Quick Post on Subscribing

I should have a post on today's English Civil War miniatures game in the next day or so, but in the meantime, here's a quick PSA.

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Trying Something New

My friend Eric and I have often bewailed the fact that we find it so difficult to get together with friends for a wargame. Schedules are full, life is busy, and coordinating a group of wargamers is like herding cats (which I've done, but it takes effort!) One starts out with a long list of prospective participants, tries to find dates that will work well for the largest number, then all those unanticipated things hit (partners and family making other plans, cars breaking down, jobs calling in everyone on the weekend).

So we decided to try an experiment. First off, we're going to coordinate more with other existing local groups. It turns out that every different social media platform (Yahoo, Facebook, Googlegroups, Meetup, Boardgamegeek) has its own set of cadres, and none of them talk much with each other (or even know about each other).

Second, we're going to try meeting up once a month on a week*night* (in addition to any sort of weekend games we play). While weekend days provide more time for play, they are also frequently in great demand by family and other hobbies. Weeknights offer less time, so the scope of games has to be smaller, but that smaller timeframe also means that they're less likely to fill up with other committments.

And, third, we're going to stop aiming for the stars. Usually when we try to organize events, we're hoping for half a dozen players or more and wind up disappointed when we're only able to collect two or three (including us!) For these events, we're going to plan on just the two of us and be pleasantly surprised if more folks show up. We've both got large enough game libraries that we could play for years and never exhaust our two-player titles, but if third, fourth, and fifth players show up, we'll still have plenty of options, either for one large game or several smaller ones.

So the first date we're aiming for is Thursday, December 17th. We're looking to play GMT Games' Rebel Raiders in the High Seas, a highly rated strategic/operational game about the maritime and riverine warfare during the American Civil War. If we get more players, we may simply add another game, or we may change over to something multiplayer.

We haven't picked a location yet, but if you post a comment here to indicate you're interested, I'll be sure to get back to you with information.

I'll post an AAR afterwards, and if we continue our experiment, I'll post here so that folks can contact us if they're interested in joining in.

Philip Passes with Flying Colors

Droits de L'Homme, 74, strikes her colors.

Last Saturday, I introduced my friend Philip to the boardgame Flying Colors, GMT's game of age of sail naval warfare. Phil is not a dyed-in-the-wool wargamer (yet ;-), but he's an aficionado of the period and the genre, being an avid consumer of Patrick O'Brian's tales of Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin.

I picked the Audierne Bay scenario as a good one to start with, given its lower vessel count and relatively straightforward nature. Phil took Sir Edward Pellew, commanding the frigates Indefatigable and Amazon, while I commanded the French 74 Droits de l'Homme. Packed with troops and unable to open her lower gun ports because of the heavy seas, DdH was fighting effectively as a heavy 4th rate. Holding the weather gauge, Pellew brought his frigates up to windward of the French ship as she carried a large body of infantry up the Brittany coast. Indy and Amazon are both 5th rates, though Indy being a 44 counts as heavy.

We read through the rules and played ten turns in about three to three and a half hours. Although this scenario features only three ships, I think that larger numbers will not take more time in direct proportion, since larger engagements are fought primarily in formations (to allow for command and control), so fighting a squadron of ten or fifteen ships will be more like maneuvering two or three multi-part elements than moving fifteen different ships.

My comments:

Though the French were able to concentrate considerable fire on the Amazon, cutting her rigging to shreds, the plucky 36 gave as good as she got, and the French ship of the line slowed considerably, her hull battered and blood streaming from her scuppers. Thinking she had at least temporarily immobilized the Amazon, DdH ran up the wind to engage the Indy (though the fight was bringing the whole group closer to shoal water along a lee shore).

But Indy dealt the French ship several shrewd blows, and the Amazon caught the wind and got enough speed to rejoin the fight in time to slam a broadside into the stern of the Frenchman, raking her decks cruelly and doing enough damage that the DdH finally struck her colors.

Fight of the Droits de l'Homme by Léopold Le Guen

His comments:
I was advised by a friend who also frequently war-games not to discuss what I had intended to do, or was planning as it might give others the key to beating me in the future. Since winning is not my over-all goal, but rather a more in-depth understanding of historical, martial decision-making I do wish to talk about how I went about this scenario.

My two frigates began running before the wind in line-abreast. As I had the weather-gage I had sought to maintain it for as long as possible. Additionally, I wanted to get into line-ahead. I turned to port (read larboard) into line-ahead with the Amazon in the van. Since I went from running to reaching I lost no speed.

After a series of turns on both sides, I broke from line-ahead and sent Amazon (running) to cross DdH's stern while Indefatigable continued on her base course with the hopes of taking DdH between two fires. I miscalculated here as I had forgotten that in Flying Colors, a ship of the line is able to turn as quickly as a frigate. And so DdH, after taking Amazon's raking broadside and returning her own, was able to come about and send a broadside with her port battery.

This left Amazon with substantial rigging damage and afire. Indefatigable at this point was on the other side of DdH and only able to play at long-bowls and so I had left her out of position to bring her heavier guns in close. Here I made another error. Even though Indefatigable's guns were having a gradual effect on DdH's firepower, in my over-concern for the Amazon I lost awareness of the wind.

View of the Wreck of the French Ship Droits de l'Homme by John Fairburn

And so because of this, and her damaged rigging, Amazon was already slow and forced to tack. She was virtually motionless for a period and so had to endure a raking broadside. Here, however, the British tactic of firing at the hull began to show an advantage. As DdH had turned to close Indefatigable, Amazon (while very slow) still had her full broadside available. After an exchange with Indomitable, Amazon was able to come up and so I finally had DdH between two fires. A turn later she was effectively armed "en flute" and so struck.

I took some lessons from this:

I gave up strength of formation for an easy, but unsupported stern rake. Had I kept to line ahead, I could have forced DdH to accept two broadsides while I took only one.

Giving up the weather-gage may have had to happen at some point, but losing awareness of the direction of the wind nearly cost me a frigate.

Waterloo's 200th: The Great Day

So, on the 18th of June itself, I have little time, sadly, to blog. I hope that tomorrow I may be able to provide something more of interest relating to the last great battle of the Napoleonic Wars.

Instead, let me point you to a couple of other sites that have interesting posts on Waterloo.

One of these I've linked to in my other Waterloo posts: JJ's Wargames.

Today, instead of providing the sort of detailed summary of the day's events he has done other days this week, he goes on a personal excursus, explaining how he came to be interested in Napeoleonic history. This caused him to travel, not only to Belgium, but to the Iberian battlefields of the Peninsular campaigns. He provides some photos and some telling insights about the ways that Wellington's journeyman battles as army commander led to his masterwork at Waterloo.

The Two Nerdy History Girls blog is another I enjoy, and today they have a piece on the Waterloo experience of Colonel Frederick Ponsonby. Those who have seen Bondarchuk's classic film about the battle, which features a scene of Col. Ponsonby leading the charge of the Union Brigade, may be surprised by the ending of his story.

Earlier in the week, the Girls also posted on the rather horrific aftermath of the battle, featuring JMW Turner's 181 painting The Field of Waterloo.

Historynet had quite a fascinating article several years ago on the women who took part in, or were at least involved in, the battle.

Which I came across when trying to rediscover a link to this article, a piece by the Smithsonian on a prominent American who took a leading role in the British Army's contingent on the field.

What round-up would be complete without links to the 200th anniversary renactment (which promises live streaming video of the event--though it appears one needs to pay a fee for it)

And, perhaps more useful, the (UK) National Army Museum's Waterloo 200 site. (The website for Les Invalides, strangely enough, doesn't even mention this week's events. Their calendar for this week has only an event about Churchill and De Gaulle. Their permanent collection features Napoleonic material in its page on the Modern Department and, of course, the Emperor's tomb, but that's all.)

And I'll close with a link for further reading, if you'd like some: the napoleon-series.org page on Waterloo, with a variety of different articles, including orders of battle, analyses, accounts of singluar incidents, and a transcription of a letter about the battle by no less than Michel Ney.

Waterloo's 200th: Two Battles and a Retreat

The games that started it all: SPI's NLB Quad,

After the initial skirmishes along the frontier and inland, Napoloen's army surged (in some cases in a rather confused way, feeling the loss of Berthier, Napoleon's long-time chief of staff) into Belgium. Meanwhile, the Prussian army continued to concentrate on the position that its forward elements had fallen back to, and hte Ango-Allied forces started to move, belatedly, towards the enemy's point of attack.

I'd continue to summarize the historic action, but I don't think I could improve on the excellent posts at JJ's Wargames (here are his posts on the initial contacts of the campaign, the first battles, and the Allied retreat).

Instead I'll continue my catalog of the treatments this campaign has received in the wargaming realm. In my last post, I mentioned The Emperor Returns, Kevin Zucker's game on the campaign published by Clash of Arms Games. Of course, the name Kevin Zucker translates into the common tongue as "obsessed with the Napoleonic Wars", so it's no surprise that this was neither his first nor his last game about the Hundred Days.

Zucker's mini-game of 1815.

In 1976, SPI published the now legendary Napoleon's Last Battles. A collection of four small games (or "quadrigame" as SPI liked to call these), it could also be played, linked-up, as a game of the whole 1815 campaign. It was among the first games I ever bought (and among, though not the first, I ever played), and I have it still. Zucker has, in a sense, been redesigning this game ever since--its systems serve as the core of many of his later Napoleonic games.

A few years later, Zucker and two other authors created Hundred Days Battles. This 1979 game The Emperor Returns in 1986. I used to have a copy of Hundred Days Battles, though I forget if I played it other than solitaire.
(republished in 1983) was a smaller treatment of the same subject, beginning the use of some of his systems seen in larger form in

In 1998, Zucker came back to Belgium with The Last Days of the Grand Armée. While TER and HDB are both in the 1x (or each turn = one day) family of Zucker's Napoleonic titles, LDGA is in the "Days" series, in which turns are six hours. I've played LDGA only once so far, a learning game with a friend in which the French were ruthlessly pounded. But, playing the Allies, I had the advantage of having played the system before (The Seven Days of 1809), so I don't think this was a representative run-through. Luckily, my friends are intrigued by the series, so I think we'll be playing these and other games in the series again before too long.

SPI's prequel to WV.

And now the maestro is at it again! Napoleon's Last Gamble has been announced, a quintet of tactical games at a scale where one turn is one hour. This should be a nail-biting experience. The traditional four battles of 1815 have been boosted by the addition of La Souffel, a rearguard action by French forces defending the eastern frontier against the Austrians.

Zucker is not alone in addressing the battles of the campaign, of course. Of the two great battles of June 16th, Quatre Bras has received more attention, at least in the boardgame world. I count at least eight other Quatre Bras games in addition to that in SPI's quadrigame. Of these I have three: Battles of Waterloo by the prolific and irascible Richard Berg, which includes a Quatre Bras engagement; Ney vs. Wellington, Joseph Balkoski's chip off Frank Davis's Wellington's Victory system, making the smaller battle a good taster for the WV system; and the visually unbeatable La Bataille des Quatre Bras by Ed Wimble.

A detail of the gorgeous LBdQB.

NvW I played many times in my salad days, both solitaire and (as I recall) in college against some of my gaming friends there. LBdQB I have set up, and I think I've played a few turns, but the game system, though intensely appealing to the would-be Napoleonic tactician, is just too complex for me to manage more than a few turns before collapsing in exhaustion. I keep all the La Bataille games, and get new ones when I can, hoping that some day I will have the space, the time, and the fortitude to play them. They are some of the most lovely games around. BoW I've set up a time or two but not gotten into the game, as the rules are well night impenetrable. They're not complex, just poorly organized, dull, and wearisome. I trust there's a good game in there somewhere, as Berg rarely disappoints, but if LB takes stamina, BoW takes patience I don't currently have,

But what of the other battle of the day, widely billed as Napoleon's last triumph? Ligny seems to get short shrift compared with Quatre Bras, perhaps reflecting the fascination of English-speakers (long the dominant segment of the wargame design community) with "the English battle" at the crossroads. Though an Anglophile, I've grown fond of the Prussians in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, and I find it sad that while QB gets nearly a dozen titles, Ligny subsists on only four.

Would Ligny get more games if Wellington had spoken German?

One is the entry in NLB, and one is the entry in BoW. Ed Wimble's La Bataille system, of course, includes a massive and spectacular La Bataille de Ligny, which I own but have yet to give myself the visual treat of setting up, let alone playing. The fourth is (to me) a dark horse, billed as a three-turn minigame and called simply Ligny, it calims descent from a system, March Into Battle, with which I am unfamiliar. Three turns, however detailed they may be, seems to me like too little to reflect the complexity of this huge engagement; time will tell whether the game becomes a hit or not.

A Brief Interlude: Waterloo's 200th

As I mentioned in an earlier post, June sees a number of exciting (to the military history-minded) anniversaries. I've been exploring the Normandy campaign of 1944, and I'll continue that shortly.

Napoleon Leaving Elba by Joseph Beaume (Wikipedia)

But first we need to take a short detour a century-plus-a-bit back wards. For yesterday (15 June) was the day that the last Grande Armée crossed the French frontier into Belgium, on its way to wreak havoc among the assembled armies of the Kingdoms of Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Prussia. Napoleon I, in a last attempt to restore himself to a stable throne in France, thrust the sword of his army towards the vitals of Allied resistance with one hand while with the other he hopefully waved the olive branch of peace towards his father in law, Kaiser Franz II of Austria. If he could crush the nearest foes and conciliate the next nearest, it might give him time to devise a strategy to deal with the furthest, Czar Aleksandr of Russia. Franz had been willing to side with Bourbon France against his erstwhile allies Aleksandr and Friederich Wilhelm of Prussia; perhaps he could be induced to from a similar alliance with a powerful Bonaparte France...if only the impression of power could be constructed.

Napoleon had an army of some 200,000 men, mostly veterans of his old campaigns, plus another 150,000 forming new units in depots and nearly 200,000 more militia, national guards, marines, and coast guards serving in static positions and freeing up regulars to fight in the field. Would it be enough to defeat his two most implacable foes--the Duke of Wellington, the calm, quick-witted Englishman whom none of his marshals had been able to best, and Prince Bluecher, the mad, wild, fierce old Prussian hussar who had come out of retirement in his Krieblowitz estates to deal a death blow to the hated Corsican.

The positions of major French and Allied Armies on 1 June 1815 (Wikipedia)

The Allied armies were distributed in their cantonments across central and eastern Belgium, waiting and watching for the Emperor's blow. It came with the sudden fire of picquets and was followed by the rumble of guns, as the advanced guards of the French army forced back the Prussian outposts on the Sambre. Falling back a short distance from the river, Prussian forces fought a delaying action and then fell back about ten miles, while couriers spurred through the dawn to reach and rouse the Prussian Army and to warn their British and Dutch allies that the enemy was now marching, straight into the strategic "joint" between the two Coalition forces.

While the Prussian advanced troops continued fighting through the day, the first contact between French troops and the forces of the Low Countries did not come until late in the afternoon. At 6 p.m., French light cavalry of General Reille's II Corps attacked and drove in the picquets of a battalion of Nassau infantry some 12 miles from the Sambre on the Brussels road. The remainder of the battalion stood to and, with the help of a battery of artillery, chased off the cavalry scouts. Although Dutch Belgian troops had at first thought that the cannon fore they heard in the distance was Prussian artillery at drill,  the gradual nearing of the fire had alerted them that war was almost certainly begun, and to the French cavalry found outposts ready for them, not soldiers slumbering in their billets. The Count de Perponcher Sedlnitsky and Prince Bernhard of Saxe Weimer had already begun moving their troops into position to hold strategic road junctions against the French advance until they should receive more specific orders.

The Duke of Wellington by Sir Thomas Lawrence: Confident or over-confident? (Wikipedia)

Wellington, in Brussels, had ignored the first reports from the Prussians of French attacks on their outposts. He had likewise ignored the Prince of Orange who, having been on horseback checking his forward lines since 5 a.m., reported at 3 in the afternoon that the Prussians were under attack. Finally, at 4.30, Wellington's Prussian liaison officer passed on a dispatch from Prince Bluecher that Wellington could not ignore. He began issuing alerts to his army, telling commanders to be ready to move once the direction of the French attack was confirmed. But it was not until 10 p.m., when a further message from Bluecher arrived saying that Napoleon himself was leading the French Army across the Sambre at Charleroi, that Wellington finally began to issue orders to his army.

Wargaming
There are, of course, hundreds, possibly thousands of games about the Napoleonic Wars. Boardgamegeek.com lists over fifty on the Waterloo campaign and its climactic battle alone. These range from serious historical studies to simplistic, fast-play treatments to the speculative (Alexander at Waterloo, which pits Wellington's army not against the Old Guard by against the Macedonian Companions), from the sublime (Wellington's Victory: 2,000 counters on a map measured in square feet) to the ridiculous (One Minute Waterloo, with eight pieces on a nine-hex map).
Since I'm going to quickly review the campaign, I'll use an old favourite, Kevin Zucker's The Emperor Returns. I will also be trying to run a semi-double-blind game of this at a local game store next weekend.

The Emperor Returns: Campaign Start Setup (OSG)

The game actually begins just before the French move across the border. The French have the initiative and must decide, as Napoleon did, whether to attack northwest towards Ghent, north towards Brussels, or northeast towards Namur. To drive towards Ghent is, in essence, to attack the Anglo-Allied army's right flank, hoping to defeat the penny packets in which it is spread out over the Belgian countryside and to draw its center of gravity away from its Prussian allies. To drive on Brussels is to attack the "seam" between the two Allied armies--often in warfare the most vulnerable point of two forces, since responsibility for defending the zone where the two meet is often confused and uncertain. To drive on Namur is to attack the Prussians, who are far more concentrated to begin with. This makes them an easier target to find and fix, but also a harder nut to crack. And the wooded, hilly banks of the Sambre will slow down the French attack, giving the British time to get their act together and come to the aid of their Prussian ally.

Commemorating the D Day Landings: Replaying the Normandy Invasion

What Are the Mission Goals?

As we prepare to dive into the German's first player turn, let's review what is driving the two sides' decisions.

Gold Beach on 7 June 1944. (Wikipedia)

In the same way that the rules for movement and combat in wargames try to drive outcomes that have a credible historical character, the victory conditions for games ("how you win") are designed to drive players towards taking actions that, across the sweep of the game, will reflect the goals that the commanders on each side were striving for. They will generally be defined in terms that can be measured explicitly in the game, but they will be aimed at creating the same pressures that the historical commanders experienced.

The full campaign game of Normandy '44 takes 22 turns, covering the period from June 6th to June 27th. For the purposes of this demo, I'll just be running the seven-turn mini-campaign, which runs through June 12th. There are "automatic victory conditions" for this scenario (ones that award victory to a player as soon as they are fulfilled) that are the same as those for the full campaign. In addition, there are "end game victory conditions", ones that will determine the winner at the end of the game if no automatic victory has taken place.

Indian soldiers serving in the German Army, manning a "tobruk" (reinforced foxhole). (Wikipedia)

Automatic Victory

The campaign's automatic VCs reflect the overall goals of the invasion campaign. The Allied armies sought a foothold in Europe, but a foothold that could be expanded to push the Germans out of France and, eventually, force them to surrender unconditionally, as had been agreed at the Casablanca Conference of the Allied leaders in 1943. To that end, they needed not just a lodgment on the French coast, but the ability to drive into the heart of France. So the Allies win the campaign automatically if they have three or more units, in supply, on the east or south edge of the map at the end of a German turn. In other words, a penetration of the German lines so complete that, given a player turn to work with, the Germans cannot displace or isolate enemy units far beyond their at-start frontline and in a position to head towards the French interior.

For the automatic Allied victory, all beaches must be open (i.e., German troops must not recently have been in possession of any of the Allied landing grounds) and all four hexes of the city of Caen must be Allied controlled. This largest city in the landing area lay at the hub of the region's road network. Until Caen was Allied controlled, supplies could not flow forward to forces fighting in the interior.

Supplies being landed on Omaha Beach. (Wikipedia)

The Germans, too, have automatic VCs. If they close three or more Allied beaches or Mulberries, or eliminate or reduce seven US three-step units to cadre status, or eliminate or reduce five British three-step units to cadre status, then they win. These events would represent, in the first place, the inability of the Allies to reinforce and supply their invasion force or, in the second and third cases, such a devastating loss of manpower that Allied morale would plummet.

End Game Victory

Should none of these decisive outcomes arise, at the end of the seven-turn mini-campaign the Allied player counts up victory points (VPs); if she/he has 14, the Allies have won. Otherwise, victory goes to the Germans. The Allies are awarded VPs for controlling the Allied drop zones, for linking up the US and UK beaches (defined as having a clear road from Juno Beach to St Mere Eglise obstructed by no German units or ZOCs not occupied by Allied troops), for controlling the city of Bayeux, and for each hex of city or town outside the Allied Naval Bombardment zone. They lose points for closed beaches.

Essentially, this requires the Allies (who will never get an auto victory in seven turns) to seize and hold their beach objectives and push far enough inland to link up the US and the UK forces. If they protect the beaches (don't lose VP), hold all the airborne drop zones (9 VP), fulfill the link-up conditions (3VP) and control Bayeux (2 VP), they can get the 14 VPs they need to win.