New Years Day Seven Years War Battle

Here's some more reporting on the gaming day I hosted this New Years, which is already well in the rear view mirror!   The players were Conrad, visiting from Ireland (THE Conrad Kinch), and David.   CK is a total grognard, whereas David was playing his second war-game ever.   We used figures (mostly Foundry and Front Rank) from my collection, and the rules were the very dependable Honours of War by Keith Flint, published by Osprey.

CK set up his Russian army, giving his commanders ridiculous names like General Timoshenko Hortonivitch.   To stretch my limited collection, we used three base units, which worked well enough:  regiments had a decently sized footprint on the table and gave both players enough units to manage while having a decent range of tactical choices.

The Russians had an advantage in infantry: two brigades of three regiments each, while the Prussians had one brigade of four.   Both sides had a grenadier regiment, and the rest of the troops were line.   The Prussian advantage lay with their better generals.  The Honours of War rules are unforgiving with the Russian subcommands, who statistically tend to be worse than their Prussian counterparts.   Thus Conrad had three dim and doddering brigade commanders, whereas the Prussians had two competent ones and one dashing general.   This would give the Prussians a huge advantage in initiative and twice allowed a Prussian brigade to get an extra move.   To offset, I should have given the Russians another battery.

Prussian lines arrayed for battle:

Given some coaching, David, the novice player, decided that the best thing to do with his Prussians was to be aggressive.   He ordered his cavalry forward, the hussars on his left and the heavy brigade of horse on his right, see here thundering forward.

While the fifes and drums called his infantry forward in the centre.  Frederick is seen on the far right, plotting the course of the battle.

The Prussian and Russian heavy cavalry collide on the one flank, and engage in a massive scrum in which the Prussian horse gradually and slowly get the upper hand.

The battle was actually decided on the Prussian left flank, where sadly I don't have any photos, but after defeating the Russian light horse, the Prussian hussars were able to exploit an extra move thanks to their superior commander, and start rolling up one of the two Russian infantry brigades.   Conrad was an excellent sport, coaching David on how to use his cavalry to best advantage in the situation,  even though he was working to defeat himself in the process.  Well done, CK.

The decisive moment was the impact of the Prussian infantry brigade on the Russian centre, where the bloodiest moments of the battle occurred, but when the smoke cleared, two Russian regiments had been mauled for the cost of one Prussian, and the Russians were at their break point.

Here, Frederick is being congratulated by happy Silesian peasants, who are trying to sell him snacks and souvenirs.

A decisive Prussian victory achieved through good sportsmanship by both players.  My friend David is keen to play another game, if I can get him away from working on his model railroad layout, and I continue to be impressed by the HOW rules, simple, easy to teach, and highly playable.   Also a thrill to get the bulk of my slowly growing Seven Years War collection on the table.

Cheers and blessings to your die rolls,

MP+

 

EX THUNDERING DICE 2-24: A Wargames Weekend

It's been ages since I've posted any sort of games reports here, and truth be told, I do very little face to face gaming these days due to a lack of local opponents.   However, my friend James and I managed one of our occasional gaming weekends, which we have christened EX THUNDERING DICE.   I think this was our fourth or fifth over as many years.   Last weekend James made the two hour drive and as the host I could offer the gaming room in the upstairs of the old rectory where I currently live.  It's a lovely space and filled with natural light during the day.

 It was also a chance to give James this piece for his Napoleonics collection, a 28mm Front Rank figure, Archduke Charles, for James' Austrian force.   Seeing as James usually plays Sharp Practice, the Archduke may qualify as the biggest of Big Men.  He certainly has a big hat!  He's painted using the Foundry tritone system.   I don't paint or collect 28mm Napoleonics, but Front Rank's figures may yet tempt me.

James and I started by playing an 18th century game using my 28mm collection of Prussians and Russians.   We had a friend of mine, David, an avid scale modeller who was getting his first test of miniature wargames.   We used Keith Flint's Honours of War rules from Osprey, and chose the introductory scenario, in which four units deploy to protect a river crossing, from five attacking units.   It might make more sense to defend the other side of the river, but that would have made for a tedious game.   Both sides had one regiment of line cavalry, which immediately charged.  David's Prussians were eliminated, while the Prussians barely survived with only one hit remaining, and would sit out much of the fight to recover.

From then on, David had to divide his remaining force of two infantry regiments and one gun section against three Russian infantry regiments.  It was a brave effort, but he was eventually swamped by numbers.  We had enough time remaining to reset the table and try another battle with more troops, just to give David another chance to move some troops and roll some dice.   I think he enjoyed it, and left with a stack of surplus wargaming magazines and a promise to try it again.    

We were not very familiar with the HoW system but we found it fairly easy to pick up.   The challenge with these rules is to keep a reserve and, if possible, pull units back before the accumulate five hits and are then removed from play.    Given that musketry is quite deadly, this is not easy to do, especially in a game like our first scenario which uses a small number of units, in which case it's a quickly resolved knife fight.  It took us a few turns to remember the shooting rule which makes it slightly harder to cause a hit against superior troops (eg grenadiers) but easier to cause a hit against inferior troops such as friekorps.  As James pointed out to me, this rule reflects the varying morale and cohesion of targeted units rather than the shooter's marksmanship.

The game also reminded me that I have more work to do on my SYW collection of Russians and Prussians before I can offer a game with more than two small brigades per side, so I had better get cracking.

In the evening we played a boardgame of a Punic Wars battle in Spain (Baetis Campaign from the most recent issue of C3I magazine, which was a kind concession from James since his taste doesn't run to hex and counter games.  I'll post a review of that game separately.

The next day was mostly taken up with Quar, which is James' latest passion project.  I only managed to get a few photos of the table before we began.   Once we started I was occupied trying to run a very large force, and did poorly.  There are more photos on James' blog here.

I have huge respect for the way James dives in a project and single-mindedly pursues it.    The Quar, a race of sentient and warlike anteaters, have clearly seized his imagination.    It's World War One but in a transposed setting, I suppose in the same way that Flintloque transposed Napoleon's into a fantasy setting.   I confess that I don't quite get it, as the troops look like WW1 French and English troops only with pot bellies and snouts, and I'm not sure why one wouldn't just play WW1 straight up.  On the other hand, I like the whimsy of it, which steers clear of the grotesque aspects that make Turnip28 rather repulsive to me.    We used the Osprey SF rules, Xenos Rampant, which seemed to work well enough. 

I had what I thought was a decent plan, but a bad run of dice over several straight turns, which made me a little grumpy, for which I do heartily repent, as grumpiness in a gaming partner is never attractive and can be a deal breaker over time.  

After dinner we reconvened and broke out my ACW collection, which includes some old Minifigs that I first painted while watching CNN's coverage of the first Gulf War, so that shows my age, I guess.  We decided to revisit Sam Mustafa's Longstreet rules, which James and I played a lot of about a decade ago when we lived closer to one another.     We each took five infantry units (3 Eager Recruits and 2 Seasoned Veterans) and a battery.  James threw his two Texan regiments against a wood defended by one of my regiments, and quickly shot them out of it.   We discovered that in these rules, defending in covering terrain messes up your shooting for little gain in return.

The main action was in the wheat field, which changed hands repeatedly.  I had an edge here, as my battery was within canister range for much of the fight, and, as they say, dealt terrible execution.  It took us a few turns to remember that in Longstreet, firing zones are straight ahead, without the customary 45 degree arcs to either side.  At the end of the fight, I had pushed the rebs back across the wheatfield, and my fighting Irish in reserve had contained the Texans that had won the fight in the woods.  A close victory to the Union.

It had been a while since we'd played Longstreet, and I think we were both favourably impressed.   Our memories of the card playing was that it could seem gamey, in that one can have the perfect attack teed up only to be foiled when the other guy plays one of the rare but annoying interrupt cards.   However, cards are usually better employed for different reasons, such as ordering a move through difficult terrain, or trying to preserve units from multiple shooting hits against them.    It's always a choice, and the choices do a good job of simulating a commander's limited bandwidth in a horse and musket battle.   While we had both instinctively put commander figures on the table, they had little to do, as the command and control rules all live within the card play.  Perhaps we missed some rules about command radii affecting card play?  All in all, Longstreet is a fun and playable system for a brigade sized battle that can be resolved in a  few hours.

We finished the second day with a viewing of the old Kubrick film, Paths of Glory, which James had never seen but which came up as we were playing our Quar game.  James was a little surprised that the second half of the film was a courtroom drama, but it's a masterpiece of the antiwar genre, and brilliantly shot in black and white.   The tracking shot of Kirk Douglas as Col. Dax walking through the trench and among his men prior to the attack is one of the memorable scenes in cinema.

We said goodbye after breakfast and hope to meet again over the gaming table sometime this winter.   Good to see a dear old friend and to get some games in.    I shall spend the next months looking harder for a gaming opponent in or near Collingwood.  Maybe David will want to try again?

Blessings to your die rolls.

MP+

Getting to Grip with Honours of War

Hello friends:

As I’ve said here recently, the SYW painting muse has captured my attention lately, and her sister muse of SYW gaming paid a visit recently.    As I’ve been slowly painting Prussians and rebasing a rather old collection of Russians, I’ve been slowly getting to know Keith Flint’s Honours of War SYW rules, published a few years ago by Osprey.

SYW was one of my early gaming loves, and back in the day the group I hung out with had two favourite rules.  The grognards all liked Phil Barker’s Wargamer Rules 1685-1845 (WRG), while the young turks preferred Tod Kershner’s Warfare in the Age of Reason rules (Emperor’s Press).  Both were hugely influential rules in their day, and I suspect most people would point to Black Powder as their most prominent heir and successor.  I confess I’ve only played BP once and didn’t find it terribly compelling, but can’t offer a fair and comprehensive opinion.

I had been following Keith Flint’s wargames blog for some years and so was tracking his own SYW rules and even received a playtest copy, though at the time my life was complex and my gaming time quite limited, so I put it aside,   I was also discouraged by the fact that the National Characteristics didn’t include the Ottomans, as for some reason I’d found myself with a Turkish horse and musket army.  

Recently I’ve been rebasing my Russian SYW troops from their WRG-era bases and putting everything on standard size bases, since most rules these days seem basing agnostic and I can’t be bothered cutting fancy and precise bases for skirmishers vs heavy cavalry.   I sound like a grumpy old git, but there you go.   Feeling that I’d made enough progress to get some troops on the table, I divided my Russians into two forces, each of two very small brigades, just to push some figures around and get a feel for the rules.

Clearly wanting to modernize their thinking, the Russian army stages a mock battle on the drill fields outside Moscow.   Both sides have a brigade of two horse units, and both have a brigade with two batteries, a light infantry regiment, and a line regiment.  All units are rated as Standard and all commanders are rated as Dependable, just to make the test drive easier.

In some of the reviews I’ve read, people don’t like the initiative and command and control,system, and others like it.  I'm in the latter camp.  I liked the uncertainty of which brigade gets to move first, which breaks up the chess-like feel that SYW games sometimes have.   I also liked the fact that an average or good commander might get two moves in a turn, vs another brigade’s none, which introduces a very fluid feel.   

As others have noted, the game uses the same results table for Fire and Melee combat, which combined with fairly few factors makes it a quick study.   Units are rated as Inferior, Standard, or Superior, depending on their troop type and national characteristics.   Units suffer degraded performance once they take thee hits from shooting or melee, must retreat at four hits, and are removed from the table at five hits. Here hussars (Front Rank) and my newly painted cuirassiers (Foundry), each already with two hits, collide, each deals three hits, and both units are done.   It’s all quite bloody and fast.  I might have rated the hussars as Inferior and the Cuirassiers as Superior, just to make it more interesting.

You'll see a bit of a WRG hangover in these bases, as the hussars on the left are based on larger bases to depict light cavalry, while the figures on the right are on the generic 40mm square base that I now use for all my stands.

Another feature about the Fire and Melee table is that it uses average dice.  I had to beg some off a kind friend, as I'm not mentally agile enough to adjust the dice AND the modifiers in my head.  As my friend warned, don't let those average dice get mixed in with your regular d6 dice or you could have poor luck rolling sixes when you need them!

What keeps units on the table is their ability to rally if not closely threatened by enemy units, and especially if close to their Commanding General (a clever mechanic is that each turn players can relocate their Commanding General, which can aid a key part of the battle by increasing a brigadier's performance and helping units in the Rally Phase at the end of each turn.  Units with four hits must retire from the fight and reform, which takes time, provided that they are protected by fresh units, which is another nice mechanic.

The line regiment on the right in this photo will lose the fight because it’s being whittled down by one of the guns to the left and by the fire of the light infantry.   As some players have noted, light infantry can seem unduly powerful in this game, unless one remembers that they should usually be fielded as small units and as Inferior troops, so they shouldn’t be left in the open.   Here I had meant to retire the lights through the line infantry on the left, but at the key moment discovered the rule preventing voluntary interpenetration of units if they begin their move within 20cm of an enemy unit.   This is why we train, to learn things like this.

Luigi the Catbeast of Muscovy declares ENDEX and all troops return to barracks for extra vodka while their officers must attend a long and tedious AAR conducted by the Observer/Controller staff.

People have been writing reviews about HoW for a few years now so I have little to add that’s new.  Quick final thoughts:

- Simple, highly playable rules that still give a convincing SYW feel.

- I like the Command and Control and Initiative Rules, very clever and they give a very fluid feel that would keep players on their toes.

- As others have noted, it’s a game that I think is best played with large numbers of units.  With only 6 units a side, as I found, it’s over very quickly and the tactical choices are fairly limited.   I think the simplicity of these rules makes them a good choice for larger battles.    I’m starting to regret my choice of 28mm for this period, but I’m too far in to go back on that decision.

- These rules are well supported by the author and have their own forum, which isn’t true of all the Osprey blue series rules titles I’ve seen.

I’m pretty sure I’ll have more to say about these rules in posts to come as I get more units on the table.  

Blessings to your dice rolls!

MP+