Lutzen 1813

Had a fine game today at the War Office. I recently read Helion's Lutzen and Bautzen: A Wargamer's Guide, so was interested to find that Milton Soong was testing a scenario for Field of Battle 3rd edition.

Prussians in foreground, French in background.

10mm figures, four bases to a battalion.

Milton plans to run this at Hurricon next month, so was interested to know not just how we liked the rules but whether we could get thru the scenario in four hours. With Mike and me commanding the Prussians and John the French (Jacob from last post turned up partway through to help him), we began with a "scripted" advance onto the field - Lutzen was a surprise attack on the French.

Field of Battle is a card-driven system, using dice steps from D4-D12 for rolls which are always opposed. However, while this does give the "inactive" player something to do, it's still a UGO-IGO setup. On the other hand, a single turn can have many back-and-forths between the sides.

In each "phase", the players roll initiative on a D10. Winner chooses to go first or second in this bound, and both sides draw the dice-difference in cards. Once both sides have spent all their cards, they roll init again. This means that players can have anywhere from one to nine cards during a bound, and a few can be held over for later use. Once all the cards in the deck are gone, the next turn begins. So a single turn can (and did) last a long time - it took us four hours, Milton's time limit for a table at Hurricon. While that doesn't sound good, we actually got a lot of playing on both sides during that turn!

Each side also has a supply of objective counters, in our case coins:

The stone-on-a-base is used to mark hit points
or "UIs." When a unit takes more than three,
it is eliminated.

These are traded between players when objectives are taken, or given to the GM when casualties are taken, and returned when casualties are rallied off. Run out of the ones in your bag, and morale failures suddenly become more critical and can end the game at a stroke.

It should be noted that my partner, who claims to be constitutionally unlucky, rolled over a dozen ones in the course of the game, and rarely rolled better than half the number possible on the dice. I made up for it, mostly.

Mike had the only artillery. As the objective villages were on my (right) side of the table, he asked me not to envelop them until he was in position to enfilade the French left flank. I forgot this and in my first move, got far too close to the enemy (long range for musketry is six inches):

At this scale, the house represents the Built-Up Area
of Gross Gorschen, defended by one French battalion.

The French were either grenadiers or veterans, not sure which, so their standard die for combat was D12+2. Most of mine were Landwehr, at D4 or D6. This is boosted by cover, First Fire, etc, and reduced by supporting units, terrain, etc. Firing can be done at any time by the active player, but reloading requires an "infantry fire" card - play it and you can fire, reload and immediately fire again if desired.

By a combination of a great die roll on my part and a poor one on John's, his garrison broke and fled the village after a single volley.

If, for example, I have a D10 for firing, boosted to D12 by first fire, reduced to D10 by cover, and boosted again to D12 by point blank range, and I roll, say, a 10 whilst John rolls a 3, I have beaten him by seven. If a second battalion fires and beats John by two, this loss is increased to nine.

For each three difference (Delta for short, as in spaceflight's Δv) the loser loses one Unit Integrity or hit point. Four lost and the unit is eliminated, two and it routs. If the winner's roll was an even number, something else nice happens, such as a free formation change or (in the case of combat) the loser is disordered. Two UI - or "rocks" as Milton put it because he represented them with tiny boulders placed behind the unit - and they must retreat, even from a nice bastion of a village.

I couldn't get into the town because I hadn't gotten enough 8" move "segments", but it was now ready for me to seize next turn.

As both of us have fired but neither has
yet reloaded, this is indicated by cotton.
Each unit has a "rock" to indicate UI loss.

It was still our turn and we had three "move" cards in the deck, so I did eventually move a battalion into the BUI and started concentrating my second brigade on the other.

This failed pretty miserably.

The advance, once a move card or extra move "segment"
permits deployment into line.

The road between the Gorschens is bloodily contested,
both sides losing units and the French light infantry
finally driven off.

But my dice rolls in Klein Gorschen weren't as lucky
as those in Gross Gorschen. Even outnumbering my
opponent two to one wasn't getting me into the village.
And we can see French reinforcements in the distance!

Meanwhile, Mike was slowly advancing, thanks to poor opposed rolls. Even when there is no combat, the opponent always rolls a standard number for you to beat, usually on a D8. Depending on the difference, you can move one, two or three times. Infantry move 8" and cavalry 12". Despite his slow progress, on our third move card he received reinforcements, a cavalry brigade including horse artillery.

While he threatened the French infantry on his flank with these, he was unable to use his guns on the squares, so still little progress was made. At least the French musketry were reduced by a die type due to the square formation, as only one or two faces of the square would be firing at a target. As the turn wound on, the French also got cavalry for reinforcements, so despite more firing than melee the fighting on this flank didn't go far.

John and Jacob take instruction from the GM. The
center is visible, with French advancing while Mike's
Prussians approach the third objective BUI.

Mike got thrown back and so did I.

Having driven off my center from the road between
the Gorschens, Jacob was able to spin round and hit my
attackers in the flank (center right of this picture).

"Run away...!"

But more centrally on the table, I held the objective securely, especially since with the start of the second turn we had a fourth move card which got us another brigade of reinforcements. Rather than reinforce failure on our right, I sent it to support the captured objective and prevent the enemy from retaking it.

John had obtained French reinforcements on his right (our left) and with fairly even forces both in numbers and composition, he and Mike were stymied. Their side was almost too crowded at the point of approach to move. Infantry were in square so that cavalry couldn't deal with them, but the cavalry were in the way of guns, who in turn were menaced if they did get into position - the classic rock/paper/scissors of Napoleonics.

While John strongly holds the central objective (top right),
he can't move off it into the center of the picture because
of my reinforcements (center right) supporting my objective.
In turn, I can't menace him, because out of view to upper right
are his reinforcements eager to retake my objective.

This felt very much like a standoff, but we ended the game at this point. Since it was a playtest for Hurricon, and game tables have four-hour slots, the plan was to see how much game we could get through in a four-hour block, and we were well into the fifth hour.

However...!

While Mike and I had had some spectacular defeats (in part due to his ability to throw ones in a tight spot), having entire battalions deleted at a blow, the French had been worn away much more steadily. John and Jacob had lost fewer battalions, but had more with one or more casualty markers, and for each they had paid with a token.

Remember that we each had a bag of coin-tokens, giving these up when taking casualties or trading them for objectives. At this point John revealed that his bag was empty. Ours still had six tokens left. Had I not seized the center objective, the French would still have two tokens and the Prussians four. While it isn't a certain recipe for failure, if you lose a morale check without tokens to give up, the game is over.

So my one spot of good luck at the start of the game had allowed the Prussians to weather their steady run of bad luck. Pruessens Gloria!

In real life, the French, surprised by a morning attack, were pushed back across the entire "table" before managing to gather a counter attack. In a full-length game of three or more full turns, this would have been achieved - in our case sometime during the second turn, as the French side, now bereft of tokens, would have broken at some point.

We thus managed to fight to a decision in five hours. This doesn't sound good for a convention demo game limited to four hours, but then we only had three players for half of it, and there are six player slots. Milton also commented that one of the expected players would be familiar with the game and could be a co-GM at need.

John felt - justifiably, I feel - that the IgoUgo method was problematic in the game, as a side could only provide dice targets while the other was turning cards. As a surprise attack, the Prussians had automatically gotten initiative. While we were turning over initiative regularly (as after a run of cards the other side got its chance), Prussia had gone second in one round then first in the next, thus getting two rounds together without response. A game where we activated alternate units rather than alternate sides might have been preferable. The cards allow you to activate every unit with the appropriate ability - move all units, fire all infantry, rally off all casualties - though you must still pass an opposed roll with each unit to do so.

Milton pointed out that a "normal" encounter battle would have likely been much more even; the French were likely to lose this historical scenario in any case.

All in all, a successful playtest, and all of us enjoyed it enough to try again sometime. I would like to see how a more generic encounter battle comes out. As I've been delving into ECW and Jacob's personal interest is in Middle Ages, the rules do cover pike-and-shot as well. 

In other news, I have not yet finalized my new apartment, but have packed up most of my stuff and also traded in some of my old 40K boxes for $120 in store credit. Combined with the store discount, that could get me even a large starter box at a reasonable price - if I actually get around to doing something with one. I also moved most of my wargames to the War Office and my boardgames and RPGs to work.

Lastly, I actually finished painting a handful of figures (with the speedpaint pens). Go me!

Til next time...

Binge Weekend, Part 2

Well, we didn't do Charge! today, but we had a good time. Five attendees this time, and we played Waterloo with Command and Colours, then a small action from Pontiac's War with Fistful of Lead.

I didn't participate much in the first game; I got the British "center," and most of the cards our team drew covered the left and right. But I did get a feel for the game. Card-driven games aren't my favorite, they feel like you have less agency. Though to be fair, that is the nature of Murphy in combat. What felt weirdest was moving units in less step with each other than they would have been in real life - it's easy to isolate a regiment here if you're not careful. That's why the rules allow you to avoid retreating if you are "supported" by other units in touch.

The figures are very attractive, the customized board more so.

I was tempted to "borrow" it for Portable Wargames.

The Prussians arrived quickly for the scenario.

We stopped around three hours in, once it was obvious
that the Allied reinforcements could flank Napoleon.

Mark Ritchie ran the Fistful of Lead game, with some lovely buildings:

The sides were about even - 25 assorted Indians with three chiefs (chieves?) vs. a mix of British line troops and Rogers' Rangers.

Based loosely on the Battle of Bloody Run during the siege of Detroit, in which a British relief force under Captain Dalyell was ambushed and driven back.

British start to cross the creek.

Appropriate card deck for the occasion!

Bloody melee at the crossing.

While Rangers and light infantry engage on the left.

My officer ably directs matters whilst exposed.

My partner really drew this hand!

The decimated British retreat back over the creek.

So the historical result achieved at any rate! A good game, and I've also familiarized myself with Command and Colours, a popular ruleset for Paperboys.

A busy weekend. See you next week!

First Black Powder Game

Been a few weeks since I've posted; the usual doldrums plus non-gaming-related reading (though Lord Darcy does bring up some interesting imagiNation possibilities!). The chess club at work is going well; with a few staff joining in we usually have around 15 participants. I'm pretty hopeless at chess, and we have some really good players in the group both young and old. I prefer to teach the newer ones

Played a short-notice round of Black Powder at Das Krieg Haus. I've read Black Powder several times and am fairly familiar with the rules (7th Son's Youtube channel is an excellent teacher) but this was the first time I've gotten to play it, as the club generally prefers General de Brigade and, lately, member Mark Ritchie's Firelock.

Marko, one of our youngest and newest members, brought some 3mm French, Austrian and Prussian minis for an 1814 (6th Coalition) game. His intent was to have a loose campaign (well, operation), but instead we put together a fairly random table for a demo game without real objectives.

The board, with felt features and some very nice buildings.

Some infantry and artillery minis.

I was a little surprised to find that each base would represent a battalion or battery, as BP has much to do with formations. In practice, though, we found it easy to denote and remind each other what formations we were using. The guns had two bases per battery (see above pic) - one deployed, one limbered. Each player had about four brigades to work with, and there were some named generals, including Napoleon, on the field. We were not careful about command ranges, except with Napoleon's free reroll - he was way over on the right, so any command rerolls on the left would take a penalty!

My side of the board - in hindsight dangerously exposed, particularly my guns which I've put on the road for speed. The Prussian infantry is poised to cross the river at the village, upper left. My intent is to effectively refuse this flank while all our cavalry...

... rush over to the upper right and roll up the Austrian left flank.

This plan crumbled in the first turn, as a) the Allies got first turn and b) the Prussians rolled low enough on their activations to get multiple moves. Even at one-third scale to the moves (meaning 4" for infantry and guns, 6" for cavalry), I was already in trouble as the enemy was now close to my (still-limbered) guns.

On our first turn the French cavalry did get multiple moves of their own, and my partner Jim started nibbling at Marko's Austrians.

His at upper right are attacking Marko's cavalry,
mine are at center hoping to support next turn.

Closeup, after eliminating a unit.

I rolled boxcars to advance my guns - a Blunder! Used a reroll and this time I got snake eyes - three moves. Unfortunately, I had chosen to move as far as I could, rather than declaring, say, two moves and deploy for the third.

The head of my artillery column, up against
a brigade of sharpshooting Jager.

One battery (the second in column) managed to deploy
and fire on the Prussians just offscreen to left - to no avail.

Above: Turn Two, engaged with Jager, who accurately inflicted disorder on most of those infantry columns. My leading gun battery inadvertently charged a Jager unit - and beat it! Shades of Ramsay at Fuentes De Onoro. Unfortunately that was my only success.

Closeup of the result, with colored puffs to denote casualties.
My units have nearly all failed to make contact.

While on my left, the Prussians are heading for my back line.

Meanwhile, a bloody mess on the French right:

As can be seen by the puffball casualty markers.

Jim and Marko were trading a LOT of punches, leaving me and Mark on the left to discuss future games. Mark has run 50 games this year (!) and aspires to more in the next. We discussed using his rules to perhaps run a VBCW game. I lean towards using his 15mms, since he has plenty of interwar and WWI minis and terrain while my 28s and the club's modern 25-28 terrain are limited. There would be quite a bit of proxying, but it should still work if we can build something that looks like pastoral English countryside.

Allied Turn Three: the Prussians are way too close, I have gotta get outta here:

But the dice desert me and I can't get that far away.

End game after three turns: Basically the same as Waterloo
with directions reversed, though the Austrians are somewhat
worse off than Wellington.

Two major mistakes - putting my guns out on a limb and (related) underestimating how fast units can move in Black Powder. It can be a swingy game if you're not careful. My guns never got into action and ended up being targets, when I was going to use them to hold off the Prussians. To be fair, the game only lasted three turns, but still. Jim's half on the right was doing somewhat better, but I was not helping at all and he would have gotten pincered in another turn or two by the Prussians.

I have let Bony down. Like Grouchy if he got to the field but still effed up.

Not too bad an intro to the rules, even if it wasn't really traditional. 3mm does let you pack in lots of troops, at least. Well done to Marko, who GMed his first game for us and was confident at it.

Jim and I started in cataloging the club's book collection. He is planning a website for the club to get us more visibility. I also took with me a couple small boardgames about the Arab-Israeli wars and a 3d-printed Skyhawk which I hope to paint in Israeli colors:

Next weekend are two games I look forward to - the annual Limeys and Slimeys Regatta, and Pete Panzeri's 80th-anniversary Battle of the Bulge operational game. See you then.

Reading in Tuscany

It's getting to be a long month - I haven't added to this blog at all yet. Tired and - here and there - ill, I didn't visit the club (which put up its new shelves), play any games (other than lots of chess at work), or get much preparation in. I have desultorily labeled most of my Wofuns, which will be for another post.

I have done some reading. Currently on early Napoleonics, which I knew very little about going in.

I like Helion and Company, having started with their Paperboys publications and gone on to their other works. Their series of wargaming "guides" has its ups and downs. I read a good review of this one and ordered it - but had to do it in physical form as it's not available as an ebook. Helion has a lot of publications but are inscrutable when it comes to which ones are available electronically, and their relatively high costs get shipping tacked on. I ordered this one through Amazon rather than their site, which was a mistake. While it came quickly, it was in a shipping envelope rather than a box, and the spine was a bit battered and a page at the back torn. It's quite large - not just 300 pages, but A4 size and squarebound. That explains the price.

About a third is potted history of the War of the First Coalition. For a modern wargaming book, I'm a little surprised there wasn't much illustration, and the maps were so sparse and basic (not even borders) that for someone who doesn't know their way around France, the narrative could be confusing. There are a lot of statistics, names and footnotes. I've decided that even with descriptive text, maps with colored arrows are best for visualization.

The next third is your typical chapters on organization, uniforms, painting, etc - the stuff you need to know to collect an army. Not bad, but again sparse on the images. There is a full page showing the stages of painting a figure, but there are 20 stages so even on an A4 page it's hard to pick everything out.

The rest are scenarios. Interestingly here, there are naval scenarios as well as land, and there are also a range of scales and rulesets. I prefer generic scenarios in part because I don't play many of the more popular rulesets - though there are a couple here for General de Brigade, my local club's go-to for Napoleonics. The naval choice here is Sails of Glory, for which I have the starter set but find too complex for my taste. However, I think I can get away with using Junior General or, for the smaller scenarios, Limeys and Slimeys. I will sadly miss this week's annual regatta (delayed from December) and set in a fictional 18th-century Russo-British clash in the Pacific Northwest. But maybe I can get the group to try the action of Banda Aceh, in which two British 74s were challenged by a squadron of large French frigates.

While Throwing Thunderbolts didn't awe me, it did allude to plenty of interesting campaigns and people. One of the most heavily-used references was The Road to Rivoli, on Napoleon's Italian campaign. In the introduction and afterword, the author has much to say about this campaign (1796) as a prelude to Napoleon's better-known battles - it was his first independent command, and it was where he met many of the officers who became his closest aides and marshals. The future Lord Nelson even shows up, poking his nose into relevant ports that Napoleon relied on for supply.

The first part of the book is biography of Napoleon's life, focusing particularly on his education. While I knew his initial aim was to join the navy, I hadn't known that there was a possibility of his family ending up in Britain.(!) On the one hand, the wars just wouldn't have turned out the way they did had that happened, and (as happened in France) he wouldn't have gotten a place until 1793 (which would mean, like Hornblower, he'd never have made admiral in time to do anything pivotal), but what a setup for an alternate history tale! 

The key point, though, was his early reading of French officers who had a) served in Italy and b) focused on planning and preparation. The first gave him a background in Italian military geography that stood him well in the 1796 campaign; the second prepared him to build an army that could carry out the orders he gave it. Nearly all of his place in the following narrative is of writing letters, ordering supplies, setting up camps, scouting fortresses, firing or promoting generals, and looking out for decision points - that being the inevitable spot where military plans break down. His opponents had to think about their reactions, but Napoleon was a step ahead of him with the thought "if my opponent does this, I'll need to do that."

He also spent the campaign building a team of subordinate commanders. One of those he sacked had once been his own commander; others he had to cajole into taking promotion.

The Austrians and Piedmontese get plenty of attention too. (One was named Spork, a name I will swipe for my Imagi-nations forces.) While relatively disorganized in comparison - and flatfooted by a monthlong knockout campaign at the start - they gave the French a couple bloody noses and recognized, if belatedly, what they were up against. They were, however, fighting with older tactics and older generals, and Napoleon's planning and attitude kept up the momentum. I am reminded of Patton's dictum that "a good plan today is better than a perfect plan next week," and there were points where Austrian commanders dithered or moved back and forth.

Both sides were poorly supplied, and winter warfare, sometimes over the same ground as would be fought over in WWI, is well described.

Overall, a very enjoyable book. The maps are marginally better - the real problem is that I'm reading an ebook, so can't easily flip back and forth. But the description is much better, and the writing more lively. There are plenty of quotes from memoirs and letters.

What next on my bookshelf? Some Warhammer 40K stuff. I've picked up the final two volumes of the Horus Heresy series but not read them yet, and just received my reprint of the original Rogue Trader rulebook - a very interesting read, since it is virtually divorced from the game as it is today. Much more an RPG/GM-run skirmish game than a wargame. A delightful throwback with a 2000AD comics vibe to the illustration and background.

As it's President's Day this week, I have a two day weekend and will try to catch up with another post soon. Thanks for reading.

Happy Austerlitz Day (or not!)

I finished the late Christopher Duffy's book on "the Battle of the Three Emperors" this morning, and went to see Napoleon this afternoon.

So, yeah, a little whiplash. I like Duffy's work, but as I'm more interested in the 18th-century period that first got me into gaming, this is the first time I've looked at his Napoleonics. It's very good. Short, like his other major "battle" book on Rossbach and Leuthen, but comprehensive. I read it because I knew nothing about Austerlitz - or really, anything Napoleonic other than the Peninsula and Waterloo, what with my anglophilia - and wanted a primer before the film.

I needn't have bothered, because the film makes a hash of Austerlitz (and Waterloo). Austerlitz was more interesting than I expected, because like Waterloo it seems to have been a "close-run thing." Both sides were attempting the same maneuvers, both sides had significant successes. I also learned a bit about the Russian junior commander Bagration (still dunno how to pronounce it) who gave his name to a Soviet operation in WWII.

The movie turns Austerlitz into a single trap (when as Duffy points out, most of the Russians and Austrians got away), while Waterloo is Ney's cavalry vs. the squares and that's about it. There are plenty of other inaccuracies, but in general the movie itself is ... okay. From the reviews I've read, historians are trashing the (two) battles and liking the love story; non-history buffs are liking the battles and trashing the love story. The French, understandably, hate the whole thing.

My view? The film isn't so much bad or good as superficial. It spends so little time on any one incident as to trivialize them. For that matter, I was expecting a 160-minute film to drag, but it went pretty swiftly in part because it didn't linger on "sections," jumping years at a time with little if any explanation. If you knew nothing about the period, you'd probably be badly confused. And if you read up on the actual characters and battles, you'd be more confused.

There is a good movie to be made out of the Josephine-Napoleon love story, but this isn't it. There's a good miniseries to be made out of following Napoleon's military career; again, this isn't it. Put them both together in under three hours, and... I don't think it's a disaster, but it's certainly not an "epic showcase" of a movie. It doesn't seem to make up its mind about its main character, probably because of the parallel military and romantic plots. Even the famous incidents don't come off well, with famous quotes like "whiff of grapeshot" and "wooden walls of England" seemingly left on the cutting-room floor even when they come up.

Another anniversary comes up this week, that of Leuthen, and I am trying to organize my assorted 18mm Wofuns so as to play it. Grenadiers and Curassiers are the "improved" version of the basic troops in the Junior General scenario I'm planning, and their numbers are limited in my army, so there may need to be some cosmetic proxying - that or hasty construction of yet more Paperboys! Below is my list of necessary units, to be noted as I collect each type:

Prussia (played by Prussia, Hesse and Britain) needs:

• 5 Cuirassiers (to be Paperboys)
• 4 Grenadiers (Yes)
• 6 Line Cavalry (Yes)
• 7 Line Infantry (Yes)
• 5 Guns (Yes)
• Six individual commanders (Paperboys)

Austria (played by Austria, France and Scotland) needs:

• 5 Cuirassiers (Paperboys)
• 4 Grenadiers (Yes)
• 5 Line Cavalry (Yes)
• 10 Line Infantry (Yes)
• 4 Guns (Yes)
• Six commanders (Paperboys)

Since each unit requires six "hit points," I plan to use three bases for each, with casualty figures to denote odd HP losses. Putting all the figures back in the right box as they die will be hell...

"Austrians" thus far - units in fur caps (center) might stand in for grenadiers?

"Prussians" thus far - mostly British.

Leuthen Church is also cosmetic in the game, with Leuthen itself played simply by a strip of difficult cover, but I'm trying to build the Paperboys version anyway:

The "boxes" that make the false fronts are trickiest.

So I'll have to do some printing on Monday; in the meantime I'll try to finish the church. Thanks for reading!