Monday 23 December 2019

Blücher two day battles

I just realised that I've not been posting! How bad of me! ;)

Anyway... I have been busy wargaming and painting. I just got out of the habit of posting about it. It happens every so often and I apologise. I will try and make up for being remiss!

Anyway, the main wargaming I've been doing has of course been Blücher. The Mini-Borodino was the last big battle we got played but in addition to that have been a Vyazma demo at Recon 2019, which I forgot to take photos of, a big Penisular war game, and a couple of small 2-day battles.

The idea for 2-day battles came when we found we really struggled to reach a conclusion to a Scharnhorst battle in a single 3-hour club night. Not reaching a conclusion in a day was something that happened from time-to-time during the Napoleonic wars and when that happened they would sometimes rest and deploy during the night and fight again in the morning. Perhaps we could do the same, with the second day being played on a subsequent night?

With a bit of thought I came up with some rules to handle this and have added those rules to the Blücher house-rules section of this blog, see menu on right.

We've had a couple of trial games with this system. In one the second day produced a good definite result, though closer that we expected. But in the other one the Russians managed to get themselves in a very good defensive position which meant that the attacking French couldn't break through, but had mauled the Russians badly.

Here are some photos from those two battles.

 The Russians at the top right were to take the brunt of the attack from the French forces, but the Russians at the bottom right pushed against their rear-guard and did major damage. The Russians down by the town did very little as they waited for French Reinforcements which would arrive at the town they defended. The re-inforcements did not arrive.

Starting position for the first battle.
French unit cards at the end of the first day with damage marked. The photo allowed us to reset the battle.

Russian unit cards at the end of the first day with damage marked.

I didn't take enough photos of this battle... so on to the second one!

A similar thing happened to the Russians in this second battle. Again they found they had a force in the top right of this photo which was pushed and pushed by the French. Meanwhile on the bottom right the French were attacking a very heavily defended village.



At the end of the day the unit cards were put back next to their units and the number of damage markers written on them.

Again I took photos of the unit cards when I got home...




The second day was mainly about a big French assault on the Russian held village and a big cavalry race around the battlefield...






The first of these two games we didn't know that we were going to go for a second day and committed troops with the intention of winning either way. With the second game we were playing to a higher points value (300 as opposed to 200) and had determined from the start that we would be playing a second day. This lead to a much more cagey game, with a lot more retreating under assault going on. Quite different and interesting approaches to the battles!

Overall this seemed to work. No doubt there are improvements that could be made, but I think we'll be using these new house rules again in future!

Oh... and I nearly forgot, here's a photo from the big Peninsular war game we had...




7 comments:

  1. Sounds great, beautiful looking game, love the mass effect and the mat...

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  2. Games look smashing, especially the big bases. I'd be interested in hearing more about "overnight redeployment".

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    Replies
    1. It's discussed in the House Rules page.
      https://www.yith.co.uk/p/blog-page.html
      Steps 9 & 11.

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  3. Brilliant AAR! Love this ruleset!

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