Little buildings

I've finally got round to painting the Battlescale 6mm buildings I bought at Penkridge in January.

They're a bit of a mishmash of styles - a couple of clapboard cabins (ACW or Eastern Front?), a wooden framed, thatched barn (German?), a stone-built farmhouse (Normandy?), and a brick-built church with peeling render (again ACW?)

My plan at this stage is to leave them unbased to use for towns and villages in Bloody Big Battles. The rules are very high level and battles often see units (brigades) marching through built-up areas. The best way to handle this is represent the 'footprint' of the town with a flat base and scatter on some representative buildings.

I should say that I like these models. They have a nice level of detail and a sculpted feel that suits the pre-twentieth century style of architecture. Worth picking up if you see some at a show.

Vapnartak and storage

This last weekend was Vapnartak in York.As usual there were some nice games on display but mainly the York show for me is about catching up with fellow wargamers and doing a bit of shopping.

As usual the show that roughly coincides with my birthday saw me making some fairly significant purchases. This year it's a big birthday and a couple of friends and son Jamie had offered to pay for some toys. With the plan to do a four-player Siege of Puebla game I need a few more Maximilian Adventure units so a visit to the Foundry stand seemed like a good way to pick up some stuff that friends could contribute to.

Two units of "Foreign Legion or Filibusters" plus a personality pack will, added to a few similar models I already own, give me the basis of a French line infantry unit in campaign dress. They will fight alongside my existing Turcos in the streets of Puebla.

I also got a pack of Mexican infantry and a Mexican personalities pack. These will serve alongside my existing red-jacketed state militia as an opposing player force. The personalities pack contains a nice general officer figure who will play a perhaps-important role in the game.

The other purchases were:

A Venetian house kit that was only a tenner at the table-top sale. Being designed for big 32mm Carnivale-style miniatures the doors are huge but with a little converting I reckon I can adapt it for Puebla.

Irregular Miniatures supplied some more Franco-Prussian War models so I can play Bloody Big Battles in 6mm. When I've painted them, Froeschwiller should be within my grasp.

And finally I invested in some self-adhesive magnetic sheet from Magnetic Displays. These have already been added to my 6mm unit storage facility. For years I've been keeping my expanding 1/300th scale WWII and Moderns collection in two Ikea filing cabinets mounted on the workshop wall:

The shallower drawers for the armies:

And the deeper ones for terrain:

The nice thing is that the drawers come out and can be used to transport stuff to games. However, I'm running out of space so with the aid of Lego bricks as spacers and PVC board or MDF off-cuts I've made some of my drawers double decker!

A couple of loops of insulating tape let me lift the top layer out and the newly acquired magnetic sheets stop the models sliding off. My 1/300th units are based on artist's mounting board and many are backed with self-adhesive ferro sheet, also from Magnetic Displays.

As you can see below, the extra space is badly needed!

New top layer - assorted Germans

In need of a new layer -
assorted 1940 French

I also picked up some more ferro sheet so I'll be spending some time increasing the proportion of the forces that stick to the magnets!

All in all I really enjoyed Vapnartak. It was great to catch up with so many wargaming friends and acquaintances. The only downside was that I didn't manage to off-load the old SOTCW banner. I really must get it to a current committee member somehow!

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.

Just arrived...

 ... from Caliver Books.

In line with this year's plan to make better use of existing toys, I've gone back to the search for a set of rules that will encourage me to get the Irregular Miniatures Franco-Prussian War models back out of storage. I wondered if Bloody Big Battles might do the job.

I quite enjoyed Principles of War but it doesn't really cover whole battles in a war as big as the FPW. I suppose you can squint a bit and say a single POW unit is a brigade or a division but... nah, not really.

Having looked at one of the scenarios available on line (a draft version of Spicheren) I think I have enough toys to do it with BBB. A brief flick through the rules suggests that maybe I need to add a few more to do the larger battles but that can be left for a later date if I decide these are the rules for me.

As I'm still waiting for one of the players to provide orders for the Muddy River Blues campaign, I thought I'd have a quick go at trying out BBB. I picked a couple of the grid squares from the Froeschwiller scenario.

This sees the 7th and 8th Brigades from 4th Division of II Bavarian Korps attacking Ducrot's 1st Division around Nehwiller.

The game started with 8th Brigade marching in column into the woods west of Langensulzbach. No problem, though they were slowed down by the woods and by having to cross the Sulzbach stream.

7th Brigade, however, were more problematic. Despite the presence of General von Hartmann, they failed to get moving thanks to a lousy die roll. Units in BBB have to dice to see if they get a full move, a half move or no move at all, or maybe even a retreat or rout (if they're already disrupted).

To make things worse, the Bavarian Korps artillery came under fire from their French counterparts and were "silenced". This would men that they'd have to withdraw on the following turn. 

On the French turn, I restricted myself to pivoting Ducrot's Zouaves to be in position to fire at the Bavarians when they emerged from the woods. I replaced the village base with a Post-It note because a unit's facing is crucial.

On game turn 2 the roles were reversed for the Bavarians. 8th Brigade's column got lost in the woods and didn't move at all, while 7th Brigade trundled forward across the Sulzbach and onto the Woerth-Langensulzbach road.

Having got there they came under withering Chassepot and artillery fire from the French. The result on the Firefight Table was "1" - this saw them lose a base (one of their original five) and become Disrupted and, because they are classified as "raw" troops, all Spent. This would make them harder to move forward in future and less effective if they ever got to assault the enemy. In addition, the lost base is automatically their "skirmisher" base so they become marginally less effective in fire combat.

The French had clearly found a position magnifique and they decided to remain in place.

On the third turn the Bavarian 7th Brigade failed the movement roll that could have seen them rally off their Disrupted status. They didn't fall back but they remained on the road under that galling Chassepot fire. This would see them lose another base by the end of the turn.

Meanwhile the 8th Brigade managed to sort themselves out into line of battle and make some progress towards the Zouaves' line at Nehwiller. Sadly for the boys in pale blue, the enemy's fire was enough to Disrupt them and force them to halt (actually pushed back slightly into the woods). With both Bavarian brigades effectively pinned down by the murderous fire of the Chassepot I decided that we'd seen enough. 

Bloody Big Battles has a fine pedigree in Chris Pringle's previous games TacWWII and Arc of Fire and I think it's going to repay further investigation. I just need to find some Franco-Prussian War scenarios I can manage with the current forces here at Stately Counterpane Manor.