Alternative Chacabuco – A Liberators QPR Scenario

The Liberators supplement (Fletcher, 2006, p. 10-11) has an Alternative Chacabuco scenario. These are my notes for playing the scenario with the Liberators Quick Play Rules. See also the Battle Report 1, Extra Photos for Battle Report 1 and Battle Report 2.

Clarifications

Here are some question I posed to John Fletcher and his replies…

The map seems to show two rivers and the text refers to the dry river bed. We assumed that both rivers were dry. Correct?

The word “dry” to describe the main waterway is an error. This is a stream
and water was running in it. Today there appears to be a lot of undergrowth
in the channel. In the actual battle it acted more as broken terrain than any
kind of “impassable water obstacle”. It affected unit cohesion as troops
crossed it, ie. it “disordered” them.

The table is 6′ x 4′ but I think it could be successfully played on the central 4′ x 4′. Thoughts?

Probably. Each time I have run the battle it takes place in the middle.
However, I like giving players flanks to work with. I personally hate “edge
of the world” and the limitations it puts on our games. I think a clever
Patriot player can take advantage of a flank in this scenario but, yeah, you
could run in on a 4×4 and get away with it no problem.

Wow what a lot of little fields. I merged a couple of the smaller ones for the purposes of the game.

Those fields were rough transpositions of data from Google Earth. I don’t
have a 19th century map of Chacabuco farm and have no idea what the field
layout was. Whatever you laid out was probably just as viable as what I did.
There was a farm there. That’s about all history tells us.

Map

I have played this game once but in two parts (see Battle Report). In the first part we played on a 4′ wide x 6′ long table as per the original scenario. This just seemed to delay the action. So in the second part I just played on the middle bit of the table. The reduced table was 4’x4′. I think I’d play on the reduce version again.

4’x4′ variant of the map

References

Fletcher, J. (2006). Liberators! Supplement 1: The War in the South. Grenadier Productions.

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