Leuthen Solo

So it took a while, but I finally finished assembling the church and ten paper regiments (thirty stands) of heavy cavalry. The Prussians got cuirassiers and the Austrians what I think are heavy dragoons. The Wofun chaps will count as "regular" cavalry. Infantry are easier to tell apart, since I have plenty of the plastics in grenadier or fur caps.

"the lighter the category of cavalry
the more pronounced the curve in the blade of its sabre."
- Christopher Duffy

Of course, then I procrastinated getting the game going. It's the last day of December, so I think I can still claim this is an anniversary game. I've also been reading a book on AWI naval warfare, and working on the DnD 5th Edition Player's Handbook (not that that will be much use past May when a new edition comes out).

Junior General's Leuthen scenario is even more basic than others in its class on the site; for example, columns aren't a thing, so all units move at the same speed. Although those 24 inches from the enemy may make double moves. Fair enough.

The setup, on a 4x6 table (smaller than the recommended 5x7):

Range is unusually short in this scenario; most have guns with 24" range, but here it's 12" (infantry have 6"). The sides start 18" apart, so movement is in order. Perhaps to make this feel like a larger battle? On the other hand, units can both move and charge.

Turn 1: On the right, the Austrian cavalry start to sweep round the Prussian left flank. On the left near Leuthen, the Prussian cavalry drive the Austrians back into Leuthen and kill their commander, Nadasty.

Turn 2: The Austrian cavalry drives back the Prussian flank guard, wiping out half of it, but on the left the Prussian horse fight their way into Leuthen. The Prussian infantry and artillery haven't even fired a shot yet.

Decimated Prussian horsw sweep through the village.

Turn 3: Prussian cavalry gets around Leuthen as the Austrian infantry reserves reverse ranks to hold them off. The Prussian left is still holding out against the Austrian cavalry, who can't make it over to Leuthen to hold off the looming Prussian infantry. Cavalry fight their way through the Leuthen defenders.

The equivalent of Rot-Wurzburg did not hold this time.

The church is practically surrounded.

Turn 4: While its left flank desperately holds out in Leuthen under heavy fire from the Prussian center-right, the bulk of the Austrian army tries to form a line behind Leuthen to hold off the Prussian horse. The Prussian cavalry has got past Leuthen by now while the infantry is firing into the town and causing casualties. I think this is definitely a Prussian victory, though their cavalry has taken a beating.

While Prussian horse is following up, I think it's clear
that the Austrian infantry could finish forming a line on
this side of town before the Prussian main force arrives.

I find the Junior General rules a little fiddly for a solo player because of the morale mechanism - before melee both sides must remember to check.

1. Attacker checks - if failed, no charge
2. Defender checks - if failed, lose a base and fall back
3. Melee roll-off - loser loses a base and falls back.

Each scenario is slightly different, but all of the "horse and musket" types taken together make for a nice, simple set that, as intended, would work well for kids. It would help if I had an opponent to remind me of the steps, though!

The other issue - and this is my own fault for "mixing" miniatures - is reassembling the units in their correct groupings and boxes. I might have to find a way of notating the regiments, perhaps by sticking tabs under the bases.

It is two hours to midnight here on New Year's Eve, so I at least completed the Leuthen anniversary game in the same month! All the best to you and yours, and here's to more gaming activity in the new year. Thanks for all the commentary and encouragement I've gotten from readers - community is key to gaming, even online. See you next year!

Junior Generals at the Library, take one

 I've been talking and thinking about it for ages, but I finally got there: two days ago I ran a tabletop wargame at work.

Not that I haven't before, but that was years before I started this blog. Hopefully this will be the first of many.

I was lucky to have, on the one hand, a captive audience of interns who needed something to do that could be argued to be relevant to library programming, and on the other, a couple adult staff with particular expertise in teen programming - mostly the technical sort, but non-electronic activities fall under their purview too, so this was a useful experiment.

I had a choice between running a simple role-playing game (which I mentioned during a recent teen advisory board as a summer-program possibility) and a wargame. I ran the wargame after one of the interns expressed interest in the plastic soldiers I'd brought - a handful of the Black Powder frames I've been assembling.

Here we see one advantage of painting -  if I'd done it
the sides would be easier to tell apart despite the bad photo.

Again, I used Sawmill Village as the inspiration - for the units at any rate. Each side has three regiments, two guns and two generals - the contents of two frames apiece. The rules were a subset of Junior General's horse-and-musket scenarios. I counted each infantry base as two, so that each regiment of three or four bases counted as six or eight for the purposes of combat, with Paperboys casualties used to indicate loss of odd hitpoints. This created confusion, and in hindsight two regiments of five bases each would have worked.

Infantry move 6" in line, 12" in column. Guns may move 12", but may not fire in the same turn. Commanders move 12". Guns have a max range of 24", musketry 12". Above, the Union open their advance on the open brown plain of Tabletop.

Another issue was that there were two players a side (and a fifth turned up midway thru the game - he appointed himself strategic overseer of the Union). With an odd number of units each side, play had to be cooperative, and when rolling dice in particular the players each rolled half (this was their own idea). Two regiments, one to each player, would have been preferable. Fewer units also would have helped us get thru the game faster, as we only had an hour to work with.

Anyway, above you see turn one, in which we simply spread the units around 24 inches apart. The Union are moving forward.

Here the Union column has charged a Confederate line.
The Union artillery are classically deployed in the center.

After a charge, before end of the combat.
The paper casualty markers indicate half-a-base worth
of casualties. The rebel general has also been eliminated.

A wider view; the Union column lost the action and retreated.
Union guns fire thru the gap to hit the right-hand rebels.

From the rebel side of the table this time. I think
the rebels are trying to flank a Union unit here.
A casualty box is visible.

In what became the last turn, a Union regiment (center)
lost combat to a rebel regiment (right) and has retreated
backwards into a second rebel unit (left). The Rebs aren't aligned
to hit the Yankees in the back, but I'd still say the Union's in trouble.

We stopped here due to closing, but the kids (and staff) were enthusiastic enough to declare the game a success, with tentative honors going to the bad guys in grey. There was still confusion over the rules so I had to gamemaster, and with more time I'd have gone over them beforehand with the players rather than taking them on as they came up. I also don't think I'd do this on a regular basis, but with more planning it would work for "special events" like Fourth of July, etc. Overall it worked as the playtest I intended; at least I know what not to do next time!

Speaking of which, I hope next week to run Hampton Roads (with a different Junior General ruleset) on its 160th anniversary. This will enable us to talk up the 3D printer, too. Wish us luck...

The Second Battle of Sawmill Village

 Having exhausted my dice in close combat, I'm repeating the game under Junior General rules. Units fight as bases and are six bases strong. As this post explains, I'm having each base stand in for two, with casualty figures to indicate odd numbers remaining. I also took fewer photos; let's try for a shorter battle report.

The rules are those in Junior General's Saratoga scenario - it has light infantry and Built-Up Area rules.

I decided to treat the first battle as the first step of a campaign, so since the French won, they start in the village and the British must come onto the field. I used different units (the originals were badly battered by the action) and also tried Charles Grant's units for his second run-through. So instead of three infantry regiments and a gun, each side had a light infantry regiment replacing one of the line regiments.

This is a good thing, since two light infantry regiments is all I've got.

The British side are the 43rd Scots, the Yorbourne Grenadiers, the 1st Loyal Highland Company and a gun, commanded by Brigadier Smith.

The Franco-Scots are the Bulkeley Regiment, Royal Ecossais, Border mercenaries and a gun, under General de Brigade Forgeron. 

The Franco-Scots hold the village with the Borderers and the gun; the regular French units will march to their assistance later, rolling a 6 on the first turn, a 5+ on the second, etc, until they both arrive.

The Brits come on in the first two turns, starting with the Highland Company.

After turn 1, the British skirmish line is halfway to the village. The French gun's line of sight is good, but out of range.

After two turns, they're even closer, but musketry range is 6", so still no firing. The Royal Ecossais come on in response to messages from the garrison, accompanied by their brigadier. As the skirmishers move at 6", the British troops follow suit and shake into line.

On the third turn, the British come into musket range, and the Highland Company's fire into the village is deadly accurate.

On the fourth, the French form into line on the left and all fire goes into the skirmishers. 17 dice and a single six to hit! The British skirmishers move to their right to give the line regiments room to charge. The battle goes poorly - despite outnumbering, having the general present, and a grenadier unit, the desperate mercenary Scots drive the British back!

On the other hand, the British gun is in position to pour fire into the village. The Scots are punished for their resistance.

Then the French line go in. Ecossais and Bulkeley, the cream of the foreigners in French service, drive the Highland Company off. 

The British gun would seem to be in trouble at this point. The Irish wheel to take it in flank ... but they fail their morale check to charge, obviously daunted by the thought of a charge of canister in the face. Instead, the gunners blast the village again, which is probably well and truly afire at this point as the skirmishers are driven out!

The British line march back into the fight, but the 43rd Highlanders take a volley from the Ecossais. The Irish pluck up courage and charge into the British gun. The luck of the Irish is with them as the gun misses! Impressively, the gunners pass morale and then hold their ground in melee.

The 43rd desperately charge the Ecossais, settling old scores with fellow Scots in the melee and their commanders urging them on. The exiles lose this one, but the Wild Geese nearby manage to eliminate the English gun.

At this point, the British have taken severe casualties, including a precious cannon. But the French have lost their skirmishers and the village. Generals Smith and Forgeron exchange haughty nods across the field. There will be another day.

A much faster and simpler game than my last try. I made enough mistakes and reversed decisions, though, that I'm even more interested in Free-Kriegspiel style now. Every game provides new ideas and seeds for the next.

How many bases to a regiment?

 As I said in the last post, Charge! is among my favorite beginner rulesets. I prefer simple rules for solo games, and especially for running with kids - thoughts about fantasy roleplaying with young'uns will be in future posts. But I'm torn between the old-school each-figure-represents-one-man style and the simpler, easier-to-grok "unit base." 

One set I have in mind is something Donald Featherstone devised later in his career, in which casualties are not even removed, but a regiment is assigned a certain number of hit points, and when they are gone, so is the unit. Simple, but one must track the hit points, which can be tricky if you have a lot of them. You can mark them on a paper army list, but this takes time if you have lots of units on the table. I've experimented a bit with a few derived rulesets found at the Natholeon's Empires blog, and they're very workable, because you can have units of any size.

Another is the 18th-century rules of Wargames Illustrated #75 and #134. I used them recently, and very successfully, to play a solo Jacobite mini-campaign with my new Wofun figures. A unit has four bases and, effectively, two hit points. When hit once, a single base is removed; the second hit removes the entire unit. Assorted variables (flanking, range, fierce enemies) provide pluses and minuses to the roll.

Not having room on my tiny table for four-base units, I used two bases for each, and a casualty figure to mark the first "hit."

This leads up to one of my favorite simple rulesets, if only because it has been used consistently with schoolchildren - Junior General's 18th-19th century rules.

Units in these rules have, as a rule, six bases, with units removed once they have one left. Effectively, they have five HP, but six dice for combat and firing. Smaller units (and, rarely in the scenarios, larger) are accordingly less (or more) effective. One for the Saratoga campaign assigns three bases to all the militia. Two hits and they're off the table.

Most of Wofun's units come in sets of four or five bases.

You might think this is no big deal. But, while I haven't actually playtested it, the writer has, and he probably has a reason for a norm of six. My guess would be that smaller units are significantly less reliable, and disappear from the table quicker. Kids don't enjoy it when they find themselves commanding nothing too early in the game. There is a caveat in that commanders are harder to kill, and a brigade CO can stay on the table and assist other units even with all his own men gone.

Obviously, it's not hard to build up armies with inexpensive paper figures, and the Junior General site has an enormous variety of them. Peter Dennis' Paperboys are absolutely beautiful, and just cutting them out is relaxing like nothing else. And there are plenty of others out there.

But some of the Junior General scenarios require hundreds of bases. This is not that big a deal if you only have two figures per base - even in 1/72 plastic, eight or ten boxes will do you. But Paperboys - with six to twelve figures per base - are so realistic and colorful in comparison I couldn't resist. More fool, me.

It took me weeks, building in spare moments at work, to construct all necessary bases from the Paperboys AWI book for the King's Mountain scenario - ninety to be exact, plus ten commanders. Each base has two ranks. Many for earlier eras have three.

Just the Americans.

Reducing the size is one way to reduce the time and effort. Unfortunately, printing in color at work is not as simple as it could be, requiring several extra steps, and using 8.5"x11" paper (rather than the original A4) also confuses things.

And then I had a thought. Here's the standard Junior General formations:

That line formation looks deep for its width, especially if you are using multi-rank bases like Paperboys. The reason for them, however, is that Junior General uses fewer figures per base, in a single "layer." So to have a proper two-rank line, you need lines to be two bases deep. When playing their scenarios at first with Paperboys, I extended the lines to 1x6 for the look of the thing, as the individual bases are two-rank.

But what if I just use three bases, rather than six? Then with two ranks, I essentially have six "elements" on three bases. And I can use a casualty marker to note when a single rank is lost, counting it as a base for purposes of the rules. When two ranks are lost, remove a base. Ranks can be removed from the Wofun bases instead, but as I've mentioned they're a touch fragile, so the less handling, the better. Also, there are plenty of casualty figures available. It would also be possible to make single-rank bases from the paper figures if desired.

This has advantages:

• More space, either for a more open tabletop or to fit larger armies.
• Larger armies, as formerly six-base units can be split into two. Not as useful for the Wofuns which come as eight- or ten-rank units rather than twelve, but there are some combinable units like Irish picquets and converged grenadiers.
• Smaller units for smaller tabletops.

I'm not positive how well this would work for kids. Teens would probably get it quickly, but for younger players having six bases is still probably preferable. It will, however, work for home games - time to experiment!