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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
Interesting choice to game Norm, never saw that coming! Looking forward to seeing progress on this I must admit.
ReplyDeleteGood Morning Donnie, it is not a battle that I have much experience with, so I thought new project, new slice of history. There is a much more marked difference between the two armies than if I would go to my normal time frame of 1815, with the fighting around the St. Amand area (and on which I have already written a nice scenario for my own rules).
ReplyDeleteI think the 'theme and flavour' approach is a good way to go Norm. The sort of thing I use for my ImagiNations games, as I still feel I'm playing the period, but without the strictures that historical OOB etc can provide. I certainly look forward to seeing how these games play out, as as mentioned before, the rules offer a nice way to get that 12-15 units per side game in in a reasonable amount of time, and of course, of a smallish table. Good to see this post appearing 'normally' dare I say it...
ReplyDeleteHi Steve, I pre-published last night, scheduled to appear at 0500 hours this morning and it seems to have done that okay, I have also just used the Feedburner thing described by Jon. I don't think anything else can be done.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, I feel that in my boardgames, the designer has really grafted to get the order of battle and history right and so for figures (which I want to be doing something different than the boardgames), I prefer a more relaxed approach.
So many die rolls are made in a typical wargame that within the first 20 minutes the game has a mind of its own anyway, plus I quite like the old 'teaser' approach. Hopefully the 1806 campaign can deliver something new for me.
Great stuff Norm, I shall look forward to future posts on the subject. I think having some sort of historical background for tabletop battles is far more interesting than generic hypothetical situations and there are some interesting asymmetries in 1806. Of they also lead neatly into the joys of Eylau and Friedland, which are also very interesting engagements. I've done both in the last couple of years with my Neil Thomas mashup.
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