Alternative Chacabuco – A March Attack Battle Report

Valdivia on top of Talhilaca Hill

I quite like the Alternative Chacabuco scenario from Fletcher (2006). It isn’t historical but it is small and reasonably balanced so is a good choice to try out a new set of rules. As it happens I’ve been wanting to try out March Attack by Crusader Games for a while so once again Chris Harrod and I faced each other around Chacabuco Farm. Chris was the Royalists / Spanish. I was the Patriots / Argentineans. It was the first outing of my Liberators armies now they are all on Big Bases.

I’ll describe the battle and then make some observations on the game, March Attack and the scenario. The summary about March Attack is that the rules are optimised for Corps level actions and hence gloss over of details at the level of the manoeuvre unit (battalion, regiment). That speeds up the rules but at the cost of flavour that is significant for the small South American Wars.

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Battle of Hastings under Twilight of the Sun King

Hastings-13 Eager Fyrd pursue off hill - Banner

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to apply my Twilight of the Sun-King rules outside of the War of Spanish Succession. I’ve also recently developed a preference for big bases. It happens that this battle report by Tom Loback and Vincent Tsao, submitted on the Yahoo Forum, combines both. It applies a variant of Twilight of the Sun-King rules to a Medieval setting, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD, using units that are effectively big bases comprising four DBx elements in a group. I’ve put the battle report together with the photos. Both words and photos are Vincent’s.

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Brigade Bases for Volley and Bayonet

Volley & Bayonet has big bases. Pretty much all troops are based on 3″ x 3″ bases; you can have any number of figures you want of any scale. I recently rebased my Peninsular War figures on big bases. I wanted to leave myself options so I effectively went for half size V&B bases. Each of my bases is 80mm wide by 40mm deep and . gets six cavalry or 12 infantry. Two of these, one behind the other, is a V&B brigade stand.

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