For God's Sake Don't Risk The Cannons

Hello from sunny Carmel, Indiana, where Spring seems to have finally arrived. We had severe weather this week and temperatures are finally into the 70s F. A normal person would spend more time outside. I slid back the sunroof cover in my car on the drive home Thursday and ended up with a sunburned head. My genetics clearly make me suited only for northern England.

Origins is coming up in less than a month. Like the past few years I'll be running wargames. I'll be with the Armchair Dragoons booth. I'm running the Kreigsspiel games this year. Due to the time constraints for the games we're doing a style of Free Kreigsspiel rather than true Von Reisswitz Kriegsspiel.

The remainder of the ACD crew will be running an assortment of other games during the convention. The famous "Command Post Gaming" will be happening again as well. During this event the participants are taught to act as an US Army brigade staff, with appropriate roles. They then develop a plan to accomplish their assigned mission. Using Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm the plan is implemented and the participants have to cope with the enemy not cooperating. This is really a modern Kreigsspiel experience and one of the best attended events we run.

I'm also giving a talk with Jim Owczarski as part of the War College titled "How Big for Boney?" Jim and I will examine different scales for Napoleonic gaming and the pros and cons of each. We both seem to be mostly convinced that brigade-sized units give the best results.

Of course, I haven't pulled either the Kriegsspiel materials together yet or written anything on my talk. I have almost a month left, why rush...?

Horse & Musket Annual I has been release by Hollandspiele. This is a collection of scenarios for the first three games of the Horse & Musket series designed by Sean Chick. I'm the developer for this series now, and the annual is my first release game. If this period is your thing, you can get the Annual here. You'll need at least one of the earlier games to play any of these scenarios.

This week I've been reading Prelude to Waterloo: Quatre Bras: The French Perspective by Andrew W. Field. For $1.30 for the Kindle edition you can't go wrong with this one if you are interested in Napoleonics. This is also one of the best books I've read on this battle. The descriptions of French tactics are enlightening. Field's writing is engaging. I most appreciate the descriptions of the communications delays, lost orders, and miscommunications that heavily influenced the campaign and the battle. Field's has worked out the timeline for when various orders were sent and received. He includes the full text of more than a few of these. This provides a very understandable story of just how written orders impacted command during the Napoleonic wars. Reading this is an excellent primer for anyone wanting to umpire or play a game that depends on authentic period communications.

Unsurprisingly I've been playing mostly Napoleonics this week. Even more unsurprisingly given my readin most of that's taken the form of playing the solo Waterloo campaign game from John Tiller Software.

I don't know of any other game that depicts the entire Waterloo campaign at the battalion level. I would never want to try this as a board game. With the computer taking care of the housekeeping this is a great experience. I think this scenario captures more of the essence of Napoleonic warfare than anything else I've played. The focus on the entire campaign means you need to play cautiously and intelligently and not burn up units at the beginning. Skirmishers and squadrons are the units to engage with. Maneuver is vital. The much maligned "French blitzkrieg" tactics often used in this series, where stacks of French battalions in column are used for rapid and frequent melee assaults almost guarantee a French loss. 

Last Saturday Jim and I played a very engaging game of Blucher.  We streamed the game on Youtube and managed to attract a pretty significant audience (for a tabletop wargame). We'll be playing again this evening (May 18th 2019) for anyone that would like to watch.

That's it for this week. I feel a blog post or an article coming on concerning using cavalry but don't expect too much. I've been having that urge for a couple of years now and still haven't written anything. If you'll be at Origins please stop by and say hello, and play a game.