Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Black Powder

Kent and I got a game in tonight- we had 8x infantry battlaions each, 3 cav units and a battery of guns.

The Russians deploy. We each had our Cav off table as a delayed reserve (FoWesque rules- roll a 5+ to get a unit on, this represented the Cav being released by a higher command).
 The French advance in the centre.
 My wekaer brigqade refused to move the first two turns then raced forward to enfilade the French. Things were at this point looking pretty good I thought.
 In the centre some Guards Cavalry arrived, forcing my battalion to form square. Sensing an opportunity Kent's infantry advanced (we had some issues with the form squre rules and how Cav is supposed to attack a square- Kent figured it out and started throwing a unit of infantry into assault then adding some Cav, a very powerful sledgehammer as it turned out).
 A good view of the battle in the middle turns, still pretty even at this point.
 The Cuirassiers arrive and look for some Russian to run down.
 The Old Guard stoically march into the guns and overrun them...
 Leaving a rather large hole in the centre of my line. To the left we both take casulties in the clashes.
 The Guards Cav line up a square to charge- my centre is crumbling under the pressure and my own cuirassiers are unable to intervene.
On my right flank we both lose a battalion in the assualts.
At this point we ran out of time. My centre was about to fold and I had no done much damage to either of Kent's infantry brigades so the game was looking like it was going to be a French victory in the next turn or so. The rules were pretty intuitive and I enjoy the randomness of command rolls not going the way you anticipated.

6 comments:

  1. Looked like fun :)

    But it seems I might have to send my Prince Alexander and Kutuzov command up to give your fellows a wee chat about their performance lol

    better luck next time :)

    cheers

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great game and report... you're tempting me to get on with the piles of unopened plastic boxes of troops I have to do for this period!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Craig - How big was that table? Inquiring kitchen-table gamers want to know....

    I believe Hail Caesar has a functioning points system (despite early indications the authors were 'above' such things), does Black Powder? The armies are looking very cool.

    You big Borodino game is shaping up nicely at this rate. I am looking forward to seeing it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. There is a points system (kind of) but we have simply made limits
    eg 8 Inf:
    0-2 elites
    0-2 vets
    at least 4 regular infantry

    Also we have agreed on 2x 8 commanders, 1x 7.

    Points aren't really needed by us and game funcrtions well by gentlemen's agreements to add limits that stop simply bringing everything as elites.

    Table was 7.5 x 6 and we think bigger tables, less stuff works well and think we should use 16 ft tables at the weekend as we don't want a traffic jam effect.

    ReplyDelete
  5. That's a great looking game and report Craig. We played a BP Zulu war game last night. Zulus totally over ran the Brit's and I was home by 10.30 (normally midnight-ish). Anyway, glad to see you are getting to grips with BP.

    ReplyDelete