Buck's Blog

Once again, Sam Fuson hosted a day of gaming at his place on the East Cavalry Battlefield at Gettysburg.  As a play test for the upcoming gaming convention, Cold Wars, Dave and I ran the full battle of La Rothiere.

La Rothiere, which took place in February 1814 as the Allies were advancing toward Paris to depose Napoleon, is an early battle of the campaign.  As the forces became more and more depleted throughout the campaign, I think this is the largest battle.  In the upcoming Last Days of the First Empire scenario book, this battle is broken into three scenarios:  the main battle (French center), the French left flank, and the whole battle.  Saturday we ran the whole battle.

The scenario involves Russian, Austrian, Bavarian, and Wurttemberg forces attacking the French, who were greatly outnumbered.  Marshall Ney had been sent away by Napoleon, but when the Allies attacked, he was recalled.  His arrival, as well as that of the main Austrian force, is governed by random die rolls.

The battle occurred in February amidst intermittent blizzards, so each turn there is a die roll to determine the weather.  In this game, all but the first turn were blizzard, which worked to the French favor as it delayed the Allied attacks.  The objective is to seize six towns.

Other than the blizzard conditions, the battle was a tightly run thing.  The Wurttembergers captured one of the six towns.  Decisive victory could only be accomplished by the side that held all six towns, so the Wurttembergers stole a decisive victory from the French.

Then the Austrians entered the table on the extreme French right and would almost certainly have captured one or more towns.  Eventually, when we had to stop the game to set up the next one, the Allies had inflicted more losses on the French than the French inflicted on them, so the game was a marginal victory for the allies.  The French were poised to get the marginal victory, but a group of light cavalry that had been on a flank attack was forced to retreat.  Being cut off by the newly arrived Austrians, an entire cavalry brigade surrendered!

Dave and I were happy with the way the scenario ran and are ready for Cold Wars

 

This weekend a bunch of us met at War Horse Farm in Gettysburg, PA, for a gaming day hosted by Sam Fuson.  One of the games we played was a WWI adaptation of the Look, Sarge, No Charts family of rules by Duncan Adams.  He has used ideas from the WWII and ACW sets and added some interesting ideas of his own.  It is a very effective combination for early WWI games.  (It may also work for later in the war, but Duncan has only run early war games.

In the scenario, the French were advancing to capture the town you see in this picture.  Some of the Germans were defending the town, while others were coming to their aid.

Duncan has come up with an interesting concept for representing rolling terrain.  See all the “hills?”  The tops of those hills are actually the base level of the terrain, with the gaps representing gullies and depressions.  It really worked well!

This is another test as we work to debug the IFTTT and Zapier automation.

This is a test of the new automation software we are using to automatically update our club blog from our individual blogs.

Over the weekend, I found a little time to begin work on eight battalions of 10mm Austrian infantry.  These will be used to complete my Austrian order of battle.  When I finish these eight battalions I’ll still be short a battalion or two of Grenzers and two regiments of hussars.

In parallel I’ve been working on some Scooby Doo figures from Hasslefree.  I hope to post pictures of finished products after this coming weekend.

 

Dave Wood and I have been plugging away at an 1814 scenario book for Fate of Battle for over a year.  Dave has put in a lot of hours over the past month to try to get this completed.  We wanted to release the book in 2014, and we’re just about done.  Earlier in the week I printed all the scenarios and went through them with a red pen.  Saturday Dave and I spent five or six hours in an interactive editing session on my computer.  We think the content of the book is pretty solid now and are just looking for little inconsistencies and Ebonics.

The introduction is about half done.  Dave is working on a brief campaign description.  Then I’ll finish the table of contents and the cover.  Our goal is to hand a hard copy to Dennis of On Military Matters at Cold Wars for his review to see if he wants to print and distribute the book.  If Dennis is not interested, we’ll put it on RPGNow for pdf download, so stay tuned.

The book has 10 battles from the campaign, focusing on the invasion of France by the Armies of Bohemia and Selesia.  The Battle of La Rothiere is actually three scenarios:  the main battle, the French left flank, and the entire battle.  We will be running the whole battle at Cold Wars in March.

There were three other invasion armies, including Wellington over the Pyrenees.  We are thinking of completing the Wellington battles (three of them) and posting them to our Web page or posting them for $2 each on RPGNow.  More to follow.

Watch for the book to hit the streets in the next few weeks.

Today the whole Baltimore-Washington area was blanketed by sleet and snow.  As a result, work was closed.  That gave me time to spend four hours on my consulting job and to shovel a ton of snow.  I also had time to finish a couple of small projects I started after I finished painting 16 battalions of 10mm Russian grenadiers for Fate of Battle.

 

I only watch about three or four hours of television a week.  I consistently struggle to find things that we can all watch as a family without worrying about excessive language or people yanking off their clothes.  Netflix has been a godsend.  Lately we’ve been having fun watching old episodes of the A-Team.  The first four seasons are fun.  The fifth season isn’t nearly as good.

I got the bug to find the van and paint figures to use in my town of Granville for pulp-style games.  The van I found by Ertl on Ebay.  The figures are from Foundry.  They were fun to paint and a nice diversion after all those white belts and red turn backs.

I’ve also begun picking away at some of the larger Bones figures from Reaper.  It was these large figures that enticed me into the Kickstarter project.  Many of the regular fantasy figures I ended up selling in the flea market at Historicon.  I wanted the larger creatures to work into my GASLIGHT games.  This tree monster didn’t take a lot of time or finesse, but I think it turned out okay.

After finishing up scads of Russians this weekend, getting them based, flocked, organized, and boxed, I was looking for something that would take a little less effort.  The figures I really wanted from the Bones Kickstarter were the large creatures.  I’ll be working on the hydra, rock creature, and other large figures later, but for now, I wanted to show the flame creatures I painted this weekend.

I think I bought two sets of these.  They come in translucent red plastic, so all I did was dry brush them with orange, yellow, and white paint.  I think they turned out okay.

…So this morning I was thinking about how to handle snipers in my under-development WWII skirmish game.  (You know the rules are almost done when you start thinking about snipers and vehicles getting stuck in the mud.)  I implemented snipers in Beer and Pretzels Skirmish (BAPS) many, many years ago.  (There are still some very unique aspects of BAPS that I think are superior to many popular sets of WWII skirmish rules.)  There really are two kinds of snipers.  The first is the good marksman who was handed an improved rifle (or the same rifle but with a scope) and was designated the squad or platoon sniper.  Often these snipers were not given significantly different training than any other infantryman.  The second was the specially trained sniper who not only had a better weapon but also had greater skills in marksmanship and camouflage.

The first case is easily handled by giving the squad or platoon sniper an “elite” accuracy attribute and increasing the range on his rifle.  The second case is a little more difficult to address without a lot of goofy rules.  These are not fully-developed thoughts but just a laundry list of some ideas.  Some are a rehash of things from BAPS, but others are new.  Here are some ideas I’ve been considering:

• Snipers don’t flip a card to determine which figure they hit.  They get to designate their target — before shooting.  They do have to flip a card to determine the hit location and severity.
• In contrast to the previous bullet, maybe a really good sniper just flips a card for wound severity and not for hit location.  In this way, the sniper would essentially negate any cover benefit the target soldier might be using.
• When a sniper fires, he flips an additional card after resolving the shot.  If any explosion marker (used for HE) shows on the card, the sniper must displace (move) at least 24 inches before firing again as a sniper.  If during this displacement he shoots at someone, it is merely as an “elite” accuracy rifleman.  A key to a sniper’s longevity is to fire a few shots and move before the enemy pinpoints their location.  Most rules don’t enforce this tactic, so snipers can become overly powerful in a game.
• Once a snipe reaches his new location, it takes some number of activations (TBD) to establish himself.  This means set up a good firing position, emplacing camouflage, etc.  This cannot be done in the open.  Once established, the sniper position should be difficult to spot.  This would require the use of the optional spotting rules, which are a modification of those in Look, Sarge, No Charts: WWII.

So what are some other things I need to think about?

• Blowing holes in walls,
• Refining modifications to spotting,
• Dog mines,
• Land mines,
• Medics,
• Calling for off-board artillery, and
• Close air support.

As these rules are for me and not for publication, I don’t need to make a comprehensive list, but at some point, I need to come up with the attributes (armor, reliability, etc.) for the vehicles I have in my collection.