Commanders, a wargame digest

Commanders, a wargame digest

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Dear Diary - a rolling 4 months of comment

10 Feb 2024

Campaigning as Archduke Charles

When JWH asked for a couple of volunteers to become involved in a French / Austrian Napoleonic campaign in northern Italy, I jumped at the chance.

The idea is that there is one French and one Austrian player. They set the strategic plan and review it weekly.

All manoeuvres / contacts / battles are played out by JWH.

There is a starter post over on his blog.

LINK

https://hereticalgaming.blogspot.com

Today I am taking the troops at my disposal and laying down the army organisation, listing the initial deployment and sorting out the first set of strategic instructions to send to my regional commander - it will be for him to interpret and execute those instructions …… what can possibly go wrong :-)

Happy campaigning.

9 Feb 2024

The streets of Ligny 1809

Ligny is a module in the Eagles of France system by Hexasim. It is a big two map game covering the whole battle, but it has a couple of one map, shorter scenarios, that zoom in on particular actions.

Streets of Ligny is a four turn scenario, that sits comfortably in an evening’s play and covers Gerard’s assault on the Prussian held village of Ligny. It is interesting because I don’t know of another boardgame that does napoleonic street fighting at this scale.

In our previous playings, it has been a tough job for the French, trying to evict the Prussians, who have reinforcements arriving. Today, it was just as tough.

In the mid-game we got ourselves into something of a stalemate and the emphasis moved to laying down fire rather than assaulting.

It all ended in a Prussian win, as attrition of French ranks made it harder to keep up the pressure. 

As always, a good game.


8 Feb 2024

Shermans on the east front

Sherman tanks of the Red Army, authored by Peter Samsonov and published by Gallantry Books. Softback with 113 pages, it is priced at £12.99, but I picked up this copy in a Book Remainder store.

More than 4000 examples of the famous diesel-fuelled M4A2 Sherman tank were sent to the Soviet Union during WWII under the Lend-Lease programme.

The book describes the development and specification of the tank, including statistics on gun / armour performance, then describes a number of actions that involved the tank in various battle situations on the eastern front.

For those that know the Osprey Publishing books, it is in a similar format, a sort of cross between the Vanguard series, Combat series and Duel series.

It looks to be a very good example of it’s type and chock full of stuff that the wargamer can pull from it for rule and scenario design.

7 Feb 2024

Prepping for Austerlitz

This is the two mapper game from Hexasim in their Eagles of France system.

There are 4 scenarios in total. The first three are each one map and 5 turns. A turn represents an hour.

The full battle scenario uses two maps and takes 12 turns.

Today will be an admin day of loading up the army rosters with counters, ready for placement on the map and a quick rule / scenario read to prep up.

This is quite a meaty game. Ligny took me 11 hours to play, so I am expecting upwards of that for this.

As an aside, I have the Jour de Gloire game on Austerlitz, a much smaller footprint, but equally meaty, with a long playing time, so it might be interesting to compare the two, especially as both systems are supposed to be doing Eylau as their next game.

6 Feb 2024

Figures sent for painting

Up until recently, every figure that I have ever owned has been painted by me. However, at the end of last year, to help the napoleonic project move forward, I bought two pre-painted units from e-bay.

I have now moved into the new territory of sending some figures to a commission painter. This is just a small unit of 8 cavalry.

I took the cavalry off their temporary bases that I have been using to game with and noticed that on one base (of 4 horses), I had used the wrong horse furniture, so I had to do a new build from the stash. I’m not keen on making up multi build figures, but they are a must when dealing with plastics.

Anyway, it took longer than I thought, but I was able to box up all eight ‘correct’ figures and send them off yesterday.

Very much looking forward to what comes back.

4 Feb 2024

Vapnartak today

Today is the opening wargame show in the UK calendar and as I type this, I would normally already be on the road, making to Vapnartak …. but not this year.

A primary reason is that the car has an oil warning lamp lit. It is going to the garage tomorrow, for what I am sure is just a servicing thing, but I am not in a rush to put a couple of hundred miles on the clock at motorway speeds until that is sorted.

I am surprised that I am not hugely disappointed, but Vapnartak is primarily a traders show, there are some games, but the focus is significantly on trade and I seem to have hit a point that in which I don’t need to make any main purchases and those that I do, I think I will wait for a show closer to home and throw my support behind that.

After the big clear out, I have a stash that needs painting before more is added and on the boardgame side of things, I have some big purchases over the past four months, some are pre-orders and I still await them, but generally, I now think the boardgame collection will be more settled.

One thing that I would have liked to do at the show is look at the bring and buy and see if anyone is selling any painted units - there were some nice examples last year and I stupidly didn’t bite.

I am under a bit of pressure to get my napoleonic project firmly under way and to that end, with the money that I will save from missing today’s show, I am going to treat myself to getting a napoleonic unit painted by a commissioned painter. I have not done that before, so I just see it as rather a joyous and luxurious thing to do …. A treat indeed!

On a sad note, I heard yesterday that Graham Cummings has just died. A really nice gentleman who was very much part of the fabric of the hobby - he will be missed. He took part in my play by e-mail game of Wavre last year and was a big fan of the Piggy Longton Chronicles.  

2 Feb 2024

Maintaining the 1809 project

Between Christmas and having builders in my gaming space for almost 3 weeks, my gaming has lost all traction and the painting schedule has gone out of the window, so I am now trying to get back on track with a renewed painting regime.

To help, I have drawn up a couple of rosters for the 1809 project to direct me what to build and paint next. This is the French one. I presently have an Austrian Line Regiment on painting sticks.

Adding this up, the basics required for each force is 100 infantry, 16 cavalry, 2 guns with 6 crew and a command base with two mounted generals.

So doing two forces for a total of 200 infantry, 32 cavalry and 4 guns is a fair bit of work and giving myself a year seems a reasonable prospect. I does however fit rather well with the Pocket Army concept.

It does all mean that the Wars of the Roses project cannot grow this year and the 1066 project, which I am very keen to start, is dead in the water for now.

I recently saw a sale of 132 Polish Infantry and 32 cavalry at the superb price of £100, which were well painted and perhaps I should have jumped on it as that would have left me just having to paint up my Austrians to fight the French Polish ally, as they did in 1809 - it sort of feels like an opportunity lost in the short term.

However, my French force is fairly advanced and includes two bought pre painted units (which together cost more than the £100 mentioned above), so I found myself rather compelled to stick with the original French / Austrian plan, which is fine.

I had wondered about setting up a local club, with one of the advantages being able to do a bit of project sharing, but administratively the distractions to an already full plate probably outweigh the benefits and I think these sort of things are probably best left to two to four friends just meeting locally without all the fanfare. Maybe putting on a small game at a local show might be a way to get that ball rolling.

29 Jan 2024

Stamford Bridge 1066. One of two battles (the other is Hastings) that I designed some time ago and which were published by Revolution Games.

The games have gone out of print, but have been picked up by Legion Games. Geoff Noble is designing the third battle, Gate Fullford so that the package can include all thee battles of 1066.

That's three armies, Harold's, Hardrada's and William's.

Anyway, I got the Revolution Games Stamford Bridge game to the table today and this was the (surprise) result!

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2024/01/stamford-bridge-1066.html

27 Jan 2024

Lord Stanley’s men arrive

Fresh from their painting sticks, two contingents, bow and men-at-arms, arrive at Piggy Longton to support Lord Darcy.

Lord Stanley is not present, but the troops are led by the able Sir. Raymond Roddington.

Good news! - Perhaps!

Details posted over on the blog. LINK

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2024/01/lord-stanley-arrives-at-piggy-longton.html

26 Jan 2024

From the Ligny battlefield

With building works at home now concluding, this is my first return to the table here, for some three weeks. Thank goodness, it has been much missed.

For our face-to-face game, the St. Amand La Haye scenario from Hexasim’s  napoleonic, Eagles of France, went onto the table, as always giving a good game. This is one of the actions from the Ligny 1815 battlefield.

On points the Prussians (defenders won), but the French early on got the better game, though over the course of the game, they were hurt by an unhealthy flow of routing units.

As the fighting around the central village went too and fro, the Prussians were kicked out of the chateau, by heavy fire, but Zieten himself was on hand to take his Landwehr back into the Chateau (see the photo above).

The French have green bands on their counters.

Artillery played an important part in the battle. The initial French advance was halted by Prussian guns as three French battalions routed and mid game, the french brought their guns up in front of the village and inflicted grave casualties on the Prussian defence, who resolutely stood their ground in face of that fire.

There was a nice cavalry action on the top ground, as French 3rd Cavalry Corps tried to get around the Prussian position. They charged a light infantry unit on the other side of a stream. The infantry managed to form square in time and the combination of square and the disruptive nature of the stream, saw the cavalry bounce off and forced back to the woods.

These smaller scenarios are only really intended as introductory scenarios to games that cover full battles, but they give an excellent evenings play.  

23 Jan 2024

Making tufts

Time to spend an hour or so making tufts with the Woodland Scenics static grass applicator.

I bought this some time ago thinking it would become cost effective in the long run and it probably would, but my reason for using it is that some of my WotR and ACW bases have these home made tufts, so I am a bit compelled to keep on making them so that there is some continuity in basing styles.

I mix bought tufts with my own. Mine do look a bit home made, but that does help to put some irregularity into the look of the base, as bought tufts, especially the big 10mm ones, can look very neat and trim.

The cork mat with 12 holes is the jig that I made for the tufts. Today I am doing 24 x 10mm dried grass and 60 x 7mm green grass.

With a couple of WotR bases just getting their basing paste, these tufts will put straight into the production line.

would I buy an applicator if I had my time over, probably not.

22 Jan 2024

A rather nice campaign system

Each month the WSS magazine put up an online (Free) article that supports the current issue.

This time, we are looking at the rise of Napoleon and the on-line article is a 4 page description of how to run a 1795 campaign (Rivoli etc). It is an excellent article and could be tweaked to fit any period.

The blog discusses this further and includes a link for the reader’s convenience.

link

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2024/01/campaign-as-presented-by-wargames.html

20 Jan 2024

Dawn of Battle

New to the table to us is Dawn of Battle. The components here are from the Worthington Publishing game, which has a mounted board, but the rules and scenario book used are from the Blue Panther upgrade deluxe expansion.

It looks a very simple line-up with strong overtones from the Bill Banks low complexity Ancients series.

I can’t remember the protagonists in this battle, but one side (blue) has light chariots and the other side (red) has heavy cavalry amongst their mix, so it is always interesting to see how these two creatures fare when facing each other.

Well things got off to a great start. The chariots are impetuous and did a reckless move forward, which got them into a great deal of trouble. Then blue’s best leader was killed, it looked like it was going to a quick collapse of the blue army ……. But it wasn’t!

Instead it just bizarrely dragged on with victorious red being totally put off from attacking because they would just suffer disorders with no further deterioration of an already disrupted enemy.

We were forced to stop play because it just felt so wrong and pointless - we assumed the fault was so bad that it must be a failure on our part with the rules.

It was - there is an escalation process based around failed morale tests and we think this would likely be at the root of what we experienced …. So next time :-)

It does use cards, which I am not a fan of and they add to the generic feel of the game. I have read user comments on the Geek that after a while the battles start to seem quite samey.

I think the cards could be improved if they were more targeted. For example once per turn, the players draw a card and play the event. On one turn, the card forced the blue player into a permanent -1 on all future moral checks for the rest of the game, without any regard for the current situation of blue.

I feel it would be better if such an event was properly targeted, so for example the side that has the most losses, or has the most disruptions or has lost a leader etc is the side that suffers the morale drop - tending towards pushing them over the edge.

Overall though, there are enough good points to have another go, but of course with the melee rules used as intended by the designer.

16 Jan 2024

Rumbling on

Building work continues beyond the scheduled completion date and now snow compounds the problem.

The good news is that I can see now that the space and the lighting in it will be better for gaming when that can resume.

A bit of painting has happened on a couple of the evenings. A base of archers for Lord Stanley (WotR) have just left the painting sticks and moved to the basing department :-)

They are replaced by a group of men-at-arms that once painted, will be flagged with the colours of Lord Stanley - I got the flag from Pete’s Flags and very nice it is too.

Probably the unit after that will be a return to Napoleonics, but Austrians this time. I have an experiment in mind for doing the white uniform.

A Piggy Longton game has been played, using just dice and a matrix to work out a skirmish battle. It involves the journey of the Bishop of Dungborough, Stephen the Fearless, who is on a mission to get news to the King about rebellious shenanigans!

I just need my table back to do a record shot or two of some figures ‘on the road’ to support the narrative and then this action will be posted on the blog. Can the Bishop survive the perilous journey?

EDIT - done, the post is up.

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2024/01/piggy-longton-bishop-of-dungboroughs.html

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