Liebertwolkwitz-The Final Battle in our 1813 Campaign

Last Sunday five of us got together to play the final battle in our Battles for Germany campaign. We decided to go with the large version of the battle as laid out in the GdA source book. Iannick had put together an Austrian Divisions and we wanted to see them on the table.

Like the last battle in our campaign, the French were the defenders with a combined force of Austrians, Russians and Prussians attacking a centrally placed village. The final OB was as follows with Helge and myself playing the defending French with Graham, Iannick and David playing the attacking Allies. The pregame was played on Discord and Graham and myself set out the troops the day before the battle.

The game was 20 turns but we are getting pretty adept at this ruleset and although we planned 3 sessions through out the day, I suspected that we would be done by late afternoon. I hate writing reports but here are a few photos.

The initial disposition of the troops, with the French in the foreground. The Allies focused on their left flank with their initial Russian brigade quite forward as a reward for Good Scouting. They failed to protect their large artillery battery and this was taken out within a few turns by the French light cavalry.

The Austrians

The destruction of the Russian artillery

Turn 5 with the arrival of all the reserves on both sides, the French skirmishers had advanced to meet the Allied reserve advance. You can see in the farground the bloody encounters between the Austrians and the French Infantries. By now the centre Russians had suffered significant attrition but their infantry did advance and attack the BUA.

The French right flank

I think this was the final position in the game before the Allies had called it a day. The heavy cavalry on both sides had a face off just to the right of the BUA, but by now several Allied battalions had dispersed and they decided to call it a day. I believe the French only had one dispersed unit.

We did finish the game in 2 sessions over about 6 hours, I think 12-13 turns when it came clear that the Allies would fail to take Liebertwolfwitz, so a French victory.

I enjoyed playing the campaign but at times it was a little one sided. We did make a few errors in this last game, I forgot that Légére deploying in skirmish order could only do so if in rough terrain. I am not sure why I forgot this but our last game was 4-5 months before. I believe this had very little effect on the game outcome. The other problem we keep having is keeping cavalry brigades in their designated zone. We subsequently discussed dividing the table into 2 flanks for cavalry brigades rather than interposing them with the infantry brigades. We will probably give this a try in our next game.

Overall though, I continue to enjoy playing Napoleonics with this ruleset. I am not sure what we will do next but I suspect it will be again in Central Europe.

Scouts Out!

 

Last weekend, I was introduced to a WWI infantry game. I am not looking to get into a new era or start playing a new ruleset, but this looked like a very simple skirmish game which required very few figures (squad level). I always felt that WWI would not offer the best tactical game experience because of the nature of trench warfare. Gabriel, one of our club members, is quite interested in WWI and has done a beautiful job on painting some 28mm figures so I was encouraged to give it a go. I found a pdf of the rulebook which was quite inexpensive and had a quick read through...the rules seemed quite simple. I was not really expecting much but why not give it a go.

Gabriel had 3 sets of figures painted, Germans, French and Brits. They were all nicely painted but the French were quite impressive. I believe most of his figures are from the Scouts Out! digital range, very nice sculpts. We set up a 6 figure aside game and selected one of the scenarios from the rulebook. As the title of the ruleset suggests the scenarios are all of a scouting nature thus are quite tactical in nature. There is really no Command and Control mechanism but each army has some basic National Characteristics, Leaders having the ability to offer adjacent figures a re-roll and each figure's weapon having different characteristics. 

As you can see the figures are very nice, it took us about an hour to play the game and this was the first run through for both of us. I have to say it was quite a bit of fun and I would certainly play again. I might even paint a small number of figures to represent Newfoundland's Blue Puttees.

Lardy Day

A week ago we held the first Lardy Day in Montreal aptly named Fèves au Lard. We had 6 games with slots for 24 players, of which we filled 22. We felt it was quite well received with gamers coming from both Ontario and Quebec and we hope to make this an annual event.

What follows is an unsorted collection of photos taken by the participants.