wargaming in 28 mm and sometimes smaller: Weissenfels-The Battles for Germany

This past weekend, members of our wargaming club had the first turn in our 1813 campaign: The Battles for Germany. We presently have 9 active Napoleonic players in our club. We use the General d'Armee ruleset by David Brown and the scenario was taken from his 1813 source book. As this was a smaller scenario we had just 4 players for the game. The fact that it was smaller allowed us to have it on a 4x6' table, thus we played the game at my apartment. This certainly made set up much easier for me.

Graham and Michel played the Russians while myself and Helge played the French. We are trying to set it up so players play the attackers or defenders alternately. Myself and Graham took the lead and played the pregame over the internet before the actual game, this allowed us to get this game over in just 1 day and in fact we got to a clear Victory over 13 turns and 6-7 hours.

The map above shows the results of the pregame, Graham elected to use no reserves and to place all his brigades in an advanced position. This surprised me. My scouting attempts were unsuccessful, nor did either side gain a Bold Brigadier. As you can see from the map the Russians were restricted to be north of the deep stream while the French Attack zone was south of the same. The scenario allowed the French to have to brigades on the table at the start, while adding the remaining 3 brigades in the next 3 turns. The Order of Battle is shown below.

The French Artillery Battery was attached to Chasseraux's brigade, while the Russian Horse Artillery was attached in the second turn to Lanskoi's brigade.

To gain Victory the French had to reach Rocken. A secondary objective was to capture Gohren thus causing the Russians to had a d6 to their initiative roll.

The initial layout of the troops on the players arrival, we allowed a 30 minute period to adjust the internal organsation of each brigade.

Final dispositions of the troops. The stream and the marsh were categorised as severe terrain.

The Game

As usual I took few photos and I should say what follows is from my perspective. I took the French right flank while Helge took the left, thus I had the light brigade to start while Helge had the Marie Louise's. We did spend quite bit of time before the game in planning our attack. We initially thought that we could reach Rocken with cavalry, if the opportunity arose. We suspected that where the Russians had placed their cavalry on their flanks they would attempt to rush our right flank. As you can see from the above photo, I placed one light battalion in Attack column to hold off the cavalry charge and to assist this effort, the skirmishers moved into the marsh as well as another light battalion being placed in skirmish order. As you will note the Russians deployed their skirmishers in the swamp but we could see within 2 turns we would out number them by 3:1 thus pushing them out. We were able these skirmishers out of range of the Russian muskets in line. As we guessed the French AC was able to repulse the initial Russian cavalry attack across the ford, and could dice actually caused them to withdraw. On our left, the Marie Louises initially hesitated and took a couple of turns to occupy Rippach, the Russians had occupied Gohren on their deployment.

On the second turn, we brought out our Line brigade and assigned them to our left flank (Helge). On the third turn the 2nd Marie Louise brigade was assigned to our right and then finally the cavalry was brought on in the centre. The photo below shows the advance of our attack at the end of turn 5.

As you can see, the French were quite successful in the first third of the game. By now the Legere brigade had reformed into close order and now was advanced north of the Rippach Stream, pushing the Russians back with both Russian cavalry units being forced to withdraw or hesitant. The Marie Louises on the right had advanced in support. On our centre and left the Marie Louises had occupied Rippach and the cavalry had advanced over the Gohren Bridge. The Line brigade on the left was now assembling near the bridge ready to push the Russians out of Gohren. The Russian Infantry on the their right was pushed back as well as the Jagers in the middle.

We broke for lunch at the end of turn 6 at which time it was looking very good for the French Attack.

Well it is always a mistake to break for lunch in the middle of a battle, but unfortunately I failed to take any photos to document the Russian successes. The next several turns were characterised by multiple Falters (4 aside) as well as dispersal of at least half of the troops on both sides. Initially these loses favoured the Russians but slowly success swung back to the French. The Russians occupied Rocken but with a worn Reservist Battalion. Now it was up to the Marie Louise brigade under General Veran, they slowly pushed forward, the French Cavalry kept the Russian Cavalry on the Russian right at bay. They inched forward and by turn 13 they attacked Rocken, the Russians were driven out and Victory to the French.