Dave Wood and I ran several Napoleonic games using Fate of Battle at Historicon. Dave ran his games using his 25mm figures, and I ran a large game using my 10mm figures.
To show that the barrier to entry to Fate of Battle isn’t nearly as great as people think, Dave continues to run games using his Empire-mounted 25mm figures. Many of us have those in boxes somewhere. He has mounted his 25mm figures on “sabot” bases with the labels. It works quite well, and for smaller battles you can still have a nice game on a standard table.
Dave ran two scenarios from our under-development 1814 Campaign scenario book. Both games went quite well — in fact better than the play test games.
On Saturday afternoon Dave and I ran a large 10mm game with 12 players. This was partly to show that you could run a 12-player game with these rules without bogging down. It was also to play a large game that you generally only have room to play at a convention.
The scenario was the Battle of Laon from our under-development 1814 campaign scenario book. In the book Laon will be two separate scenarios. We were playing the eastern half of the battle. In this scenario the French are trying to keep their retreat rout open (far end of the table in the above picture). The Prussians under Kleist are trying to cut the road. In the above picture you can see there are two major roads that meet in a “Y’ about two feet from the far end of the table. The French were trying to remain in possession of as much of these two roads as possible.
There is a town in the middle of the table astride one of the major roads. The town itself is not worth any victory points and could be bypassed; however, if makes a nice defensive position for someone. It was hotly contested during the game.
Two young men on the French team (on the right of the above picture) did a terrific job of maneuvering to thwart the enemies’ plans. As the Prussian cavalry maneuvered to go around the French left, they kept readjusting and filling holes created by aggressive Prussian attacks. In the end, they only gave up a couple feet of table while pushing across toward the stream, keeping the road open. The Prussians pushing from the close end of the table in the above picture were quite aggressive, but the other Prussian corps much closer to the French end of the table were not aggressive enough to cut the road before the game ended.
Victory was determined in a unique way. I measured the number of feet from the French end of the road (far end of the table) to the farthest point of the two roads they controlled. (This meant that the one little section in the back corner was counted twice.) Then I measured the number of feet along the two roads from the close edge of the table to the farthest point controlled by the Prussians. The winner is the side with the most feet of road. In this case the French won by about two feet. (The table was 15 feet long.)
