Coulmiers, 1870

It's too early to report on progress with the Muddy River Blues campaign but in between adjudicating on map moves I've been trying out Bloody Big Battles.  I've been playing, solo, the Coulmiers 1870 scenario available from the BBB community at Groups.io

Coulmiers is a smaller battle featuring inexperienced Republican French against poorly motivated Bavarians. I've had to use virtually every vaguely in-period village or town base to get the terrain required.

The French were attacking from the west (left in the picture above) and trying to force the Bavarians back far enough to capture five out of eight objectives in the eastern third of the table.

To make things interesting I diced on some home-made tables to decide on the tactics (or is it strategy at this scale; one 30mmx30mm base is about 1000 men?) to be used by the two sides. I ended with the French launching a concerted attack aimed a Coulmiers with the plan to fan out from there to capture nearby objectives. The Bavarians would counter this by centring their defence on Coulmiers and using their meagre cavalry force to screen the flanks.

A keystone of the Bavarian defence was the village of Baccon. This was partly fortified and occupied by a small brigade from 1st Bavarian Division backed up the divisional artillery.

Baccon in the grey square in the centre.
I've removed the buildings to give the
Bavarians room to deploy.

The Bavarian infantry holding Baccon would hold on until game turn three, significantly disrupting the French timetable (seven turns allowed for the scenario).

BBB in 6mm doesn't really support taking gorgeous game-in-progress photographs (there are lots of markers on the table) but it does give a good impression of really large battles swaying to and fro.

In the pic above we can see the French army converging on Coulmiers. The Bavarian infantry have been driven from Baccon and only the dug-in artillery remain. They will soon be over run.

Above we see a typical BBB unit - the Regiments de Marche forming half of the 1st Brigade of the French 16th Corps. They previously lost a base and because they had skirmishers, the base removed was that representing them. As a result of losing that base and of being Raw troops, they are now Spent and will be both harder to activate and less effective in combat. 

Their firepower is further reduced because, last turn, they rolled 11 or 12 when firing. This had a significant impact on the enemy but meant that the firers become low on ammunition. 

Finally we can also see that the unit is Disrupted. We can think of this as meaning that at least some of the companies and battalions making up the unit at pinned down by enemy fire. They will be harder to get moving and less effective when firing. They may even break and run!

The battle went as far as game turn 6 before I called it a day as the French had no possibility of reaching the required number of objectives.

The French in Coulmiers - the red marker indicates one of the two 
objectives the town represents.

My first impression of BBB is very favourable. The rules are superbly laid out; not with gorgeous colour photos but with clear rules, helpful examples, and a minimum of extraneous verbiage. It's really easy to find what you need to know and a double sided QR sheet (included at the back of the book or available to download) gave all I needed to run the game.

It's so clever how by using a few statuses for any given unit (Disrupted, Silenced, Low Ammunition, Spent and a couple of others) we get a clear mental picture of a brigade's current combat status). The rules around these statuses (and how to get rid of them) encourage realistic employment of your troops. 

All this is done without adding complexity. For example the system for Movement manages to combine movement distance, command and control, and morale into a single 2D6 dice roll! Fire combat is equally simple, also using a single 2D6 roll, and manages to factor in casualties, disorganisation and morale effects. Finally The Assault (short range fire and hand-to-hand combat) is done with simple opposed die rolls and reflects all of the factors you'd expect.

I think the best praise I can give to the rules is that in playing them I felt like I was commanding an army of several divisions and not a brigade pretending to be an army.