Peninsular War

My interest in the Napoleonic Wars is largely restricted to Spain and Portugal, plus their Central and South American Colonies. The continental part of these conflicts (1808 – 1814) was known as the Peninsular War to the British and the War of Independence to the Spanish. The effects of the French annexation of Spain lasted long after Napoleon was removed from the European Stage for good (1815). During the period 1810 – 1824, the Spanish colonies were wracked by revolution in the South American Wars of Liberation.

Why I think hills are horrible in wargames rules

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

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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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Horse and Musket Crossfire – Crossfire for the Horse and Musket Era

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Rule - Horse and Musket - Crossfire - Banner

I wrote this about five years ago because a couple of my projects, i.e. Albuera in the Peninsular and Sipe Sipe in South America, had stalled because I didn’t like any of the available horse and musket rules. Inspired by Roland’s WW1 experiment I wondered if I could make a horse and musket variant for Crossfire. These rules have now remained raw and unplayed for some time. I stopped work on them because I decided I had bent the rules so far that it is no longer Crossfire. But rather than having it lurk on my hard drive any longer, and because Jamie asked about it, I thought I’d share. What do you think?

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Terrain Cards – Random terrain placement for pick up wargames

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Terrain Cards - Banner

In our recent game of Tilly’s Very Bad Day Chris observed that, as the defender, he could exploit the terrain placement rules to his advantage. This is my proposal to address Chris’s concern. These rules allow randomised terrain for pick up battles in any period.

The terrain placement rules described here borrow heavily from Terrain Cards for a ECW Campaign.

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Top 20 Pages on Balagan

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Balagan Site Stats

I started this blog on 21 Feb 2001 and then Migrated Balagan to WordPress on 15 Sep 2013. So, roughly 4.5 years ago. One of the great things about WordPress, compared to the hand crafted HTML site I had before, is that I get statistics on page views. Apparently I’ve had 1,176,779 views since I migrated and 1,125 comments. My biggest day (23 Feb 2018) brought 2,420 views – this was because Reddit got hold of my Academy of Street Fighting: Tactics during the Battle of Stalingrad post. Today is a typical day with 750 views.

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Lasalle with Big Bases – Introducing Combat Value

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Big Base Infantry Attack Column

All my Peninsular War infantry/cavalry units are on Big Bases with two big stands per unit. Also I don’t want to combine small units in the South American Wars of Liberation because there are already only a few units on table and I want to represent them all. So I need some way to represent the number of men, and hence number of stands, in a different way to standard Lasalle.

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How to use Big Bases with Napoleon at War, Lasalle and FoGN

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Big Base Infantry Square

I want to try Napoleon at War (NAW) for Liberators and one of the first questions is … what do I do about my Big Bases? Luckily Phil from Wargaming in the Sun has some useful suggestions for using units based for Lasalle / FoGN with Napoleon at War. I can just add to his analysis to cope with my 2 x 80mm x 40mm basing.

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How to Arrange Peninsular Infantry on Big Bases

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PEN-201 Peninsular Battalion on Big Bases - Banner

A couple of years ago I put my few Peninsular War figures on big bases. Some French Dragoons and various Spanish new battalions. Now that I’m trying to finish my Albuera project I’m going to supplement these with more figures. Before I do that I have to decide, exactly, how to deal with the company distinctions of the various nations. The French, who gave each company in the battalion, including the fusilier companies, pose particular challenges.

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Battle of Albuera 16 May 1811

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Battle of Albuera - Banner

There are quite a few interesting things about the Battle of Albuera (16 May 1811). Enough of interest that the battle has become the subject of my first Peninsular project. The battle was the bloodiest of the Peninsular War. It was a major battle but had modest sized forces involved. Wellington wasn’t there. The battle has French columns facing British (and Spanish) line – so is a good exemplar of what happens in that situation. As a result the core of the battle was a long gruelling musketry competition. It has perhaps the most famous example of cavalry charging, and destroying, unprepared infantry; infantry that in other circumstances were considered steady. And finally, the Allied forces included perhaps the best Spanish troops of the war – those trained by Zayas.

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Spanish at Albuera – Better than Conventional Wargaming and V&B Stereotypes Allow

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Myth vs Truth

In my recently published Albuera – A Volley and Bayonet Scenario, I used an Order of Battle by Jeff Glasco. For the scenario I did not try to reconcile Glasco’s order of battle with my own Orders of Battle at the Battle of Albuera. Nor did I inject my own thinking on the Spanish forces at the battle and it is the Spanish I want to focus on in this post.

I appears that Jeff Glasco, like most Napoleonic wargamers, doesn’t think much of the Spanish and layers on the disadvantages. This attitude and approach is fairly common in the wargaming community and, in truth, the Spanish armies were often pretty rubbish. But I’m not sure this indictment is warranted for the Battle of Albuera (16 May 1811). I want to highlight and counter some of the anti-Spanish points in the order of battle.

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Attack Column or ‘Ordre Mixte’: How did the French deploy at Albuera?

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French Ordre Mixte - A French Regiment or Brigade with three battalions - Banner

English historians since Oman have claimed that the French V Corps at Albuera formed ordre mixte, i.e. mixed order with battalions in a combination of line and column. Strangely French sources make no such claim. In all French sources V Corps was in closed column (colonne serrée). Unfortunately Oman mistook a French source and, because of that mistake, English historians have got it wrong since.

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