Quatre Bras!

This past weekend I finally got to play the Battle of Quatre Bras on the Table Top. I have had this in the planning for at least five years and collected the complete set of figures for Perponcher's Brigade as well as the Brunswickers. I had to use some substitutes for the French and the British but otherwise all was good.

Our wargaming club in Montreal has about 10 members interested in Napoleonic Wargaming and 6 of us gathered at Graham's House in Beaconsfield for the planned 2 day event. We were joined by Steve from Ottawa for the first day, unfortunately Iannick had to drop out for Sunday. I decided to be the games master for day 1, so this left 2 brigades at least for each player on Saturday. On Sunday the French  players had 3-4 brigades each.

I took the Order of Battle from the Hundred Days source book for GdA1 but converted the ADC's and added the CiC's to work with GdA2. We decided to play on an 8x5' terrain and adjusted the layout to mirror the schematic in the source book. Graham did a great job on the terrain as you can see below with all the hills in lace. I did the 3D modelling of the two farms and painted them. I was really pleased with how the terrain looked. Myself and Iannick carried out the pregame several days before including the Scouting Phase and Attacker's deployment. When the players arrived Saturday morning all the units that were deploying on the first turn were already on the table. The final OB is below, as you can see I used all the original rating and colour coded everything including the Brigadier status on an excel sheet. At the end of this post you will see the system that I used to identify each unit on the table. It worked very well!

The French had identified the position of both Sax-Weimar and Bylandt during the Scouting phase, thus gained a 20cm advance beyond their deployment line of 12" (I had given them a bonus 4" because of the depth of the table). 

We used the Victory Conditions in the source book (capture the Quatre Bras Farm) or on Victory points from the GdA2 rulebook.

I set the original terrain in the source book to a 8x5' grid. This placed Gémniocourt Farm a little too forward but it was still within the Allied Deployment space. Otherwise the terrain was accurate to the book. The deployment markers for each are the dotted yellow lines, the dotted light blue line was the advanced position allowed by the Good Scouting result for one French brigade. The numbers on the allied line are the possible placement of the Allied Brigades, 7 of which were dummies. Iannick found both deployed Allied Brigades, Sax-Weimar at 2 and Bylandt at 4! The initial placement of the French Brigades is in White, if you click on the map you should be able to see them. Thus the Battle Lines were set. 

I did take quite a few photos which are below and I will try to summarise the action every 4 turns. 

Turn 4 (Saturday Morning)

The French had placed their most powerful brigade with their Bold Brigadier, Prince Jerome Bonaparte in an advance position to take on the Nassau Brigade who had started the game on the Allied right flank. Bylandt with his Dutch-Belgians had the centre right and had placed the Orange Nassau in Gémniocourt Farm. Campi advanced his brigade on the French right to the woodland in an attempt to outflank the Nassau. Bachleu advanced his entire brigade against the Gémniocourt farm in order to take this strongpoint. Wathiez's Cavalry held back waiting to see if a weak spot would appear in the Allied right flank. Soye and Huber advanced on the French right in an attempt to outflank the Allied left. Butlar's Brunswick arrived on Turn 2 to plug the centre-right. Pack arrived on Turn 3 and advanced to protect the Allied left. Sprect with a 2nd unit of Brunswickers arrived on Turn 4. 

End of Turn 4, French advance to the right of the photo.

Turn 8 (Saturday Afternoon)

These are photos taken at the end of day Saturday. Most of the action continued on the Allied right. The Nassau took a lot of casualties but held the hill. They kept Campi at bay despite multiple attempts to attack. The Brunswick brigade kept the right of the farm from being flanked but Bachleu after several attempts was able to take the farm. A cavalry battle ensued on the Allied left with French Chasseurs and  Merlen's Brigade of Light Cavalry. By now Cramm with the Brunswick Cavalry had arrived to assist the Dutch-Belgians. Bylandt's Dutch-Belgians had now started to break and had to be withdrawn from the front line with the Brunswick Brigade moving into its position. Now Kempt was also advancing to support his fellow British Brigade on the left. Musket battles ensued between the British and the French. 

We called it a day, it was felt that the initial French advance was weakening and the Allie may have the battle, but much more fight to come!

End of Turn 8, all troops are on the table.

Turn 12 (Sunday)

Sunday, we played 4 more turns with a break for lunch. By now it was obvious that Jerome's brigade was quite battered and really becoming less of an effective fighting force. The French on their right and left flanks were being held back by the Brits on the Allied left and by a combination of the Nassau and Brunswickers on their right. Campi and Soye were also getting battered and their advance stalled. The Brunswickers were able to take back the Gémniocourt Farm. Multiple attacks by the French Cuirassiers failed to break the line. The French cavalry were destroyed. The writing was on the wall.....history had repeated itself. Allies 9 VP and French 4. 

The table at the end of the battle.

The Players

Saturday: Iannick and David, with me at the head of the table trying to keep order. Keeping order required a bit of effort on my behalf for the first few turns!

Sunday: From L-R Helge and Dan for the Allies. David and Graham for the French. I played with the Allies. Steve and Iannick played for the French, I do not seem to have a photo of Steve.

I felt this 2 day GdA event went very well as I hope all the players felt the same. 

Markers

I really have to thank Julian, one of our club members for his help with these markers, I just could not get a good result using resin and my FDM printer was not tuned well enough to do the name tags. He is quite a printing expert and has one of those Bambu Labs printers which seem to work very very well, so well in fact, that 2 other club members have just bought one!

I attached one marker to each command stand, and although it is not obvious here each marker is in 2 pieces, the base and the name tag. The name tags are snapped into place and can be easily removed allowing the base itself to be used again for another battle, by just changing out the name tag. Each name tag is coloured according to the grade of the unit. Above you can see from L-R; Grenadier, Reservist, Line and Veteran ratings. This is duplicated on the OB spread sheet that each player had. This really worked.

All my Napoleonic figures are on 25mm square bases, but more importantly they are metal. As you can see a small 5x1mm round magnet was position to insure excellent attachment. The recess on the marker is 25mm square and are 1mm thick aside from the 4mm addition at the bottom to accommodate the 21x1mm name tag, the print was raised a further 1.5mm. This was all done on TinkerCad.

Carnevale

Two Sundays ago, I got together with Antoine who I have been playing Carnevale with for about a year. He introduced me to two of his friends Paul and Nic. They were great people to game with and we had a 4 player game. There were 2 factions of Rashaar (myself and Nic), a Vatican faction (Paul) and Antoine's Guild faction.

The Acquisition scenario came from the main rulebook with each of us having 75 points. Points were awarded for Agendas and there were 2 Objectives on the board. Some photos follow.

It was a closely fought game with Antoine winning. It was a lot of fun and I will look forward to the next game.

CoC Training Night at the Abyss

 

Two Fridays ago our club had a training session for the TFL ruleset Chain of Command. We had 4 players, Dan who had played under 10 games, Gabriel and Julian who had played under 5 games and Artin who was just playing his second game. We set up two tables and I have to say I was quite happy that Graham showed up as well to help games-master. We played in 28mm so I had no need to bring any of my own troops, I did bring a couple of mats and some terrain. We had to utilise the Abyss collection of terrain for some buildings, walls and hedges. Each player brought his own platoons and there were some very nice figures on the table.

Game 1

Soviets vs Italians 1942

For this game we used 2 fan made platoon lists. Regular platoons, the Italians fielded a Motorcycle platoon, while the Soviets used a standard mid-war rifle platoon. We played scenario 2 from the rulebook but played down the long axis of the table. The Soviets were the defenders. They bought an ATR Team and the Wrath of the Gods pre-game barrage. I am not sure about the Italians but they did have an AFV.

Game 2

Canadiens vs German Fallschirmjägers 1945

This game utilised the lists from the main rulebook both regular platoons. Again scenario 2 along the long axis of the table. The FJ were defending agains the Canadiens. I am not sure what supports the Germans had but the Canadiens had a Churchill.

Patrol Phase

1942 Soviet Union, Italians to the right

1945 Normandy, Canadians in the foreground

Action Shots

L-R Dan, Gabriel, Julian and Graham. I did not get a shot of Artin

Summing Up

I was very thankful for the players showing up and I hope all had a good time. As noted above I am especially grateful to Graham for coming, there was no way I could manage 2 games with fairly new players. The Soviets won their game so kudos to Artin in his 2nd CoC outing. This game finished first so I was able to shift my attention to the Normandy game, which was eventually won by the Germans. Two victories to the defenders.

Post game observations sent on to the players: 

I thought every one did quite well and there was a basic understanding of the rules. I believe the Patrol Phase went well on both tables, there are a lot of nuances to this pregame which take a long time to learn, Certainly I am still learning. A critical part of this in the pregame sequence is picking your supports after you see the terrain and the JOPs have been placed. Your choice of supports is based on where you are going to deploy and where your opponent might deploy. The terrain is a big deal here, as it is your cover as you advance or defend.

I believe the mechanics are pretty simple and all you really need to play the game is the 6 page QRS and with a games-master there is really no need to refer to the rulebook. The biggest weakness as I saw was an understanding of the shooting rules but more so how it is applied to a target in respect to shock. This game is all about shock and how it contributes to Force Morale, when checking for successes in respect to hits, this has to be done by teams (except in cases of platoons where there are no teams-Soviets). In this manner you can kill a team while applying shock to a whole section/squad; kills are not shared but shock is, a somewhat difficult concept to appreciate when you start playing.

Both games had a lot of entrenched firing back and forth, which is a little boring to play but this is perfectly normal when first learning the game.