Christmas Clash

No, not Trenton (though I've done that in the past, and might next week at work), but a repeat of Prestonpans. While I feel the Charge! version was a mess, there's another reason for a simpler game - more units on the table. With Stephen Simpson's rules, a regiment just needs a couple bases and one or two casualty figures, and this way I can field the number of units recommended in the Black Powder supplement and fit them on my table. I tried Simpson's '45 scenarios (from Wargames Illustrated 134) last year shortly before starting this blog, and was very pleased with them. The blog title image is from my runthrough of Culloden.

Unfortunately, Simpson's rules use D8 and D10 dice, and virtually all my RPG dice have been turned over to the Dungeons & Dragons group at work. But I found a variant of Simpson in MWAN 98, written by Prior Aelred Glidden, which uses only D6s. It was apparently inspired by a review of Simpson's rules by Wally Simon, and if anyone can tell me where that review is I'd be obliged. I like Wally's writing very much, and I'm interested to know what he thought.

The above is Simpson's simple Prestonpans scenario from WI 134 - an empty field with five regiments on each side. The British units are all "below average;" ie, they will rout after one morale failure. According to the Black Powder scenario and my successful 'Rising rolls, there will be twice as many units available:

Government:

• Five infantry battalions (White, blue, yellow, green facings and Hessians)
• Two dragoon regiments
• Three guns

British army, with supplemental cat butt.

I'll count all of these, except the Hessians, as three-base units - under Glidden's rules, they will rout after one morale failure. But at least there are more of them, including guns, so it might not be as bad as it looks.

Rebels:

• Eight Highland clans (all with four bases, or average strength)
• Two dragoon squadrons (I'll count these as a single regiment with, like the British, three bases to represent its small size.)

Left.

Center.

Right.

Two thirds of the Scots will start 14" from the British - ie, one move out of musketry range. The rest of the units will be 19" away, or two moves. 

The British formation will be classic, infantry in the center interspersed with guns, cavalry on the flanks. Glidden's version of the rules includes brigade commanders, who provide bonuses to rally attempts (but can be killed in the process, so let's not have Charlie do any of this!). The Brits get one commander, Cope, and the Scots get four - Charles as CinC, Murray, Perth and Nairne.

To save table space, I started the game immediately after the first Scottish move, at which point the two left-hand brigades are in musketry range and the third will have to move again first. This will allow the British a round of shooting before the Highland charge of ten inches next turn. The Scots are advancing (hence their generals in front of the units) and the British are holding their ground (Cope next to, rather than before or behind, his line).

Turn 1: Firing

• All Scottish fire misses (Highlanders have -1, so needed sixes).
• Three Highland regiments are hit. Two, rallied by their commanders, take no effect, but one loses a base. It may continue, but one more loss and it will break.
• A British dragoon regiment charges, but fails to hit despite +2 to the roll (+1 for first round of melee, +1 for cavalry charging infantry.

Turn 2: Highland charge!

• Four of the five clans in range of Cope's line pass their rolls to charge (requiring the number of unit bases or better). The last may still move forward, but not contact.
• One dragoon regiment takes musketry and breaks off the board.
• The second continues its combat with the Highlanders, who lose a base but do not break.
• The white foot regiment loses a base and breaks.
• The rebel dragoons take casualties from a Hessian volley and break.

Right moves up, with cavalry flanking.

Some badly lit charges:

Turn 3: Hand-to-hand struggle

• Two more clans get into the fight, which is however inconclusive until...
• General Cope is killed while trying to rally one of his regiments!
• His army checks as one and ... holds on. Boring!

Battle in the center.

Hessians and gunners hold out on the right.

Turn 4: The final push?

No, not really, though...

• One gun is eliminated and presumably captured.
• Two clans are decimated and driven back.

Turn 5: The grind

• One of the retreating clans reforms.
• The Hessians, after holding the British left flank all alone for ages, are overwhelmed and retreat from the board.
• One of the British guns, cleared to fire, fails to run off the increasingly unhappy clan in front of it.
• On the British right, a regiment swings into the combat on its right but despite the +2 roll, fails to hurt its opponent.

British right flank. The battle threatens to turn into a swinging door
as both rights outflank!

Turn 6: Maneuvering for advantage

The Scottish right, ready to sweep down the field.

Turn 7: Collapse imminent?

• Units on both British flanks break.
• One reduced clan does its best to keep the remaining dragoons busy, charging and retreating.

Turn 8:

• Yellow-faced regiment takes casualties and breaks.
• The Scottish right reforms into column with intent to cut off the British line of retreat.
• The dragoons turn about and charge into the Highlanders pushing back their infantry. Only the Scottish brigadier manages to keep them in the fight.

Turn 9: 

• Last gun eliminated.
• The Scottish right has marched to the center.

Turn 10:

• The last two British regiments (blue-faced and dragoons) take casualties and break. End game, at last!

Outflanked.

The scrum!

That really should have ended earlier - like right after the Government commander was killed. Perhaps I should have repeated the army-wide morale check? There isn't a flanking rule, either, and it's pretty hard to outnumber in melee. A little free kriegspiel might have been useful here. I'm not entirely satisfied with Glidden's rules, mostly because of the morale check, which is random and a roll of 1 or 2 always keeps a unit in the fight. In Simpson's original rules, to-hit and morale are combined. I think I'll return to them for future games, but under the circumstances this still went much better (and quicker) than Charge!

Now for the Black Powder campaign recovery table. One British dragoon unit left the table without suffering casualties, while the Hessians took casualties before leaving the table and all other regiments were destroyed. Also, the Scots captured three guns.

Their recovery roll is 3. Units destroyed are lost, but those that left the table without taking casualties first (remember, as Poor units they can only take a single "casualty") are restored. That's one dragoon regiment and the Hessians who escape to join Wade south of the border.

On the Scottish side, one Highland regiment and the dragoons were destroyed, and three Highland regiments took casualties.

Scots roll a 6 on the recovery table - that allows them to restore the damaged units to full strength, get half the destroyed units back (I'll take the Highlanders), and upgrade two units. That enables me to make two of the Highland regiments elite - ie, they now get three hit points.

They also get to roll on a Jacobite Victory Table: 6 again! D3 Highland regiments join my cause - and I roll a 1. Ah, well. I now have nine Highland regiments and three guns to advance on England with. See you next time!

Regatta at Das Krieg Haus

 The local club of the South Florida Miniatures Gamers is lucky to have its own clubhouse (read: a rented storage unit), with the affectionate nickname of Das Krieg Haus. Members take it in turn to run monthly games, usually historical and usually horse-and-musket to WWII. One member takes on the responsibility of rent, though the rest of us chip in as a quasi-membership fee, and in between games there is plenty of room to store minis and terrain - also a small library, fridge, and TV for showing appropriate films. I find it a comfortable place to just spend some time, and members spend more time reminiscing and eating pizza than playing some days. Yesterday was one of those for me...

Traditionally in December, we play Limeys and Slimeys, a beer-and-pretzels naval game that leans more towards pirates than ships-of-the-line - not that there aren't some of those, and the table can barely fit the fleet some years. There were about thirteen people present, including the father-in-law of one player and the daughter of another. This year's scenario featured a convoy of Maltese ships, sometime in the 1740s, fleeing a pair of Franco-Spanish warships and defended by a single British frigate.

Fore and aft views of the largest ships: 

 

A few representative pictures of the club. The second level, used for storage, is visible in the second pic.

 

A couple of my favorite posters. The second is Maryland militia at North Point, 1814 - a game I'd like to run at work.

Usually the ships are stocked with 15mm miniatures - this year we used 28s.

 

Line infantry doubled as marines aboard ship:

 

Towards the middle of the battle. The dhow in the center is mine. The Frenchman on the left is catching up with the larger merchantmen and boarding a little one, while the Spaniard on the right is dueling with the British escort. Later in the game, we removed the rear mat, dragged everything towards that end of the table, and replaced it on the forward end to provide more room to sail through the Straits of Messina.

Ultimately, the Brits and Maltese lost; the larger merchantmen were taken, the British frigate sunk and the smaller ships escaped after tossing their cargoes overboard. I never even fired a shot or had one fired at me, just sailed down the table with occasional tacks to avoid other ships, and spent the game ogling the ships and miniatures, talking with friends, drinking Cokes, and reading a loaned copy of Eight Hundred Fighting Englishmen - the large-scale version of Larry Brom's classic The Sword and the Flame, which I'm thinking of using with the Zulu War Paperboys.

Still had a good time - this was only my second visit to Das Krieg Haus since the pandemic started. Maybe not the smartest idea, but it did our hearts good if not our immune systems.

Dropped by the game store afterwards, but unfortunately they no longer had a copy of Chris Peers' Death in the Dark Continent and were short on paint (the teen tech lab at work would like me to run a basic painting class for all the kids busily printing DnD miniatures). Coming not so soon...

Charge! at Prestonpans

"... the broadswords came whirling out of the mists at Prestonpans to fall on Major-General John Cope's redcoats and cut them to ribbons in something under five minutes." -- G.M. Fraser, Johnnie Cope in the Morning 

It didn't go too well.

As a game, I mean.

Despite its relative simplicity (it was published in the '60s, after all) Charge! is a bit messy to play. Especially with multi-based figures, because close combat is largely one-to-one. And because the morale mechanic is based on casualties alone, I have to track each unit on paper. Then track overall casualties against the original number of men, leaving out those who fled the field, and ultimately I gave up and accepted a more free-kriegspiel result. The methods I used to make the British lower-quality didn't work too well, so the Scots took a lot of casualties on their way in.

The field of battle. Five Highland clans and a handful of horse...

... facing three and a half foot regiments, a gun, and English horse.

The Scots advance, with the right unit in skirmish order.
(Highlanders may move as light infantry.)

Cavalry clash.

The Scots cavalry are broken, but the rallying British
are in range of a Highland regiment, which fires into them.

The right-hand clan spreads out to flank the Hessians.

The British troops count as militia and roll one die per ten men,
the Hessians one per eight men. At this range, the roll is halved
for casualties (marked on the slip behind the unit).

A Banshee of the Highlands appears out of the mists!
Some of the Hanoverians fall over on the shaking ground,
and the Highlanders feel a supporting paw on their backs as they
hurtle towards the enemy!

The lines meet, unluckily for the gun-crew.
The last volley kills dozens of Highlanders.

The Hessians draw their combat.

While one Highland regiment breaks, so do two
British regiments, and the gun is lost.

The British horse were close enough to their target
to avoid a volley, and draw the combat.

By my calculations, the Jacobites have about 80 men left on the field, less than half what they started with, while the Government have 79 men left. But while the Hessians and horse on the flanks have held their own, their center is gone. I think the Scots have won the day - at the cost of many of Scotland's finest.

At this point, I roll on the Jacobite Victory Table, and the Recovery Table for both sides. The Jacobites get volunteers - my choice of one Highland regiment or D3 Lowland regiments. I'll choose the latter, and two units of Lowlanders join my banner! (I also claim the enemy gun as spoils of war.)

For Recovery, the Jacobites "rally," recovering the casualties of unbroken units but failing to recover the broken regiments. The British roll the same and won't get their broken units back either.

On reflection, using Charge!, with its lack of real morale rules, probably was a mistake for the sort of morale-based battle Prestonpans was. With Stephen Simpson's rules, which I used for this same battle before, it is entirely possible for the British line to break on the first turn!

On to Edinburgh and Stirling! Unless I repeat this under a simpler ruleset. Time will tell...

Raising the Standard

I've committed myself to running a Jacobite '45 campaign. It would probably be smarter and easier to go with the very nice (and brief!) rules by Stephen Simpson, which I've successfully used in the past, but I really want to give the simplified Charge! rules a workout. That may require a larger table and slightly bigger armies. I intend to try the campaign structure from Black Powder's Last Argument of Kings supplement, and this requires a maximum of thirteen (!) Allied infantry regiments and up to six cavalry regiments.

My table is five feet across. A base of eight men is 30mm wide, so a Wofun regiment of five bases is about six inches. 

Yeah.

The other option is to reduce the armies by, say, a third or even half (I do want to retain the regiment sizes). This isn't hard for the Hanoverians but may be tricky for the Jacobites, as their army size is more variable. The campaign is a series of linked battles and choices, where direction, victory and defeat modify the numbers of troops available in the next action. Perhaps modifying the improvement tables (rolling on -1 or something) would work to start.

I roll for the Raising of the Clans; 2. I get only three clan regiments. I can roll again at +1 at a delay of two weeks, and this time I roll a 6! Eight clans and two squadrons of horse are available to me.

You may notice the poor bastard with the standard has
had his foot glued back on. A bad omen?

I posted a poll on the Wargaming the '45 Facebook group for Johnnie Cope's actions:

• Await Reinforcements: 6.
• March on Edinburgh: 3.
• Leave Garrisons and Retreat to England: 0.

Someone added:

• Retire to Carlisle and Berwick, then await reinforcement: 2.

Await reinforcement is the obvious winner, so Cope gets an extra regiment and another "turn" begins. I repeated the poll, and this time March on Edinburgh was the clear winner, though Retreat to Carlisle and Send Cavalry to Reconnoiter were also suggested.

For the battle, I decided to go by raw numbers, assuming a normal infantry regiment to number roughly a thousand men and cavalry to number 500. Thus, the original battle of Prestonpans had about 2,500 men a side, this one has 3,000 for the Hanoverians and 4,000 for the Stuarts. So I'll need 3-4 odds.

The Scottish side will be composed of five 32-man Highland clans and 12 cavalry, the Government of three 32-man plus 18 cavalry and a half regiment of Hessians. Probably will add one gun for the Government as well, though perhaps give it limited shots to reflect the crew morale? Except for the Hessians, the Government are classed as poorly-trained militia, thus will fire at one die per ten men. To reflect their poor morale (again barring the Hessians), they will retreat at one-third casualties and break at half casualties - the Highlanders retreat at half and break at two-thirds.

I imagine with the Hanoverians in such poor shape, the goal will be for them to mostly escape the field to reinforce Wade. A game of Charge!-lite normally ends once one side has taken half casualties; I think once all Hanoverians are retreating instead that will work, and if they can cause greater casualties on the Scots they will at least hold their heads high.

So soonish, a battle report. Will this work as a scenario? No idea. Any suggestions are welcomed.

A mix of Paperboys

Some Peter Dennis-inspired modeling this week.

I experimented with a faded brown sharpie on the edges of some Wofun ECW Highlanders. The difference stands out in the mix of uncolored and colored strips, though I will also need to try a sharpie with more ink:

 

I built a couple knights and a tilting ground from Peter's free Jousting set, which I take credit for inspiring after I asked him for some side-on knights for jousting games!

My thought was to run a Warhammer Fantasy jousting tournament (rules from White Dwarf 215) with custom-colored paper knights, but the teens have just gotten a new 3D printer and are already printing plastic miniatures. So we are likelier to use plastic knights, though on the other hand the staff are eager for me to run a simple painting class. Will have to make the time.

Finally, I finished my Glory:1861 battalion:

Eight companies, command base, and two field officers.

HQ element: Lt. Colonel, Major, Color-bearers and Musician.

Closeup on the troops - 18mm Paperboys, nine to a base.

My first "battle" may simply be a "training" action of four companies a side to test the rules. Given my table size, I'm thinking of building a small Western Confederate unit for trans-Mississippi battles. The three-company Arizona Rangers, a handful of which fought at Picacho Pass, might be a fun unit to raise.

Light Bobs at Waterloo

Haven't gotten much done in the past couple weeks. Quite a bit of reading, at least, though not much that will translate to gaming any time soon. Like my gaming projects, I tend to read several books at once, depending on my mood. The only one I've finished of the five or so I'm working on this week is this:

The Great Waterloo Controversy is dense. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm its intended reader, for Napoleonics are not my all-consuming interest. I was interested in its promise of a light infantry regiment's role during the Hundred Days, but this isn't precisely a reader's book. It's more aimed at researchers.

One of the things I like about British regimental history is that every unit has its own heroes, battle honours, traditions and rivalries. The 52nd's most famous moment, according to this book, would seem to be its role at the "crisis" of Waterloo, when Napoleon's Guard charged the British line and was driven back in disorder, leading to the rout of the entire French army. The Grenadier Guards got the credit for this in the popular eye, leading to their name - not because they were grenadiers, but because they defeated grenadiers. (That's an odd one, come to think of it, taking a name from one's enemies rather than one's victories.)

The 52nd Light Infantry also had a role in this, though, wheeling onto a flank of the advancing French columns and firing into them. And partly because of a couple officers who wrote prolifically about their own units' accomplishments, this led to a feud - though less between the regiments than between their retired officers, in the pages of gentlemen's magazines. I had never heard of this feud, but it was apparently pervasive enough that the author chose to focus, microscopically, on the 52nd's actions during the battle.

Much of the volume is taken up by soldiers' writings, decades after the battle, dispatched to William Siborne, who built a famous scale model of Waterloo. He assembled an enormous collection of primary sources in his effort to do things accurately, with regiments in their correct positions at a specific moment. This led to much confusion, in part because memories are malleable, and the earlier books on the topic ended up influencing the memories of those who read them.

So most of the book discusses the 52nd's organization and movements, down to the quarter hour and which company was where in line (necessary because this explains differing viewpoints between the reporters, who often saw things the men in the next company over did not on the undulating terrain, and worsened by confusion over which officers were in which company). He delves into muster rolls and court-martial reports to determine exactly how many men were present. The 52nd was actually the strongest British battalion on the day, with over a thousand officially and narrowed to 990-1000 by the author's research.

The leftovers were variously sick, deserted or on baggage duties, and the wordage spent on this is interesting as an account of a soldier's life. Glover discusses, for example, the typical percentage of men who fell out on the march - particularly important to the Duke's army because only men who were actually present and not under arrest received prize money, medals and other honors. These included an extra two years of enlistment for purposes of pension accounting, though the award was very specifically worded to not allow men to just leave two years before their enlistment was up!

The names of the dead and wounded are included in the appendices, including their origins, prior careers and enlistment dates. Several of the dead had enlisted in 1799 - a sad end to such a long career.

Even the terrain is discussed, to determine how dips and ridges both divided the attacking French columns and prevented observation, to the point of calculating how much earth, and from where, was moved to create a monument on the site!

Glover even spends a couple chapters shooting down conspiracy theories, such as that the Duke of Wellington tried to conceal the 52nd's role in his victory. (He didn't; he just didn't bother to single out many people or regiments in his reports at all.)

Ultimately, Glover synthesizes the various accounts, accepting those that agree and going to extreme lengths to reconcile those that don't. While the detail of a soldier's life on campaign is valuable, much of this is covered in other material, and this book is really for those interested in minutiae of a specific moment in history.