A few months ago I had the pleasure of popping round Des’ for a game of Napoleonics using his fantastic collection of 15/18mm kit and his fantastic newly finished buildings. I really should have posted about it a lot sooner but got hit with a lot of life shit recently – moving flats and spending some time being really quite ill due to Shingles, 2 bastard colds and a dose of COVID which has really made me lose the old mojo! Sadly with the passage of time the details are a bit vague so here’s a bit of a photo dump as it was a cracking day’s wargaming as usual.
I was playing as the Austrians and had command of 2 Brigades of line infantry and a Brigade of Kurassier with a Brigade of Grenadiers in reserve and was tasked with forcing the French forces in front of me to retreat from their position, especially the beautiful village to my left. My plan was to ignore/mask the village and to concentrate on forcing the French back from the ridge in the centre so that it might maker the occupation of the village untenable. Failing this I would assault it with the Grenadiers when they arrived. The cavalry would swing round the right flank to hopefully distract or pin French forces enough to prevent them from interfering whilst the assault on the ridge went in. Nice and simple.
The game was a blast and I tried to do something very strange in a Napoleonic game – I tried very hard to keep the battalions spaced out so that they would be able to deploy into line and not crammed ‘unrealistically’ together as is seen so often. It was a struggle but not impossible to do and it meant that I had to attack in two lines which I thought was ace! Apart from the struggle for the hill which swung back and forth there was a fantastic clash of Cuirassiers on the flank which was made all the better because Des had the Saxons out – possibly the best looking cavalry ever fielded. We also had a good conversation about why do rules have such set, rigid turn sequences and maybe it’s time that they were done away with – but there will be more about that in another post soon.
Tracks and Threads 