Valour, Discipline and Training

I like the idea of using contemporary language within rules but I have two competing sets of terms: Napoleon’s “Valour and Discipline” and South American “Training and Discipline”. What to do? For Bolivar’s Very Bad Day should I replace the “Resolve” attribute of Tilly’s Very Bad Day with two attributes, one reflecting bravery and the other training? And what should I call them?

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Revised guidance for terrain set up in Crossfire

Terrain Coverage when setting up a Crossfire table - Banner

I got into a discussion with George Breese on Crossfire maps on the Crossfire WII forum. We were talking about the attributes of a good table. George uses a guideline that “tables should be 1/3 to 1/2 terrain”. This echoes a guideline from the Crossfire rule book the table should have at least 1/3 coverage. And that got me wondering whether my maps obey a 1/3 to 1/2 terrain coverage guideline? The answer is no, but I’m not sure it is a problem.

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Twilight of the Britons – A Battle Report 3

Britons-308 English Warleader - Banner

I have some newly painted dark age heroes along with tons of new armoured infantry, plus an update to the rules, so it was time to play Twilight of the Britons again. Chris and Adam were willing to give it a go.

Summary: Good game and very dark age in flavour. Chris overestimated the ability of his dark age warriors to manoeuvre and got into a bit of a tangle. Adam’s Briton cavalry crushed the English flank guard and hit the Great Fyrd at the rear of English line causing the English shield wall to collapse.

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Tucuman – A Bolivar’s Very Bad Day Battle Report

Tucuman-338 Centre - Patriots encircle Royalists - Banner

Adam and I play tested Bolivar’s Very Bad Day using my Tucuman Scenario. We wanted a small game to test my variant of Tilly’s Very Bad Day for the South American Wars of Liberation.

Summary: Good little game with the Patriots strong in cavalry and the Royalists strong in infantry. My Patriot cavalry stripped off the weak Royalist cavalry and encircled the Royalist infantry columns. Then we had a hard grind with repeated cavalry charges against the staunch Royalist infantry. Eventually Adam accepted he couldn’t win and conceded.

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Using geometry to find implicit crests on a hill

Hills-215 Geometry and implicit crests - Banner

While I was ranting about Why I think hills are horrible in wargames rules, I found two rules had a clever solution for dealing with line of sight on hills using geometry. I’d already thought of a similar approach, also using geometry. I call the two approaches “Parallel crest” and “Perpendicular crest”. Both solutions are clever. Which one is better?

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Why I think hills are horrible in wargames rules

Hills-102 Questions about hills in wargaming rules - Banner

Sometimes I get obsessed by tiny little aspects of the hobby and just have to write about it. In detail. A lot of detail, after endless hours of research. This time I’m picking on hills. You see hills were a thing in the South American Wars of Liberation – my current favourite period. A lot the battles featured at least one big hill e.g. Battle of Maipo. This hilly tendency could be extreme e.g. the Battle of Vargas Swamp was fought predominately on the slopes of a single giant hill and half the table top is covered in hills. Bolivar’s Very Bad Day, my Liberators variant of Tilly’s Very Bad Day, is going to have to cope with a lot of hills.

Unfortunately, hills are horrible in wargames rules. I’ve not seen any set of wargaming rules that cope with them really well, sadly, not even my own Tilly’s Very Bad Day. Certainly not my beloved Crossfire where hills are tiny mesas. I could have left it there, but I felt an obsessive urge to prove my claim of “horrible” so I got out a bunch of my wargaming rules, read the section on hills, and used a standard set of questions to test how well the rules handled hills. Here is what I found. It is horrible but there glimmers of genius.

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Twilight of the Britons – Update to Version 1.1

Twilight of the Britons - Banner

I have updated Twilight of the Britons – Fast play rules for the English Invasion of Britain to version 1.1. As a reminder this is Vincent Tsao and my version of Twilight of the Sun King for the dark ages in Britain. I have a hankering to play another Arthurian game so thought I’d get the rules into shape for that. Some of the changes are to make it easier for Vincent to use the rules for the Fall of Rome but this is still not my focus.

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Tucuman – A Bolivar’s Very Bad Day Scenario

Table - Tucuman - Map 1c - Bolivars Very Bad Day - Banner

Feedback from the guys was that Battle of Sipe Sipe (29 Nov 1815), although a good game, was too big for regular play testing of Bolivar’s Very Bad Day. So they asked for a smaller scenario with less terrain. The Battle of Tucumán (24-25 September 1812) seems perfect for this. Although the deciding battle in the War of Argentine Independence, it was a small scale affair with, in game terms, only 11 units on each side. It also features the a wide range of troop types and troop quality. And it has Gauchos. This scenario is based on my write up of the historical battle and how to wargame the battle. Bolivar’s Very Bad Day is my Liberators variant of Tilly’s Very Bad Day.

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Sipe Sipe – A Bolivar’s Very Bad Day Battle Report

SipeSipe-106A Royalist right and centre - Banner

Jamie and Adam came over to play test Bolivar’s Very Bad Day, my Liberators variant of Tilly’s Very Bad Day. I’d just finished the hill for Battle of Sipe Sipe (29 Nov 1815), so decided to give the associated Sipe Sipe Scenario a go. Because we were play testing the rules, we wouldn’t have enough time to complete the battle but we figured we’d give it a go anyway.

Summary: Draw because we ran out of time. But good play test of the scenario and rules. Lots on insights most notably, the jungle fighting felt wrong under the draft rules and there shouldn’t actually be jungle fighting at all in the scenario. Both rules and scenario need tweaks.

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Musing on Commander Special Attributes in Bolivar’s Very Bad Day

I like the way John Fletcher (2005, 2006, 2011, 2018abc) assigns special abilities to the generals of the South American Wars of Liberation. In Liberators QPR generals are classified on a five rating scale from abysmal, through poor, average, good to excellent. That is nice but then he goes further and gives some generals extra abilities e.g. improved initiative. It is these special attributes that I really like. So how would that work in Bolivar’s Very Bad Day, my Liberators variant of Tilly’s Very Bad Day? This post is about the rules mechanism, the framework, and I’ll post separately about the actual generals of the South American Wars of Liberation.

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Battalion line, column, and square – Tactical formations during the Napoleonic Wars

Napoleonic Tactical Formations - French Infantry Battalion 1808-1815 - Banner

Line, column, square … the tactical formations available to infantry of the Napoleonic Wars, South American Wars of Liberation, and Carlist Wars. Line is pretty straight forward but I thought I’d describe the others, in particular column. People think of columns as long and thin, and some were, but most columns of the Napoleonic Wars were usually stubby. I use the post 1808 French as the main example because the Spanish followed their lead, but the other nations were similar.

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