Général d'Armée 2- First Impressions

 

Our gaming club has been patiently waiting for the release of GdA2 for months now, with our last game almost a year ago. We made a group order of 8 rulebooks, I received them more then 2 weeks ago (Rich Clarke was great about getting the order to me in the US before the actual release date of March 4). There was a bit of a delay getting it to the club members in Montreal but they were distributed at last Thursday's Club Games Night.

Production quality looks great and you get 2 laminated QRS sheets which were certainly more readable (ie bigger print) than GdA1. Myself and Graham decided to get together at my place and have a test game last Friday. I put together the table and decided to play the Albuera 1811 scenario from the book. 

The terrain, the Anglo-Spanish force commanded by Graham were deployed in the farground, with the 2 Spanish infantry brigades starting on the table. Two English brigades were deployed in turns 2 and 3 to reflect the historical battle.  I (the French) deployed 3 brigades on the table at the start of the the game, holding my best brigade with a Bold brigadier in reserve. 

I of course was way to excited to take any photos in the first couple of turns, but as you can see above I rapidly advanced the brigade on my right flank up the hill to confront the Spanish.

3 ADC Taskings got us into our first charge. My lead unit took some damage but we were able to force the defending Spanish Brigade to Falter.

One of the British brigades moves in to confront the French.

Situation at the end of turn 5, as you can see the Anglo-Spanish have a sent a British brigade to their left flank to support the Spanish in the left centre. The 2nd British brigade is moving to the centre with the 2nd Spanish brigade on their right flank. They have yet to deploy their Spanish Cavalry.

From the French perspective, we see that the 1st French brigade on their right is engaged with 2 enemy brigades. The 2nd French brigade is advancing up the centre to confront a British brigade. Out of view in this photo but seen above is the 3rd French Brigade holding the left flank. The French still have an infantry brigade off table as well as a Cavalry brigade.

We got in 5 turns in a little over 2 hours and this is an impressive improvement over the previous version. With both of us being familiar with GdA1, we had a good sense of how the rules generally worked. I had watched the 3rd video on Lard TV just before the game and this was quite helpful as a lot of the changes are in the setup and the Command and Control aspect of the game. I made a short list of notes, and I felt quite prepared for the game. 

Aside from testing the rules, I was really focussed on reducing the number of markers on the table as well as using a much simpler and less obtrusive method to mark casualties. I had noted that Dave Brown in the demo videos, really just seemed to use 3 markers and I wanted to go with that plan. I felt we were successful in this with having to use just a Hesitant and Faltering Brigade markers as well as the Casualty marker. We will of course need further games to see how this goes.

In this our first go, the only rate limiting step was putting the troops on the table. Unfortunately there is little you can do about this and at the start Graham had to just put on 2 brigades and myself 3. This took about 10-15 minutes and really there is no way to speed this up. Certainly, the fact that we had a total of 5 brigades off table at the start did speed things up.

I am not going to go into all the details of the changes in this version but I felt without exception they were a great improvement on an already good ruleset. The new Scouting phase in the deployment part of the game was a lot of fun and definitely increased the fog of war, likewise initiative changes and ADC takings were all simplified but at the same time made the decision process more complicated. Most of all though the basic game mechanics of Charging, Movement, Firing and Combat have now almost disappeared into the background becoming much simpler and thus much quicker to resolve.

Anyway, we only had a couple of hours to play this game but did get 5 turns in. I have left the troops on the table and we hope to complete the game in the next week. A careful perusal of the rulebook over the last this weekend has revealed no errors being made. This was well worth waiting for!