Fighting for Mexico - the unboxing

 It is a truth universally acknowledged that a wargamer in possession of more money than sense must be in want of a set of rules for a period for which he has no figures. I have, therefore, bought a copy of the newish Peter Pig rules 'Fighting for Mexico'.

They consist of 132 ring-bound, black and white pages within colour covers. There are a number of photographs, mainly showing examples of suggested unit basing, terrain types etc with only a couple appearing to illustrate points from the rules. A first read through gives the impression that they are easy enough to follow, and they do contain a number of snippets of the designer's thoughts. Peter Pig have a house style which involves those explanatory sections also being used to tell anyone who questions their decisions that they are wrong, which I have always found a bit irritating. The same could be said of their approach to editing and proofreading; pages 31 and 32 for example seem to me to contain exactly the same information repeated twice in pretty much the same words each time. 

They are inevitably gridded - which is good - and I understand that the RFCM rules which these most resemble are PBI and SCW, but I've never read those so can't confirm that. They do have some resemblance to Square Bashing, and many of the differences appear, at first glance, to address things I don't quite like about that set. In particular they allow units to be spread over more than one square, which would sometimes make sense in SB, and for which I have seen house rules on other blogs. It does, however, worry me that units are going to be very difficult to tell apart from each other without some sort of elaborate base marking system. That is, of course, all moot because I don't game the period. While I was ordering the rules I did take the opportunity to buy a couple of packs from Peter Pig's extensive Mexican Revolution range, but that was just by way of a look see...