Tuesday Night Boardgame: Battle of Ligny, 15:00hrs

I thought it was time to pull the dustcover off a game I’ve had sitting in a cat proof room for many months.  It’s Lighy from GMT’s now OOP quad game, Battles of Waterloo, a 1995 Richard Berg design.  I’m embarrassed that this game has been sitting still since August.  Life happened, and I had to force myself to sit down and figure out the rules, which seemed a little opaque to me at first, but I think I understand the major mechanics now.  

Now, in the middle of Turn 5, Thielman’s III Corps is now engaged to the east, while Zeiten’s 1 Corps has yet to be challenged for Ligny.  The fighting is on the outskirts so far.  This turn Pajol’s division of the Cavalry Reserve has been bumping heads with. Hobe’s III Corps Cavalry, while Milhaud’s cuirassiers have been battering the Prussians to the west.  Elements of Pirch’s II Corps are coming to the rescue.  Because the activation of units is random, the Prussian I and II Corps and the Imperial Guard, Gerard’s IV and Vandamme’s III Corps have yet to move.

This pious fellow is helping me keep track of the turns.  He’s my lovely Santa Clause 2014 gift from Stefan of Monty’s Caravan fame.

 

 

Here’s a close up look at the Pajol vs Hobe punch up on the French right.   Each of the units is a cavalry brigade and most have been in action this turn, hence the counters marked D1, showing disruption.  Disruption can be as a result of combat, but it also happens automatically to all cavalry at the end of the turn in which they Charge and Shock an enemy, so cavalry formations can quickly be used up.  As you can see here, Hobe’s cavalry are pretty much battered, but the fresh division of Exelmans is behind Pajol and could make life difficult for the Prussians on Turn 6 if Exelmans and the Cav Res activates before III Corps. If you’re curious about the size of the stacks, mostly the height is because of bookkeeping markers and leaders.   The rule is only one cavalry or infantry unit per hex, though a battery can stack with each or with another battery.  There are limits (9 I think) to the number of strength points that can fire out of a hex.

Meanwhile the Imperial Guard, with the fearsome Guard artillery to the fore facing five brigades of III Corps at the top right as they move to link up with I Corps at Ligny, and Gerard’s Corps at the bottom right, still have not moved this turn.  Ligny Chateau is probably safe for now, but the threat is building.

We’ll see how far I can get with this before next Tuesday.  I’d best get a move on because my stack of games to be played got bigger after these fellows arrived just before Christmas.  I blame Jon Freitag for putting me on to a sae by Multi-Man Publishing.  I elected to get four of their Brigade Series ACW games, including two different treatments of the Battle of Shilo, a battle I’ve always felt was under-treated by boardgame publishers.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

Speaking of games, only three seats left in the Diplomacy Game starting soon.

 

Tuesday Night Boardgame: Ligny From GMT's Battles of Waterloo Take Two

I haven’t had a lot of time to push counters around, but I’ve had enough to figure out a few things, including the fairly complex rules for command and control and activation of commands (corps and divisions).    The rules are rather complex, so I’m making slow progress.

Here’s the situation at the end of the 13:00 to 13:30 turn.  I don’t blame you for not making much sense of it.   The town of Ligny is in the centre, as is Blucher’s I Corps under Zeiten..   At the top, Pirch’s II Corp is beginning to march south to reinforce Blucher.  At the extreme right, the first elements of Thielmann’s III Corps is entering the map.  French are coming on at the bottom.

For the Frenchers,  left to right, Milhaud’s IV Corps CavRes, the Imperial Guard under Drouot,and Gerard’s IV Corps just starting to come on. The III Corps is out of the shot on the left.   Note that many of the units are followed by a n Extended Column marker.   While most units are brigade sized, the game has some tactical aspects, including large units taking up extra space while moving in column on roads and paths.   Units with 6 or more Strength Points  in tactical movement as opposed to road movement can flip these counters and adopt an extended line formation to maximize their firepower.

 

I haven’t quite decided how the French attacks are going to work.  I suspect it will be III and IV Corps, supported by the Guards artillery.  One of the interesting things about this game is the sequence of play, which is a chit pull system.  Depending on the Supreme Commander’s command rating, he can choose a number of chits representing Corps and Commands.    Blucher gets two, and Napoleon starts with three (his command rating depends on his health from turn to turn).  The sides take turns drawing chits, and once they are gone, they take turns trying to activate Corps and Commands that spent the turn without a chit.   I’ve pretty much got that figured out.  Now to work on the combat mechanics.

Speaking of games, Victory Point announced recently that it was discontinuing several of its titles.   I wanted two games because of their Canadian content, Operation Veritable, about the capture of the Reichswald in 19944-45, and their Juno Beach game from their D-Day system.   I also couldn’t resist getting “Toe-to-Toe Nuc’lr Combat With the Rooskies”, a tongue in cheek solitaire game about red-blooded B-52 bomber crews.  Hard to resist.

I suspect I’ll tell you about the B-52 game along with my next Ligny update.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

Tuesday Night Boardgame: Ligny From GMT's Battles of Waterloo

It’s a retro post tonight as I finally punched a game I’ve had for ages, GMT’s Battles of Waterloo, a 1994 game design by Richard Berg.   I bought it and three other titles through a sale after a friend of mine told me about this new, up and coming gaming company called GMT.  My newfound Napoleonics interest made me want to go back and give it a try.

I’ve decided to start with the Ligny scenario.  It’s a big game, played on two maps (the maps are clever back printed to allow four battles in one box.  The new house gives me a study with a door I can keep closed from the dreaded kitty cats.  Even so Ligny is a big game, taking up my entire desk.  Here’s the initial setup, with the Prussians in the centre and the French just coming onto the map.

Old “Vorwarts” Blucher ponders how he can extricate his army from the French tide and link up with Wellington.  It’s quite a nice map.

While Napoleon together with Grouchy plot the piecemeal destruction of the Allied armies

Here’s a bit of gaming history.

 

In the bottom of the box I found a GMT 1994 catalogue.  Billingsley, Berg, Herman - quite the lineup of talent that they were able to include as part of the GMT team.  The artwork already has that signature style of Rodger MacGowan that makes boardgames of previous decades look so dull.   A reminder of how long ago 1994 was, the game design notes mention that Berg and the play testers were able to collaborate using an awesome piece of technology called the Genie Information System.  Hands up if you remember GEnie.   Bonus marks if you ever played a game using GEnie.

Hopefully next Tuesday I’ll actually have something to say about the game itself.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+