During Call to Arms 2024 last year, K walked up to our little vintage game to tell us that he'd been a wargamer for years, and that he even had some 20mm Napoleonic armies. He uses them to fight battles with his son, who he had with him.
Well, one chat led to another, and a couple of weekends ago we met at his place for a battle. K uses the delightfully simple, fast-play and very entertaining rules to be found in Neil Thomas's Napoleonic Wargaming, published in 2009:
The rules don't have a catchy title, so I'll just have to refer to them as Neil Thomas' Napoleonic Wargaming Rules (or NTNWR). These are not the same as NT's famous One Hour Wargame rules.
What attracted me to them is that they have a variety of quirky but really quite fun looking game mechanics, while also being entirely compatible with my 4-bases per unit organisation.
The scenario we played pitted most of Wallmoden's Corps, albeit beefed up a bit with Prussian dragoons and the Russian Leib Grenadiers, against the flower of the French Army in 1813, commanded by K. He had much better cavalry than me but also a lot of terrible infantry, so it was going to be an interesting match.
As luck would have it, I was able to seize the wooded road in the centre with two of my best infantry regiments, the 73rd and the Russo-German legion. This was to have very important effects.
Wallmoden's left flank was cunningly refused, forcing K to make a long march around the flank to get at it. The Feld Batallion Bremen were only classed as levies, but the Prussian 2nd Dragoons, I hoped, would scare off any attempt to assault them.
On the right were the Estorff Hussars and the Lutzowers. These were by far my worst troops, so I hid them beind the woods. The Lutzowers were so bad they couldn't even form line and therefore had greatly reduced firepower. Not too far off, however, were the crack Leib Grenadiers and my Russo-German battery.
What makes NTNWR different is that it's an I-Go-You-Go system and firing, charging, melee and morale have all been radically simplified, so it clips along at a great pace and there's real scope for tactical suprises.
The really radical bit though, which has a transformative effect on the gameplay, is that close-order infantry units may only assault other infantry if they have a numerical superiority in terms of the number of bases they've got left. This forces players to attrit their enemy before attempting an assault, producing a linear style of deployment that, to my eyes, is very similar to actual Napoleonic warfare. When the charges finally go in, however, they're devastating, and there's very little prospect of recovery from a poor morale result.
K's sent three battalions against my centre to keep it occupied while manoevring against my left. I had every confidence that my Dragoons would make short work of his Chasseurs, however. The Guard Grenadiers looked a bit menacing though.
Supporting the attack in the centre was the Foot Artillery of the Guard, which had a much better chance of hitting than my Russo-German gunners. They were firing at long range at troops in cover, however, but K made up for this with some oustanding dice throws.
Sure enough, it was first blood to K, with the 73rd losing a base. I had them rated as only average troops, so they were quite lucky to survive the resulting morale test. This was not a good start, and my dice throwing was so dreadful that their much vaunted firepower was not having any effect.
If I'd been commanding the French, I probably would have assaulted the 73rd there and then, but K was worried about my dragoons and so decided to charge them with the 4th Chasseurs. This set off a running battle between the two that lasted for the rest of the game.
Meanwhile, on the left, K decided to have a pop at the Leib Grenadiers with the Empress' Dragoons. NTNWR seemed to suggest that three-deep infantry in line should have a fair chance against a frontal charge by cavalry, so I decided to give this a go.
And the ED's bounced right off! What was worse, they also got raked at short range by the RGL gunners and were then charged in flank by the Estorffs ...
.. who were victorious! I think K must have forgotten they were lurking behind the woods.
Things really started to go south for K from this point as the RGL and what was left of the 73rd finally started to find their marks, aided by the RGL artillery firing at short range. Within a couple of turns K's three centre battalions had sufferred catastrophic casualties, made worse by failed morale tests.
It wasn't all bad though. The 4th Chasseurs were also victorious, as it happens, but this still left K with only two viable battalions: the Guard and the 3rd Swiss. Neither had made much impact, however. Although the 4th Chasseurs had seen off the Dragoons, they were down to a single base, and the Guard was about to become rather isolated.
The Swiss, meanwhile, had spent the entire battle in the woods taking fairly ineffective pot shots at the Lutzowers. They were too far away to be of any assistance.
We called it a day at that point. It was such good fun that we've decided to do it again with armies twice the size at Call to Arms 2025, which is at the end of August.There'll be two generals on each side to manage the mayhem.
For those wondering about my French artillery, I'm hoping to have something to show in a few days.
Have a great weekend,
WM
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