Battle for Mont St Jean-GdA

 

I had a demo game of Général d'Armée yesterday at the L'Abyss in Montreal. For this game, I took one of the scenarios from the Waterloo source book for GdA. It was going to be a 4 player game and I wanted to have 3 brigades for each player, as well as a goodly number of ADC's so the players could experience the use of the multiple ADC Taskings that are available in the game.

Aside from one player, Graham who had played one previous game of GdA, the ruleset was a novel one to the players. Three of the players were, however, quite experienced with playing Napoleonics, and when I say experienced, I am thinking 40+ years of Napoleonics. The 4th player David, has played quite a bit of skirmish wargaming but not many games at this level.

This was a big game to transport and set up and it took quite a bit of organisation. We had initially planned the game for the last week of November but a personal issue had arisen which forced me to have to cancel until yesterday. I spend several hours the day before organising the troops and the terrain, the troop requirement was a close run thing for my collection as by the time I had pulled out the French I needed, I was down to just 2 bases of Ligne.  I was able to get the whole thing into 2 bags so it was easy enough to transport. It took me a little under 2 hours to set up the game and by the time, all the players had arrived the terrain was done and the troops were on the table.

We had Graham and David playing the French and François and Don playing the Brits. I will not do a battle report but will post some photos and describe what I learned from this experience.

Initial positions with the French to the left.

Some Closeups

What I Learned

The Game: The scenario I picked was too big for the table and was too big as a teaching game. The table we played on was 6'x4.5'. It would have been better to have 2 brigades per side rather than 3. We got in 6 turns which I thought was pretty good as all the reserves came on the table, but after 6 turns the forces were not engaged. If we had got in 2 more turns we would have seen a lot more action, but the 2 Allied players had to leave before 3 hours were up. The scenario is a good one but I do note that the Grand Battery is too far away from the Allied line. Some of this, however, might have been because the Allied players really never advanced during the game. This might have been the right thing to do as they were the defenders but I am not sure. With 15mm troops this game would have been better on a 7 or 8'x4' table.

Four Player Setup: I added an extra ADC to each side, not sure if this was necessary. I alternated the CiC each turn for each side. The CiC rolled the ADC dice, and distributed the ADC's according to the overall battle plan. The CiC had to give at least 1 ADC to the other player and if there were more than 5 ADC's then the non commanding player got 2 ADCs. This seemed to work well.

The Players: I had a bit of a difficult time getting the players, especially the Allied players, to focus on the game rather than the ruleset. This is perfectly understandable as the players have played multiple Napoleonic games with different rulesets over a very long time. Graham, the player who had one previous game with me understood this well, stating that "with this ruleset you have to forget all other rulesets that you have played". You actually have to.........this exemplifies the TFL mantra, play the period not the rules! I appreciate experienced players want to understand the mechanics of the game before they make tactical decisions. But as TFL fans know mechanics should not dictate tactics. David, our 4th player seemed have little problem with this.

The Location: The Abyss is a great gaming store; it is large, there are a lot of players and you get a lot of walk by attention. Even though it is a lot of work to pack things up, transport them and then set up, it is well worth it. As far as I can tell, the great majority of gamers there are Games Workshop players, I have not seen any historical game there. The great thing was that I engaged with several younger players (in their 30's) during the game who were quite interested in our game and asked a lot of questions about the ruleset and the period. This made it worth my time to be sure. I am planning to put on at least a monthly historical war-game at the Abyss going forward. We already have three players putting together armies for an 1813 campaign. 

The Ruleset: Overall, I thought the game went well in respect to the rules, within 2-3 turns the players had the command sequence down and had a basic understanding of ADC tasking. I was a little concerned about my knowledge of the rules as I had not played for a couple of months, but aside from a couple of very minor stumbles, it went well.

The Big Picture: Overall, I am having a great time gaming since I have moved part time to Montreal. I can get in 3 games per week quite easily, I have a game of Pulp Alley scheduled for tonight and am getting in an introductory game of Congo tomorrow. So all is well, and I think the plan of growing Historical Wargaming in the area might even work!