All things Jena Auerstaedt

Starting out with the Epic scale for DBN armies, I have something of a blank canvas. My Napoleonic 28’s are French / Austrian, so I wanted to take the opportunity to field something different and the Prussians are where my gaze has fallen. So the Epic project will see a pairing of newly formed French / Prussian Pocket Armies.

Rather than just going with some generic forces to fight some generic actions (which is fine), selecting a theatre / battle might just impart some extra flavour on the play and so my shelves were scanned for inspiration. 

‘Boom’ as the cool generation are saying! Jena - Auerstaedt 1806.

I have a rather beautiful book on the subject, Jena Auerstaedt - The Triumph of the Eagle, from the pen of E.G. Hourtoulle and published by Historie & Collections. 

A 120 page hardback, it is chock full of illustration, including lovely full colour uniform plates and nice clear maps of the actions, while also supported by a very readable text on the battle and good orders of battle and organisation notes - it is a dream book for the wargamer!

Alone, that would be enough for me, but my beady eye noticed that I also have four boardgames on the Jena Auerstaedt subject;

The Coming Storm by Kevin Zucker from Operation Support Studies.

Trois Batailles en Allemagne by Didier Rouy from Pratzen Editions and Legion Games.

Jena - Auerstaedt, one of the old Napoleon at War Quads (SPI), recently republished by Decision Games.

Deux Années de Gloire, of the Jours de Gloire series, published by Vae Victis

If nothing else, this offers a ton of play opportunity and will allow me to really get a detailed appreciation of the battle(s) and also, there will be that thing of some situations created in the boardgame playings, being suitable for transfer to the figure table, where they might generate some interesting set-ups for the DBN armies.

Despite all of this marvellous detail in front of me, of late, I have enjoyed prioritising theme and flavour on the figures table above exact replication of history and so I will be using the Jena - Auerstaedt arena to that end.

Having a quick look at the characteristics given in DBN of my two 1806 armies, The Prussians get a -1 to their command point allowance, their musketry range is reduced to reflect their lack of skirmishing capability, they get a bonus in close combat and cannot use column for assault.

The French get a +1 to their command point allowance and an additional bonus when using column attack.

These differences might bring some additional interest to the table.

Anyway, this all seems fertile ground for a lot of near future napoleonic gaming on my table.

Resources;

I have other web space at the COMMANDERS site, where more on this will be written about over the coming weeks. LINK.

https://commanders.simdif.com/dear_diary.html

Revisiting a Tale of Two Tank Platoons

I have just re-bought back into the 'Panzer' series, which looks at WWII tactical action. 

In September 2018, I put up a post called A Tale of Two Tank Platoons. In introducing the game play, it looked at an action from the perspective of how tank crews from both sides on the east front were trained.

I think the post has been one of my favourites during my time as a blogger and so rather than write up something similar, I thought I would simply give a link back to that article - I hope you enjoy it. 

LINK

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2018/09/panzer-and-tale-of-two-tank-platoons.html

RESOURCES

I also have some separate webspace called COMMANDERS, which is more snippet based than here. I post there more often than here and at the moment it is a more reliable way of seeing my stuff than Blogger.

LINK 

https://commanders.simdif.com/dear_diary.html

First battle with DBN

To give the DBN rules their initial outing, the napoleonic 28mm French and Austrians were ordered to the table. These figures are based on 80mm bases and here, 1 base represents 1 unit.

The view from the Austrian commanders position

For the starter game, I went for the standard 12 points army per side, which roughly equates to 12 units per side and used the scale of 40mm equalling 100 Paces.

A table 4' by just over 3' was easily enough to allow the armies to breathe.

From the Austrian perspective

The French army included a Cuirassier unit and one of their artillery batteries was horse artillery. The Austrians had jägers that can operate in 'bad going', plus they got 2 hussar units that count as Superior.

The French left, cuirassiers up front

French columns advance over the bridge, crashing into the Austrian muskets on the other side, pushing them back, but there was a nuanced problem in the French getting off the bridge. 

There were Austrian hussars in the immediate area and the first unit off the bridge couldn't turn to face that threat, because they were operating in the Zone of Control of enemy muskets and they couldn't just attack the muskets, because they would then expose their flank to the hussars .... so, they pulled back to within the confines of the bridge!

A shooting match started there, which just started to rack up casualties on both sides. The bridge had become a stalemate.

In the centre, the French slowly advanced, inconvenienced by the fordable river. They did manage to engage the Austrians on the other side, but not in time for anything to be resolved there.

It was on the French left that the drama unfolded. French Horse Artillery engaged the enemy jäger, while the cavalry, led by the Cuirassiers, struck at the Austrian Grenzers. 

It was close, but both the jäger and one unit of Grenzers were seen off, bringing the total Austrian losses to 4, which brought the game to an end with a French victory (the French had only suffered 1 loss).

Austrian Hussars

Actually, over on the Austrian left, their hussars had positioned themselves ready to strike the French right flank. For fun, I played this part of the action out, just to see whether another turn would have helped the Austrians ..... it didn't, the hussars charged and were (just about) seen off by determined French line!

Overall that was an enjoyable first game with DBN. I will take the rules away for a re-read, helped by this playing.

The 28's looked magnificent on this compact table and the randomised number of Command Points generated each turn for each side, helped keep things fluent. This small game that would end when one side had inflicted 1/3 losses on the other (4 units) took 6 turns to play, probably taking no more than a couple of hours for a first game. 

RESOURCES;

With Blogger having some technical problems, the reader may want to check out my Commanders site, which is snippet based and updated more frequently than here. LINK

https://commanders.simdif.com/dear_diary.html