Blucher - Making a late start

Blucher campaign extensions and army packs.

Seven years after buying the rules I finally got round to an introductory game of Blucher, Sam Mustafa's grand-tactical Napoleonic game.

Many thanks to fellow club member, Simon, who organised and umpired the game. My opponent, Dave, commanded a Spanish force in defensive positions while I attacked with the French. I eventually managed to take a village in the centre of the Spanish position, but did not achieve the breakthrough I was hoping for. Simon pointed out that I should have made more use of my troops' superior skirmishing ability before rushing in.

Napoleonics are a foundational wargaming period. I've flirted with them over many years, but I'm no expert. While the tactics of column, line and square are for many the very essence of period flavour, I'm more pulled by grand-tactical games that allow one to fight whole historical battles, at least potentially.

Blucher is widely played and reviewed so it's rather late to go into detail about the rules. What I do want to write about is the use of the pre-printed unit cards and some thoughts on modelling terrain.

While the game we played employed conventional 6mm scale scenery, the armies consisted of the commercially available preprinted unit cards and I have to say that I was so engrossed in the game that I never missed or even thought about the absence of lead (or plastic) figures.

I now have all the extension sets and army packs, and these give me far more wargaming flexibility than a collection of model figures rooted in one time and place. Although I have 6mm Napoleonic armies that I was going to use, I'll now stick with the cards.

Two of the great advantages of card, tablet or block armies are their modest storage requirements and the ease with which they can be transported, and I'm thinking about scenery which meets the same criteria.

While I could create purely 2D scenery using felt, I'm currently considering slightly more realistic scenery which is nevertheless in ultra-low relief. Done properly I think it could look quite good and rather like an aerial perspective.

I already have a good collection of game mats, relatively shallow hills and roads and rivers, so that leaves urban and forest areas. For villages I'm thinking of using a template with low grey rectangles to represent houses, although I do have some Monopoly houses and hotels that could be put to use. I also have some 2mm lead buildings, but part of the aim here is to reduce weight and maintain a symbolic style. The houses would be of uniform height (no church steeples) so that unit cards could sit level on the top when villages are garrisoned. Forests would be templates covered in clump foliage, again of uniform height.

Battles of Napoleon

Battles of Napoleon is a hex board game with miniatures which was published in 2010 and is no longer in print. Despite a superficial similarity in appearance to the Command & Colors series of games, it plays quite differently.

Board games with miniatures are said to be the wave of the future, and I would say that miniatures games with hexes or squares are effectively converging from the other direction. This was thus a game I was keen to try.

My friend Ian, who owns the game, chose the Salamanca scenario and gave me the French with the warning that I was unlikely to win, but fate decided otherwise. The British were stronger, particularly in cavalry, but I had more artillery and a good position on a ridge line defending the three objectives which start in French hands.

The aim of this scenario is to take a majority of the objectives, but you can also win the  game by destroying a certain number of units or killing the enemy c-in-c.

The initial French deployment. The British are yet to set up.

The British made a frontal assault in column and uphill which gave me two  bonuses in firepower. Coupled with a  run of skillful dice throwing (!), the British attack shattered on the French rock. The British may have suffered from bad luck but I believe they would have needed an equally exceptional run of good luck to have succeeded in their strategy.

The French hold firm while the British begin to suffer.

I'd certainly be interested in replaying this game from the British side. My strategy would be...well, you'll have to wait for that!

I really enjoyed the game and I think Napoleonic buffs would prefer this game to the more abstract approach of C&C Napoleonics.

Reorganising my 6mm Napoleonics for Blucher - a reapparaisal

After some very helpful discussion on TMP I'm inclined to go for smaller, 60mm square bases which will allow me to use my dining-room table without having to get out the 6' x 4' extension boards. For artillery, I'd follow the Polemos standard and mount each gun on a 30mm square, using them in pairs for Blucher.

60mm x 60mm bases, or 60mm x 30mm?

I could break down the infantry and cavalry bases into two 60mm x 30mm bases to give me greater flexibility for playing other games in which the bases would represent battalions, but if I did that it would be more difficult to fit in skirmishers and the general positioning would not look quite so good IMO.

And while 1 base equals 1 battalion works well for pre- and post-Napoleonics, I feel that a lower level Napoleonic game really cries out for multi-base battalions which can be formed into column, line and square.

Reorganising my 6mm Napoleonics for Blucher

The publication of Sam Mustafa's Blücher sent me sorting through my old boxes of Heroics 6mm Napoleonics which I first started accumulating in, I think, the early 80s.

The core of the collection are Austrians for Aspern-Essling 1809, all historically organised in 18-figure battalions. The rest are a more miscellaneous collection of Austrians and French bought off eBay and rather horribly flocked IMO. The Austrian uniforms are not quite in period with my original figures and the French infantry seem to have rather a jumble of uniforms on each base, but I'm past seeing that level of detail and past caring about that level of accuracy.

My introduction to Command & Colours

The first scenario from Command & Colours Napoleonics

Despite my enthusiasm for wargaming with hexes and blocks, I played my first couple of games of Command & Colours Ancients only last year, although I had previously played a couple of games of BattleCry, the ACW variant of the system.

As the game system has been out for some time and most readers are probably more familiar with it than I am, I won't attempt a comprehensive review, but I would like to share a few points in its favour for the benefit of anyone who hasn't played it. One's first impressions of a game are always improved by winning. I did win both games, though my opponent inevitably attributed this to lucky dice throws rather than tactical genius!