Limes Game 3

 

Myself and Robbie had our third game in the Saga Limes campaign a couple of weeks ago and unlike history the Saxons were driven back by the Britons.

Some Photos

The Saxon Line

I will not bother with a report as I think the game was over pretty quickly and my Morale fell to zero giving the Britons a victory in the campaign.

I am trying not to be negative, especially where I lost, but this is a campaign that I cannot recommend. Even on the Saga Discord where there are thousands of members, hardly any one had played it. I remember when it first came out it got bad reviews. It is structurally a mess, although the individual ideas are quite cool. I doubt if it was ever play tested. You play the same scenario every game which is sort of boring and although it is suggested that the attackers have an advantage as the campaign progresses it is the reverse. The defending player can essentially restore almost every killed figure as the campaign progresses. Thus, the attacker gets no benefit from killing figures and his only chance of victory in a game is if he can get units off the table. 

Saga Night-War of the Roses

This past Thursday, we had our monthly Saga Night at the Abyss. It was another good turn out with 12 players. Several new warbands appeared on the tables from the Age of Chivalry. Germans, Bretons, Scots, Flemish, English, Ecorcheurs, French and Venetians were represented. Myself and Rob, however,  played the War of the Roses factions, a first for our Saga Nights!

Yorkists (Rob)

Warlord

Mount Hearthguard

Foot Hearthguard

Warriors

Handgunners

Levy Bowmen(1.5)

Cannon

Lancastrians (John)

Warlord

Mounted Hearthguard

Foot Hearthguard

Warriors

Levy Bowmen (2)

We used the Chaos set up. Although I have played many games using this method, it always gives you a different game.

Scenario

Scenery-Uplands

Deployment-Pincer Attack

Game Length-Pitched Battle

Special Rule-Forced March

Victory Conditions-Target

Game Photos

Initial Setup

This ended up being a big mistake for me, with my WL and HG deployed together although I should say the scenario conditions forced me to split my warband in 2.

Other unit in my deployment.

Keep the bowmen in the forest

The Yorkist right flank.

The Yorkist left flank.

Well it seems that the Cousin's War will end up going on, as we had a draw with less than a 3 point margin of victory. It was quite a bloody battle with both of us losing most of our HG, the Yorkists had 2 left and I had just one lone mounted HG. The only reason that I was able to eke out a draw, as I was quite a bit behind going into turn 5, was to charge my WL into 12 levy, luckily for me this worked out but it could have gone either way. 

What I found interesting is that the Yorkists have a complex BB which is quite different then the English BB, while the Lancastrian BB is quite similar to it!

ACW 15mm Terrain

 

Recently, I have been working on getting some Pickett's Charge games back on the table. This is a ruleset by David Brown which is similar to his Napoleonic ruleset Général d'armée. I played quite a few games several years ago with my friend Adam but have never set up a game in Montreal for our wargaming club. I am a little limited as I do not have a CSA army but I am working on this now. I also know that version 2 of Pickett's Charge is in the works but I suspect that it might be another year or so before we see it.

In the interim, I felt it important to work on some terrain for the game. My sense is that terrain is more important for the ACW than for Napoleonics, especially linear terrain. I already have several buildings, crop fields and trees that are suitable. I do have a lot of snake rail fencing but otherwise my linear terrain and barricades were lacking.

To test my new Centauri Carbon printer, I thought it would be a good choice to print some small terrain especially picket fences which can be a challenge in any scale. What follows are my efforts.

It does not look like much, but there is 5' of snake rail fence as well as 5' of picket fence. 

Really happy with the print of these fences from 3D PrintTerrain ACW set.

Some log barricades 

This fencing was put together some years ago and comes from Battlefield Terrain Concepts. It was pretty beat up and I had to reassemble more than half of the pieces.

Some resin field barricades from Battlefield Terrain Concepts

A mixture of resin prints as well as some 3D Prints. I am not sure how the haystacks came out but I think they are OK.

Lots of 3D printed stone walls.

Overall, I am quite happy with how everything came out, and I should be good for most battles. I still have another package of snake rail fencing to put together.....a tedious job which can be put off in the short term, but for now I will have to shift focus to some CSA troops.

Mockern-The Battle for Germany 1813

 

Last Saturday, 5 of us got together for the penultimate battle in our 1813 campaign.  The scenario features the Battle of Mockern and was fought in October of 1813, as part of the Battle of Leipzig. As you can see from the map below this action was fought north of Leipzig and featured the French under Jarmin defending against attacking Prussians under Yorck on day one of the battle.

Overview of the Battle of Leipzig

Victory conditions for the Prussians were to capture Mockern in 20 turns that was made up of 2 BUA's back to back. Victory for the French was to inflict 3 Suave qui Peut's on the Prussians.

GdA has a scouting phase and myself and Iannick played it out a couple of days before our gathering. The French (myself and Helge) had to decided to just field 3 of our 5 brigades and the start of the game. 

Pelleport was deployed on the yellow marker, with Lorge's Cavalry on the pink and Jarmin on light blue, despite 4 scouting attempts the Prussians were only able to identify the position of the cavalry. 

We ended up having a pretty tight deployed frontage that I believe almost lost us the game but more about that later. 

The French kept Bouquet and Joubert as off table reserves. The Prussians had no off table reserves aside from Rummel who would arrive as a reinforcement on Turn 6.

The Game

Saturday came and the Prussians (Graham, Iannick, David)  rapidly deployed their troops across the whole width of the table, I dod not remember their exact order but Mecklenberg was deployed on their right flank with Sohr on their left flank with the other 3 deployed infantry brigades in between. We deployed Pelleport on our left with the 1e Marine holding the front Mockern BUA, with Lorge next and Jarmin on his right. I will let the photos tell the story.

The table, I think it is roughly 8x5', Mockern is in the distance with the French position to the right. There was large hill on the French side, otherwise open ground.

Here are the starting positions as seen from the Mockern side of the table. You can see to the left the Prussian wide deployment with their cavalry in the distance. The French had a very tight deployment with their 3 artillery batteries deployed together in defence of Mockern with their cavalry to the rear. Skirmishers were deployed to the left of and in front of Mockern (one legere unit deployed in skirmish). An infantry brigade was deployed to the right flank to defend against a flanking manoeuvre from the Prussians.

The Prussian players;  Graham, Iannick and David

Helge for the French and I am taking the photo!

Turn 4. The Prussian advance, as you can see they went into line pretty quickly, I believe this slowed their advance but did protect them against cannon as did the skirmishers. The French held their position aside from advancing the skirmish units on our left flank to harass the advancing Prussians. Our initial plan was to focus on our 3 batteries of artillery to weaken the enemy. The Prussian cavalry moved quickly to challenge our right flank.

Turn 6. The Prussians have advanced on all fronts and now their reserves have deployed. By now our artillery batteries are starting to suffer some attrition but we have weakened the front line Prussians.

Turn 12: Th ePrussians are now advancing on Mockern in column with their reserve. Their initial assault in line was repulsed. You can also see that Jarmin's infantry on our right flank is collapsing. The French have now brought on one of their reserve infantry brigades to buttress the right but also to be ready to support Mockern. You will notice that we have left the 2nd BUA unoccupied.  Our skirmishers have been pushed back but our cavalry is still intact.

Turn 12; a close up of the defence of Mockern.

Turn 18. A lot has happened. The Prussians were able to drive the French Marine Veterans out of one part of Mockern and only with great difficulty were one of our reserve units able to occupy the other half of the town. Our cavalry became trapped and was unable to challenge the advancing Prussians. By now, however, we had inflicted 2 Suave qui Peut on the Prussians. Before the Prussians could take all of Mockern we were able to inflict the 3rd Suave qui Peut...thus a very narrow French Victory.

Summing Up

I thought this was going to be an easy game for the French but the Prussians almost did win it. If their initial advance was a little more aggressive at the start, I think they might have got a victory before we met our Victory Conditions. Our defence was good but we had a lot of difficulty bringing in our reserves because of our narrow frontage. In retrospect, Jarmin should have been more to our right allowing our reserves to move more easily to support Mockern. I am not sure also if Pelleport should have started one of his battalions in the 2nd BUA. Certainly, his skirmishers did a good job to protect Mockern and were able to retreat in good order once their job was done. The French Cavalry, as usual, caused significant havoc to the Prussians. But a good game was played by all. I should note that around Turn 13-14, some of the Prussian players considered withdrawing their troops, Helge and myself urged them to continue the game as all was not lost. I believe we were quite correct in this and once they got "stuck in" they almost turned it around. 

There were also complaints about the actual scenario design with the one objective being stuck in a corner. I disagree totally. As gamers we are presented with what we are given, this was a historical simulation and the scenario was what it was. It ended up giving us a very good game, not an easy game but it was quite exciting.

Hopefully, we will get to the last game (Liebertwolkwitz) in this campaign fairly soon. I should note that there were 1500 18mm AB figures on the table and with the last scenario using the large OB option we hope to hit close to 2000 figures. And what will be very exciting is that we will see some Austrians.

Many Rivers Turn 3a Blitzkrieg!

 

Myself and Graham got together yesterday for our next turn in our Many Rivers to Cross Chain of Command campaign. It had been May since our last game so we were both a little rusty, I should note that this is the first time we used CoCV2 for this campaign, it seemed to meld easily with the OB and support information for the 1940 Germans and British from the Blitzkrieg Hand book. We had the game at Grahams.

Forces

Guards Platoon 2, FM 10 (fresh)

FR 0, 5CD, Regulars

Supports (18)

Barbed Wire 2

Minefields 2

2" Mortar

Pregame Barrage

Sniper Team

MMG Team

Infantry Section

Schützen Platoon 3 FM 9 (still fresh)

FR +1, 5CD, Regulars

Unchanged Supports (18)

Engineer Team

Shabby Nazi Trick (fifth columnist)

Red Dice

MG34 Tripod Mount

Pregame Bombardment

Extra Schützen Squad

IG18 IG

Patrol Phase

The JOPs are circled, not the best Patrol Phase for the Germans. Graham did a very nice table.

The Game

This was a challenging game, first because it was a Blitzkrieg, I felt it did not adhere to the rules for support generation in the campaign so we felt it best to go with the support generation as determined by the scenario rules for Swift to Support in the 1940 Handbook. I had the same supports as Turn 3 with 18, so the Brits got 18. This is a lot of supports for defence.

This was my base of fire on my left flank with a planned advance on my right. It looked pretty lethal with a 5cm Mortar, an IG18, a Schützen squad and a SL.

Graham put down an SL and a 2" Mortar in the farmyard compound. The SL had LOS so smoke started to come to block my base of fire. I have some questions about this as there did not seem much I could do about it. I will have to check with the TFL cognoscenti though as something did not seem right.

There is nothing like the effectiveness of the 2" British Mortar

Graham had deployed 3 of his sections as the game progressed, one on his right flank and 2 behind the fence in the farm compound. By now we had both deployed our MMGs in entrenchment. They were both destroyed by the end of the game but I was take to take out the Vickers first.

My advance squad did very poorly as you can see and ended up breaking on the next phase. 

I had deployed my last squad on the road, but by now it was too late and once the squad in the opened broke my FM dropped to 3 and I decided to withdraw. Luckily I had not lost many of my core platoon (5 figures) so the cost to the platoon was limited.

Summing Up

German Platoon #3 (Final FM 3)

Platoon Leader Outlook: Content

Men’s opinion: -3 (FM roll -1)

CO’s opinion: -2

German Platoon 3: 2 dead, 2 missing

German 1st Platoon has lost 5 dead 

German 2nd Platoon has lost 8 dead

British Platoon #2 (Final FM 8)

Platoon Leader Sociable: Affable (FM roll +1)

Men’s opinion: +1

CO’s opinion:  +1

1 missing next game

British Platoon 1 has lost 5 dead

I think I was really against it with the British having 18 supports in defence. I did set up a nice firing line to cover my advance but I could never get my advance moving along, I might of waited too long. I did kill quite a few Brits but the difference in the FM made an easy recovery for them.The good news is that I did not lose a lot of men and on the same table the British will have many fewer supports although there are quite a few fixed defences on the table. We will just have to see how it goes.