Dettingen

John wanted to try out Brown Bess in an eighteenth century context, so put together this scenario covering Dettingen during the War of the Austrian Succession.

Tim C and I took the Allies (British, Hanoverians and Austrians) while Jerry took the wicked French.

The battlefield from the French side. The Allies are hemmed in by the impassable River Main on the right and forested hills on the left while the French have a nice stream to defend. To add to the misery, the Allies are cut off and trying to break through to restore their supply lines. Not a happy situation!

The French deploy. They clearly didn't get the memo about defending the stream, and (as in real life) are all set to attack the Allies with their outstanding cavalry massed on the right.

The Allies are more conventional. Infantry in the centre, cavalry on the flanks. The columns are the Austrians deployed in reserve. I had the right flank (mainly Hanoverians plus a couple of Austrian units including a brigade of Cuirassiers).

The French cavalry dash forth, led by the Maison du Roi. Our chaps move up to meet them. Very unfairly, the French have a gun on the far side of the Main where we can't get to it.

Over on the right, my chaps take advantage of a lack of enemy cavalry to ride along the front of our line. Well it seemed like a good idea at the time and will look great in the film.

A bloody melee ensues on the left. Sadly for us, the French are all cuirassiers. Luckily our gun managed to get off a volley of cannister before the French closed, which emptied a few saddles.

My chaps join in the fray, as a French cavalry unit peels off to meet them. Again, our centre battery manages to knock a couple of hits off the French before they close, which really helps.

The line will advance! The infantry on both sides start to advance to support the cavaly action. The French refuse their left flank, covered by a square, pinned by my reserve dragoon brigade.

To everyones amazement, we finally push the French cavalry back and plug the line with infantry. The allies success was soley due to that inital cannon shot which slightly weakened the French before contact. Both sides horsemen regroup as they are all a bit ragged now. Sadly George of Hanover died in the melee, so no George II.

The infantry lines close and fusillades of musketry ring out. In the centre my Austrian cuirassiers are still slugging it out with the French. It turns out the Allies musketry is rather better than the French.

Outgunned, the Swiss launch a desperate infantry assault, but are shot down by with withering platoon fire. It was very glorious though.

The tide has turned in the Allies favour and the French realise they can't win the infantry fight, so begin to fall back. We called it a day at that point. A very close run thing.

This was really good fun and the rules worked well. There were a couple of oddities around interpenetration and the duration of cavalry melees which we came up with some amendments for, but overall it felt right and produce the historical result. It also looked really nice. Good stuff.

Zvezda Ferdinands

I have played quite a few Kursk games but for some reason I've never managed to deploy any Ferdinands despite having a 20mm one and half a dozen (!) 6mm ones. As I have been building up my 15mm WW2 Eastern Front stuff, I didn't really have an excuse to resist the beautiful Zvezda 1/100th scale Ferdinands.

I bought two of them because anything less would just be silly wouldn't it? This pair were a real bargain at £2.50 each. 

They are on the simpler end of Zvezda kits, with only a few parts to clip or stick together. The tracks are very crude but actually look fine when painted up. As ever you need to be a bit careful clipping the parts off the sprues. 

Some of the detail is a bit light but  most of it is deep enough for a wash to work well (the hatches, engine grills etc). I just left these models plain rather than adding extra stowage etc. as I don't think they will be coming out to play much. 

The are finished in dunkelgelb and the endlessly reproduced mid green cris-cross camo scheme that almost every model Ferdinand seems to sport. I just gave them a couple of Balkan crosses and didn't bother with the turret numbers. 

For weathering I did my now usual technique of painting the entire tracks and running gear mud colour. The whole thing then got a dark brown wash, and a final highlight of pale sand to pick out he sharp edges etc. Then is was just detailing (e.g. metal highlights on the track plates), basing and they were good to go. Which in this case was straight into my 'box of silly big German tanks which rarely come out to play', but I do have a specific scenario in mind for these. Just need to get the rules written...

Bunker Hill

Tim was keen to try out a new Command & Colours variant he'd bought which covered the AiW. He revamped a load of 2mm stuff to replicate the mix of blocks in the game. In general there were four strips per unit, colour coded by quality and nationality. 

I got to play His Majesty's forces, while Jerry and Tim C got the wicked rebels, and we all rolled up at some place called 'Bunker Hill' outside Boston.

View from the British side. That big fortifed hill doesn't look very promising!

I guess this is the sprawling metropolis of Boston awash with damp tea.

Johnny Reb dug in on Bunker Hill.

Somewhat unfairly, I decided that the right flank looked more promising, and the redcoats rolled forwards supported by artillery.

The rebels were pushed back from the stone walls by withering musketry.

Which allowed the Briitsh centre to close en masse. Scary!

The rebels were soon routed by the British Grenadiers and the entrenchments taken.

We set off in pursuit whilst masking Bunker Hill.

And soon put the withdrawing rebels to panic stricken flight.

At which point Bunker Hull was pinned from the front and thoroughly outflanked so the surviving rebels slunk away to fight another day. Hurrah!

The game system worked pretty well and some interesting innovations to the standard CnC mechanisms.  It was all fairly unbloody, with morale failures being a more common combat result so units flowed back and forth across the battlefield in a pleasing manner. I can't recall what the variant was called, but Tim picked it up via Kickstarter.

Robots Sir, fahsands of them.

Graham volunteered to bring a game along this week, which featured big stompy robots. Not our usual sort of fare, but when offered a chance to stomp people with big stompy robots, Tim and I thought it would be the gentlemanly thing to do.

Jerry and Tim C ran the opposition, while Graham oversaw events.

My big robot thing. Our mission was to protect a fairly immobile piece of alien technology on the escarpment in the top right. We had a  couple of really big robots, a couple of smaller ones, and a swarm of light recce craft. The alien thing is the big red blob in the top centre.

Tim had a sinister panzer grey robot. This model mounted a couple of long range missile launchers as well as laser guns etc.

The enemy had literally hordes of stuff. Tanks, flyers, IFVs, soldiers in power armour etc. They seemed quite interested in the alien artefact too.

The missile launcher proved quite useful in thinning their ranks.

Our protective recce screen, backed by by the big robots firepower mowed the enemy down, so only a few stragglers made it to the escarpment.

Oh dear, what is this? The dead enemy units came piling back on again, as an inexaustible horde. At this point we started counting ammo and casualties. Tim C observed that it bore interesting parallels to the 1st day of the Somme.

The enemy waves got a bit closer this time, and some local fauna turned up looking rather aggressive too. We worked out that we'd run out of ammo and screening forces in another hour or so and then the chips would be up, so we called a halt at the point. Jerry then revealed that it was a disguised scenario of..... Rorkes Drift.

Graham was keen to put this on as a show game, so we discussed various ways to speed things up whilst retaining the flavour of the action, so it was an interesting design session.

Cambrai 1917

Bob has published my old Nugget article on The Battle of Cambrai which was itself based on Operation Uranus. Bear in mind I ran this game a rather alarming 16(!) years ago, but the progress of the game was recorded for posterity by the miracle of digital camera technology, which was a bit of a novelty in 2002.

As might be expected, the massed armour rolled over the Germans, although the game was not without its distinctly sticky moments. The photographic evidence reveals rather poignantly the ever diminishing number of operational tanks in the front line and the increasingly ragged progress once the main Hindenburg defences were reached, a couple of pillboxes in the centre proving extremely tough nuts to crack.

Initial setup. The first line is the outpost line, and second heavy trench line is the main Hindenberg Line and an anti-tank obstacle. The two zones to the left are the British deployment area.

Closer view of the tanks. Interesting mix of Greens and Browns there! The 15mm tanks are deployed in the north (they are further away so are smaller). The plastic tanks are a mixture of Emhar and Airfix, the later minus their trails and doing passable impressions of Mark IVs. The infantry are lined up in support, restricted by the stacking limits, a brigade from each division forming the first wave. The cavalry can be seen waiting to exploit the inevitable victory.

Turn 1. The outpost line is obliterated by hundreds of tanks. Eagle eyed readers will notice that one tank unit has already stalled on the start line. Some Germans have popped up in the HKL (spotted from the hill) and the German reserve line behind the canal is visible.

Turn 2. Things are a bit sticky in the north, but the tanks press on in the south. One tank unit has already been destroyed by the main defences as the infantry follow the tanks up.

Turn 3. Reasonable progress in the south as the German guns are overrun. Stuck everywhere else.

Turn 4. More tanks into the gun line, but Bourlon wood is bypassed in the north as it is proving a very tough nut to crack.

Turn 5. Approaching the canal du nord with cavalry rapidly advancing to exploit any gaps.

Turn 6. Over the canal. Cavalry moving up and over the canal.

Turn 7. The cavalry pushes on to the green fields beyond and off the table.

Turn 8. The bells ring out a great victory! The cavalry can be seen galloping off the right hand side of the table, while the British have achieved their 10,000 yard breakthrough.

So, despite the somewhat dodgy rules, a reasonably plausible result. I  later ran this at COW with eleven British players (one per division and two Corps commanders) with much the same outcome. I later made up some MDF trench systems to replace the cardboard ones. The main Hindenburg trench is much wider as it was designed as an anti-tank obstacle.

Less Portable Wargame

After our previous outing with The Portable Wargame, I took on board the comments the players had made and had a go at making some revisions. I got a little carried away with this process and five versions and four playtests later realised I was in danger of re-writing the rules entirely and replacing them with a mixture of NATO Brigade Commander, NQM and Sam Mustafas Rommel!

A degree of cutting back was in order as I wanted to keep to the basic philosophy of the game. I ended up with some minor changes and some big revisions, but something which was still recognisably the Portable Wargame, although less Portable, hence its new title.

The main changes are:

1. Tightening up the turn sequence as we got really confused about which units had done what when.
2. Removing the retreat result altogether and replacing it with the 'pin' result as suggested in the rules.
3. The movement table was replaced with something which looks suspiciously like NQM.
4. The close combat system was replaced with the Sandhurst Battlegroup Wargame system, converted to opposed D6 and made a bit more heroic by plugging in a DBA type graded result system. I'll stick with it for now and see how it goes.
5. The shooting system was heavily simplified with only three classes of fire (good, OK, bad),  but three weights of fire and levels of protection (Light, medium, heavy) added. So an 88 is now considerably better than a 2pdr , and troops in bunkers only really need to worry about heavy artillery. Thank you Mr Kemp.
6. Some WW2 chrome was added (OPs, ammunition, reorg, communications, visibility) in as simple manner as possible.

It seemed simplest to play KG Fredrickson again, as it saved the players faffing around figuring out the scenario as I wangted to try the new mechnisms out. Tim and Graham took the Russians, John and Jerry the Germans

First turn. The Germans have adopted a forward defence with two companies in the front woods. I tried this in the playtests and it worked really well. Eagle eyed readers will notice that the Russians are using both my converted command bus and Zis-2 57mm AT gun. Really eagle eyed readers will spot Colonel Strelinkov and his megaphone standing by his command car.

The Russians have also got 76mm Shermans. Their first outing, from a batch of Shermans I bought at Triples some years ago, and fitting for a 1944 Guards Mechanised Brigade.

The Germans got some new toys too. Here is Colonel Fredrickson riding a  horse. They also have an Opel radio truck and a horse drawn Pak 40. Both sides have an HQ which needs to be active for them to call artillery fire, units also need to trace supply to it if they want to conduct engineer actions or reorganise (remove hits). If it is destroyed they lose 1 off their initiative dice. I've extended the artillery ranges to more realistic ones so the German 105s are now several hexes offtable. 

The Russians pushed hard on the right. The outpost took a loss and was pinned (yellow marker) but the ZOC held up the Russians.  In the centre a nice fat target of the Zis AT and a rifle company was heavily stonked by the Germans 105s (offtable).  I let the players stack two units in a hex, which seems to work OK. Greater concentration of force vs greater vulnerability.

The Mark IV company and the other forward outpost surrounded by wire and mines held the Russians back over in the distance. That chap on the motorcycle is the Russian artillery observer.,

Things are hotting up on the right flank. The German infantry are 'poor' so can only take three hits. Russian engineers (I gave them some engineers) are clearing the minefield under fire. Colonel Strelnikov  has turned up to encourage the troops.

Over in the distance, the Germans are holding out well and the Russian assault has petered out. The Pak 40 company in particular did massive execution on the Russians with direct HE fire. The surviving Russians fell back out of range and reorganised to remove their hits.

By great sleight of hand (ie two turns on a row), the outpost company managed to disengage, run back to the trenches and rally off a hit! I let pinned units retire, which seems to work rather well. They were all then pinned by Soviet 76mm artillery fire (offtable), but as they are only 76s (light) against trenches (medium), not much chance of any actual hits

Sadly in all the excitement I forgot to take a photo of the final assault on the trench system. 24 SP of Shermans and infantry against two second rate German rifle companies with three SP between them. The Colonel was killed rallying off the pin markers under fire, but the trenches gave the Germans quite a big bonus, which meant the Russians only attained a marginal success. That was enough to push the Germans out, then the tanks followed up with a breakthrough assault and wiped out the survivors.

By this point the Russians were only four hits off their exhaustion point so we deemed it unlikely they'd capture the other German positions and we called it a day.

Player feedback was very positive, although there was some discussion about the effects of artillery fire on armour and we still got confused about which units had done what. Old age I guess. I did notice that players never fired then moved, so we decided to bin the option. Units now either move or fire, and we'll see how we get on with that.

The main thing I was pleased with was that players made decisions which had some tactical verity, in particular whether to accept a pin or push on and take some losses. They also pulled units back out of range to reorganise them before putting them into the fray, so I'm glad I added that option. I'm slightly unhappy about having the pinned status, it is one more thing to keep track of, and I can't help thinking there are more elegant ways to solve this problem, but all I can think to do is copy the NQM or Horse, Foot and Guns firefight mechanisms, which are both aimed at different sorts of games.

I've made a couple of minor tweaks, but we'll play it as is for a few more games and see how we get on. It went well enough for me to starting thinking about some very obscure scenarios I've wanted to run for years with a few battalions. Too small for NBC but too big for Battlegroup.

Blitzspiel II - The Road to St Leger

I came across this scenario on another blog and thought it would be ideal to playtest Blitzspiel as it featured a bit less kit than the last game. It features a company of the Green Howards and two troops of the Royal Dragoon Guards vs elements of the 352nd Inf Div Fusilier Battalion and Panzerjaeger Battalion as the british push inland towards Bayeux on D-day.

I ran it on a 4x4 table (800m x 800m) with the German defenders hidden. John took the British and von Gow took the Germans.

John brings on his leading platoons. This game was also an excuse to try out my new Deepcut Studios 'scrubland' game mat. I made up the ridges either side of the road using hexon tiles and laid the mat over them. It draped very well as it is quite thin. 

The British infantry tanks and infantry operating independantly. All that training in England wasted!

A Stug opens fire from behind the hedgerow, and unfortunately misses.

The Shermans make no such mistake and their return fire turns the Stug into a column of smoke. Meanwhile the British infantry press on alongside.

More Shermans roll on as the British infantry pushes on to the far hedgerow.

The German ambush is sprung! Two more Stugs open fire, brewing up the leading Sherman.

A pair of tripod MG42s lay down a devastating crossfire on the British infantry crossing their front on the other side of the valley. The new 200m beaten zone for tripod MGs was really nasty here.

The platoon suffers a several casualties and the remainder are pinned. A German rifle section emerges from behind the hedge and takes pot shots at the survivors.

The other British infantry platoon is largely pinned by long range LMG fire.

Things were looking a bit sticky at this point, however the firepower of the remaining Shermans slowly began to turn the tide. The German advance guard and tripod MGs were suppressed and the surviving Britihs infantry assaulted the hedgerow.

The other Shermans pressed on under a hail of MG fire which neutralised one tank. More Germans emerged from their hiding places.

Perhaps more importantly, both the remaining Stugs were knocked out without any further losses of Shermans. The Germans were a touch unlucky here and might have been better siting their guns with more restricted fields of fire and aiming for flank shots. Easy to be wise after the event though.

Over in the orchard, a British rifle section stalked the suppressed MG teams.

Down on the main road, one of the German rifle sections fired their brand new panzerfaust at a Sherman, egged on by the platoon commander. Only to miss completely.

We called it a day at that point. The remaining defenders were pulling out, but the British infantry had suffered a bloody nose with only their reserve platoon intact. Without effective infantry support the Shermans weren't going anywhere in the ever denser country.

The game rattled on  at a fair old pace and we got through the whole thing in an hour, which was great. It just plays much faster than Platoon Commanders War, which is what John was after. In the washup I felt that the British would have benefited from closer infantry-armour cooperation as the tanks and infantry fought virtually separate battles. John had decided to dash for Bayeux though, and so kept his tanks concentrated, which worked very well in the tank battle, but less so in mopping up the German infantry. John noted that we were thinking in terms of platoons and troops rather than worrying about the manipulation of rifle groups etc which was what he was after from the design. So all in all, very successful.