15mm Napoleonic’s

Monday, January 7, 2011

15mm Napoleonic’s

For this game, Patrick came down and ran Age of Eagles.  A few of the guys had played before, most hadn’t, but everyone was familiar with Fire & Fury, so it was easy enough to fall right in.  Attendees were Alex, Chris, Patrick, Roxanne, Steve, Tony, and myself.

The scenario was a historical fight, but not being big into Napoleonic’s, I’ll be damned if I can recall what it was!  It was something in the Peninsula, Brits, Spanish, Portuguese, and I think there were even some Irish out there!  I played on the left flank running the British and Portuguese there.  My opponent was Chris, who was playing with us for the first time.  Hopefully he returns, we tried to be on our best behavior!  Honest!!  I don’t think I rolled more than a 3 but maybe twice?  Luckily for me, Chris nearly never rolled better than a 4…  It was a very sad day on our end of the table; I put some heavy losses on Chris, but took heavy losses in return, and failed to take the bridgehead that was my objective.

The day went better for the Brits on the right flank, and the center, and in the end, Patrick ruled the contest a draw, with a slight advantage to the British, being in a position to cut off the retreat of the Spanish army.  I have my doubts about whether or not it was really a British victory, but who am I to argue?

This was my first time gaming Age of Eagles.  When Chris, other Chris, runs Naps games for us, he normally uses a set of his own creation, based on Fire and Fury, but done years before AoE came out.  We have done a lot of changes to the games over the last 5 years, and I think we have added some good stuff.  We pretty much took out the combined arms ability of these games where you can pin someone into a formation with one troop type and hit them with another when they are in the worst possible formation.  We added fatigue rules as well, keeping Cavalry from being able to run around the board and charge every turn with little care to wearing out their horses.  The one part of AoE that I like better than our home rules is that the firing can do more damage.  In Chris’ game, you almost never do better than Disorder when shooting.  In AoE we were doing 1 and sometimes 2 or 3 stands loss, depending on the situation and roll of course.

All in all, a great game, enjoyed by all.  Patrick is already hard at work creating a new scenario for our next gathering.  It will also be in the peninsula, I believe he is using an old Donald Featherstone book for the OOB and maps, which I am pretty sure is what he used for this scenario.  I need to take a look for this book; he says it is a brilliant primer on the Peninsula.  I think I prefer the Russian stuff, but learning something new in this hobby is never a bad time.  I think this is the book:

Campaigning With the Duke of Wellington and Featherstone:
A Guide to the Battles in Spain and Portugal, With Donald Featherstone, the Duke of Wellington, and All the Others, 1808-1814 and 1973-1992