From the Publisher:

Freeman's Farm: 1777 is an Old School War Game with an Old School look!  Military style map with military formations and a vintage layout. Created and Designed by Maurice Suckling.

An innovative card driven board game on the Battle of Freeman's Farm.  1 - 2 players.  Playable in 1 hour.

Freeman's Farm: 1777 is the first game in our new Battle Formations game series. These games are a new game system  centered around battle formations and have been designed for solitaire and two players .  In solitaire mode players can play as either the American or the British against the solitaire player game engine.   

Players decide which formations to activate and how far to push it once it begins attacking. Push it just enough and they can win the day.  Push it too much and failing a morale test will break it.

Freeman's Farm has been designed for easy set up and quick game play. Game unit placement is shown on the game board and units are wooden markers representing troop and artillery formations.

Both sides require you to make hard choices on which formations to activate, how long you want them to press their attacks, and when and where to move them.  Building momentum with your formations is important.  Choosing how to use your momentum is critical.  Use it well and your formations can break the enemies formations in a closely contested fight.  Squander your momentum and the battle is lost.  The decisions are yours…

The object of the game is to break three of the formations of the opposing side.  This is done by activating your formations and choosing  the best actions for it to undertake given the state of the battlefield.  

Should you fire your artillery or attack with your infantry?  Or should you move your formation to a part of the battlefield that provides an advantage?  Or reinforce a faltering formation with troops from a stronger formation?  Whatever choices you make, there is a cost to the morale of your active formation.  

Further you are limited on how many times you can call on a formation, and once called on you must decide how long you want it to press the attack.  

Each time you call on a formation your army gains momentum.  As your army builds momentum it allows you to press your formations to continue attacking.  But the cost is a reduction in the momentum the army has built up as well as reductions in the morale of the attacking formations.  

Each formation has a fixed number of troop markers that can be hit in combat and are also subject to breaking from morale loss.  Each formation can only be activated when its activation card is played, and these are limited and not always available.  Each formation reduces its morale when activated and when continuing attacks. 

Formations are broken when they fail a morale test OR when all their troop markers are eliminated.

SET UP AND PLAYER TURN EXAMPLE:

Set up the game board by placing the wooden troop markers like colors on the game board and cubes in the zero position for army momentum and turn 1 on the turn track.

Now set up your formation cards near the game board and place one cube on the start 10 on the momentum track of the formation card.

Shuffle each side's formation activation cards and deal out 3 cards.

If using the optional tactic cards shuffle the common deck, remove the top 5 cards and set in a discard pile, and deal 3 tactic cards to each side.

You are ready to play.

Turn 1 example of a player's turn:  

British go first.  In their hand are: Fraser, Phillips, and Fraser.  Tactic cards are not being used in the example.  If they were, a player could play them in a turn but must reduce army momentum when they are played by the momentum cost of the tactic card played. 

The British player decides to activate Fraser and plays the one with 3 army momentum cubes on it.  For that activation he increases his momentum marker 3 spaces on the army momentum track.  

He reduces Fraser's morale by 1 on the formation card.  He decides to use Command  A on his formation card which is "Attack Learned".  No modifiers are available so he rolls 5 dice for his attack.  

The results are 6, 4, 2, 2, 1.  It takes doubles to apply die roll affects.  The British player decides to keep the 6 and the 4 because they can adversely affect Learned's formation.  He sets those dice aside. He does not like the 2's and 1 as they adversely affect his formation.  He decides to keep attacking with these 3 dice.   

Continuing the attack requires the reduction of army momentum by 3, or a reduction of your formation morale by 1 or the removal of a troop marker from that formation.  

He decides to reduce the army momentum by 3 for the continuation of his attack. He rolls the remaining  dice for his attack and results are  4, 1, 1.  He decides to keep the 4 and keep attacking with the 2 remaining dice.  

He has no army momentum remaining so decides to reduce Fraser's morale by 1.   The results of the 2 dice used to continue the attack are 6 and 1.  He likes the 6 and keeps it.  The 1 causes no harm by itself so he decides to stop attacking.    

The results are tallied for the British turn. The double 6's cause a troop loss for Learned and one troop marker of Learned's is removed from the game board.  The double 4s cause a reduction of morale by 1 on Learned's formation card.  The single 1 die is ignored.   

This ends the British turn.