than the musket stuff, especially as I already have miniatures ready to go in that period. :-)  Maybe someone (me?) could expand the rules into the "Pike&Shot" era....

Like most games I buy, FoB will probably wind up giving me a few weeks of enjoyment as I study the rules and daydream about playing.  I may even throw down some figures and play a few scenarios to see how I like the game in practice.  I've been trying to find any set of "musket" rules that I like for over a decade.  Maybe this one is it.  I surely don't need any more hobby projects on my plate, but once I own the rules they're not going anywhere, so maybe in a few years' time....