Kircholm: Riga in the Balance 27 September 1605

The Polish-Swedish War (1600-1611) was five years old when Sweden's Charles IX led an army to besiege the Latvian port of Riga. The bickering Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth cobbled together a relief force, which took station near the town of Kircholm. Charles put his army through a miserable night march to find Poles awaiting him. Kircholm uses a simplified variant of the Pike and Shot system to portray combat. Massive pike blocks form the basis of each army, with thin lines of musketeers for firepower and tightly packed cavalry for shock power. Artillery is only an adjunct-powerful but immobile. Battles focused on maintaining the dense formations. Once broken a unit was easy pickings, a single broken unit could snowball quickly into an ignominious rout. —description from the back of the box