Field of Battle 2 – FNF

This Friday was what we call a “Baker Night” – where the club meets at the Baker rec center from 7 to 12 for good times. Given that, early in the week, I decided to toss down an ACW game using Field of Battle Second Edition. Readers of this blog know I am quite taken with Black Powder – I must say, I think that I am right now equally taken with FoB2!

Playing on the Union side were Rick Stockton (the C-in-C), Doug Wildfong and Nate Forte. On the Confederate side were myself and Dan Gurule (the C-in-C).

The context of the game scenario was this: Late 1863 in Central Louisiana, a hastily assembled force of Confederate soldiers, including less-than-stellar units, are detailed to stop a Federal advance. Even though the troop quality may be lacking, the leadership structure of the Confederate force is quite good. The Yankee force was of good quality, veteran soldiers, but, with less-than-stellar leadership. The troops, command quality and decks were generated ahead of time using the FoB2 rules.

The Yankee army was also larger than that of the Southerners. There were 4 brigades of bluecoats and three batteries of artillery. Opposing them were 3 brigades of Johnny Rebs and 2 batteries of artillery. For simplicity, all infantry were armed with rifled muskets. This would perhaps not be truly accurate for the Western Theater, but we’re learning the rules. For the artillery, both sides employed smooth-bore guns.

In order to set the scenario and ensure a rather long exposure to the rules, I embarked on a little social engineering for the game.

1. I gave both armies the maximum number of Army Morale Points for the number of units. So the Yankees had 20 and the Rebels had 14. I thought this was good because the yanks would be attacking. I gave the players their poker chips in cloth sacks. It was fun during the game to see the two C-in-C’s keep the chips a secret from the enemy!
2. Of the generals generated, I selected a D8 quality for both C-in-C’s. My thought was to limit the “swing” between dice. I didn’t think I wanted a game – that new folks were learning in – to be rolling a D6 versus a D10 or anything like that. As it turns out, I should not have worried about this. This game played fine, but so would any values for the C-in-C’s. I have to remember that both sides get the points and the idea is to get through the cards. See, I am learning the game too!
3. I decided that the Yankees could have a more forward deployment in any one zone. I did this to speed their attack and impress upon them that they were, in fact, attacking. They got to choose the zone.

So, then we got the deployments and the battle. At this point, I let the four players do some social engineering. Since they had no knowledge of the scenario, who’s attacking, size of the forces or even who is on what side, I let them set up the terrain on the battlefield as they wished.

This was really cool to see. I got the party started by laying down a roadway and some wooden fences along it. Then they all dove in and before long we had a cool field set up. It had some woods, roads, fields of corn and of wheat and plenty of wooden fences and stone walls. When Rick started setting up the terrain, the first thing he grabbed was water! So he placed a nice creek across the field!

Regarding the terrain, we called the creek and woods Class II. The wheatfields and the cornfields were Class I but the cornfields blocked LOS at 4” depth. The wooden fences were nothing at all, but we gave the stone walls Class II for combat effects. We employed no town sections and no hills in this battle.

At this point, the player’s decided what sides they’d fight on. I was expecting 2-on-2 with me as the referee – but – 3 players said “Union”. So, I was drafted to play on the Southern side. I happened to ask the Yankees who was going to be the C-in-C right as Rick was raising his arm – so the guys quickly jumped all over him as he had “volunteered”! Dan was appointed the Confederate C-in-C.

The Union was then asked to select the side of the table they would attack from and to select a zone for the forward deployment. They did so, and selected their far left flank as the advanced zone (they could have picked any). We took turns deploying the commands and away we went!

The battle was terrific. The yanks got off to a slow start but the rebels advanced a little to consolidate positions. Soon, the battle was joined and Army Morale Points began leaving the bags.

For the Yankees: Doug’s command got his flank attack working and soon owned that section of the field. Doug’s attack appeared to be the main effort as he was allocated 2 of the brigades. Nate advanced aggressively in the center and lost many men in so doing. He didn’t drive any Rebs out of their positions in the long term, but did bleed them and tie them down – which I suspect is all he intended to do anyway – to stop them from helping fight against Doug. Rick’s command, moved forward on the Union’s right flank. Even though the Rebs had some nice stone walls over there Rick managed to drive into them and had good success.

For the Rebs: I commanded 1 brigade and a battery and attempted to defend against Doug’s maneuver. I held him off for a while, but weight of numbers ruled. When the game ended I really didn’t have a flank. Part of my command got caught up against Nate as he drove through a cornfield. I was able to stop him cold – but those troops were needed against Doug. Dan’s command was busy fighting off Nate and Rick the whole evening. He was in a real dogfight too. At the end, his command was in better shape than mine!

So what interesting things happened during the battle? Several of note (of course the whole thing was interesting)!

1. My command’s general (D10) was killed twice during the battle! This hampered by ability to defend against Doug.
2. One of Doug’s commanders, not the lead command in the attack, was also killed. This prompted the Yanks to send the C-in-C over – so determined were they to keep the pressure up. But, we just could not get to him.
3. There was one of my regiments and one of Nate’s regiments that had a real knock-down-drag-out melee. Over the course of several actions, we fought multiple melee where one side or the other won by 1 point and it took a little to build up to a UI loss. Then only 1 UI loss resulted (so tight were the die rolls) and the loser fell back – only to get involved again and again in subsequent actions. Finally I was able to destroy the Federal unit, but my unit was a wreck too at that point.
4. Oh! Army Morale. The Rebels ran out first, but the Yankees only had one or two left at that point. The Rebs survived an Army Morale Test too. For a little bit there, both armies were out of Army Morale and losses gave points back to the other side – but this ebbed and flowed. At one moment the Rebs would have 1 or 2 then none and the Yankees may have 1 or 2. Weird and fun – the suspense about the next Army Morale card coming up was real.

In the end, neither army broke. We called it a game at 11PM after about 2 and a half hours of play – we spent time socializing and setting up and deploying and teaching rules before we actually got down to playing in earnest. Union tactical victory was the call.

The game went well; the fellas and I had a good time. Many good things were said about the rules – they gang would play again. There was a little feedback that maybe I should have given the attackers a fourth “Move” card (or give them a free “Move” card on the first turn) – as the Yanks didn’t get any at first. Fair comment, maybe that is a good idea in a given scenario – but – hey, in the terms of the battle and the game system – the Yanks just didn’t get off on time (how many attacks in history go off on schedule?). Having them move on the first action would have been better for the scenario. This game system has that flexibility.

One new thing I have now come to like about the game – and this was pointed out to me by a person that was not playing in our game – was that there is a lot of player interaction in the game. Even if you are not the active player, there’s no sitting around. You’re either opposing the enemy’s die rolls or using opportunity fire or battling. There’s no down time here.

I think I’ll write a unit generator application for this game. I like coding. That way I can simply “adjust a few dials” on a window and push a button for an army generated to the specs of the game.

Onto the pictures!

Got some painting in this weekend

I was able to get some good painting time this past Sunday! I brought up one of my folding tables from the basement and set it up right in front of the 55" TV and painted and watched NFL Red Zone all damn day! It was awesome!

I painted up a handful of 28mm British for the Peninsula. Almost done with a few more French Hussars too!

Although I only painted a couple of French soldiers from the French & Indian War period (I actually use these as "Colonial Soldiers" in pirate games) I did mount and prime about 12 more.

I also completed three more squads of 15mm NVA and 3 more NVA mortar teams.

Oh, I did have one glass of scotch (Quinta Ruban) and a few beers. For football food I made roast beef po'boys. Man, I had a great day! The wife? She got up early and went to the Susan G. Komen walk...so when she got home about 1ish she took a long nap on the couch and kept one eye on Red Zone too! She's a good soldier, too. I did my housework on Saturday and totally shirked all responsibilities on Sunday - with her blessing!

Red Zone - man, it is the PERFECT channel. First of all, it is six hours of non-stop football - all the best plays! Oh, there are NO COMMERCIALS! The host of the show has even better mastery of the remote control than I do!

This coming Sunday is the wargame club meeting, so no Red Zone, beer, scotch, painting and Cajun food. Huh? Why am I going again?

Cutlass has arrived!

After watching some videos on Beasts of War about the Black Scorpion rule set Cutlass, I purchased it. The rules seem very interesting. They are a set of skirmish-level rules for fantasy pirate games with Orcs and Humans and all that...

Hold up! I like Orcs - but in my world they have no more a welcome in Pirate games as they do in Napoleonic games. I have absolutely zero need for Elvish swashbucklers and the like. To me, ridiculous. To others, fine - I bear you all no ill will.

So why the hell did I buy them? For the mechanics of the game. I think they may be good for other skirmish games - yes, pirates (no Dwarves) or cowboys or whatever. Let me describe the mechanics here and you players of any of the Piquet family of games will find an interesting thread of commonality: polyhedral dice.

First of all, this is a game played with two sides. Each side rolls a die to determine the winner of initiative. The high roll acts on that number of actions, when completed or the initiative is stolen by the opponent, the opponent acts on their number of actions. Yes, initiative can be stolen! Certain actions make it possible for the "inactive" player to become active - yes, the initiative can swap several times during a turn. In my mind, something like this is a good mechanic for skirmish games where the action can be fast and furious. The use of the actions is has more detail too, more in a later post perhaps.

A miniature pirate has a number of statistics that describe him (or her). But, instead of a numerical value for each the miniature has a polyhedral die value for each. So, instead of a Dexterity of "4", a character may have a Dexterity of "D6". Certain conditions modify die sizes up and down from D4 to D20 - some earn a "bonus die" where you roll 2 dice and select the highest value.

Combat and some actions are resolved by opposing polyhedral die rolls where the margin of victory determines the outcome...maybe a miss to maybe a critical hit.

I have not yet had a chance to look at the campaign section, but there is one. From the brief scan, it looks somewhat similar to the campaign section of Legends of the High Seas (an awesomely fun game, BTW): skills, permanent injuries, etc.

So, really looking forward to giving these a go very soon!!!!!!


Oh, in the interest of full disclosure - and yes, this may be contradictory - while I don't want any Orcish pirates, I am not against a skeletal or ghostly pirate here and there in the right scenario! 

Malvern Hill?

I had a fun evening yesterday. I was invited to play a Civil War battle using Piquet - Field of Battle II! First of all, the invitation was awesome because these are good guys and good gamers - second of all, I have never played FoB and was excited to do so.

I like original Piquet - yeah, I can think abstractly and non-linear, I am a software engineer after all. Unlike many, I had no issues with the impetus system. Yeah, it can lead to inactivity for some players if the game is too big. But for me that just made it a less effective "club game". It was more about an evening at home with a good friend a good scotch.

Last night, Field of Battle did a great job in the balance between restricting my control and letting me play the game...and...involving all of the players. Plus, I really like the opposed die rolls stuff that FoB (and that family of games) uses.

Brent has an innovative manner of "deploying" for the tabletop battle that is included in the rules. In this battle we had some additional deployment options (allowing for a terrific flank attack) and we had a tardy brigade and a couple of other neat things. Basically, we simply decided what forces would be involved and let this process help us set up the circumstances of the battle. It was cool.

Onto the battle. John and I played the Confederates and Brent and Greg played the Union. Given the ability to deploy some troops in a very forward position, John and I decided to mass troops in this are and try to slam into the flank of the Yankees on the hill. We'd of course place a holding force along the center to demonstrate but not really to attack with.

Due to the conditions and deployment process, the Yankees were able to deploy a brigade to delay our attack and sap its strength. Indeed this brigade would be successful in this endeavor.

In the end, the Rebels would fail in their attempt. So, the war continues on, another retreat and another battle. Onto the pictures. Brent, thanks for the hospitality and thank you and Greg and John for the terrific gamesmanhip!

First Battle with Bull Run to Gettysburg

We fought one this past Friday night. Just a small group of us, in order to learn the new rules. Before that; a word on the book itself. Beautiful. It is a really super nice book – certainly in the category of the Black Powder rule book. It has several “Showcase” sections containing awesome images of the incredible miniatures produced by Wargames Foundry.

On to the battle data. There were 2 Confederate brigades and 3 Union brigades on the field. The rebs were basically setup with only 1 brigade to maneuver and 1 that would maneuver little due to the proximity of one of the Yankee brigades. We set these up to engage in a fire fight to see how those rules worked out. In the area there was a stream, a patch of light woods and open terrain. We assumed that there may be a charge or two in this area as well.

The remaining rebs and yanks marched onto the field in a race to secure positions. There was a roadway to allow the road bonus to show itself and a building next to the road to test that. As the these troops converged there was plenty of formation changing and shooting and charging.

So we feel like we set stuff up to really test several aspects of the rules. We included no optional rules, wanting to go “straight” and see how it plays.

I am not going to give details of the action – and I was so busy working the rule book that I failed to take more than 2 or 3 pictures. This report is about how we felt the rules played to our tastes.

Overall I thought the rules were fine. Not spectacular, but certainly worth playing. There was plenty to like and some things that we disliked. If I stated that for our group that Black Powder got a grade of “A” then I’d give these rules a “B”.

Let’s get into the things we felt were not to our tastes. The main issue was that there seemed like a lot of modifiers for things, especially morale. We certainly did a lot of scanning the charts. OK, that’s not the end of the world; most likely a few more plays and some of those things would come naturally.

We felt that 10% losses in a turn caused too many morale checks, causing us to seek that chart. Given the unit sizes possible, this means that some units would check morale every time they lost a model or two. Most of the regiments we put out there were 4 stands (16 miniatures) although we did have some 3 and 5 stand regiments. Also, we did not use any rosters, so sometimes after a unit had lost a stand or two we could not remember how many models it originally had. We finally decided to check morale after each stand loss instead (sort of a tip of the hat to good ole Johnny Reb).

There were no rules for “broken commands”. Well that is easy enough to address with a house rule or scenario rules.

There were no rules for a reduction in firepower when deployed into a building. Well, we’re creative folks, we just decided that the unit can only shoot the stands that are in a particular facing of the building. Solved for us.

There were not any real rules for adding another unit to an ongoing close combat. In the “Charging” section there was a rule that a unit cannot charge a unit already engaged. The “Close Combat” section had no rules on the subject. On the close combat modifiers there is a modifier for “any unit reinforced in an ongoing close combat”. So we invented on the fly and allowed a friendly unit to charge anyway (if they passed morale of course). By this means we allowed reinforcements to enter the fray. I am sure there would other ways to manage that too.

What did we like? Several things. First of all. We like systems that restrict the ability to move all your units anytime you want – these rules have no restrictions. So, they could be a nice convention game where players can easily get involved with the units under their command.

Snipers. We liked this. Each side had 1 sniper in our battle. There were officer casualties as a result. Not too many and it did not feel weird. It made players think about the risk to their commanders – as they should. It made us thing of poor General Reynolds a Gettysburg! We’ll “port” the sniper rules over to Black Powder!

Unit sizes. The rules represented the variation of unit size very well. And is friendlier on the budget regarding needing really large units. We felt like we could put more units on the table than in Black Powder.

Simultaneous shooting. Both sides’ shooting is worked out as if simultaneous. That felt fair. The modifiers for shooting included penalties for movement and if the unit was shooting while itself under fire.

Degrading effect for frequent shooting. If you shoot a lot, your firepower degrades a little to show the effect of smoke on the field, fouling of guns, etc.

Fatigue in close combat. Close combat does not last forever. After three rounds, something is gonna give.

Seeing friends rout causes a morale check. I liked this one. Reminded me of the Johnny Reb days – and is a nice touch for the Civil War period. This may find its way into some Black Powder scenarios too.

Again, a “B”. They certainly worked. In one game play, nothing jumped out as broken. They are not as polished as Black Powder, but they certainly offer a few different things too. I don’t know when we’ll play them again – we’re still pretty taken with Black Powder.

If you’ve played these rules, leave a note and let me know how you liked them! Rule sets are like exotic foods, everyone’s tastes vary. I like to try different systems. I like to experience the creativity of writers out there in the world!

New Arrivals - Rules (Part 2)

OK, so before I share what arrived today - let me tell you a short story. Matt Grippin and I have long wanted to play ancient China war games. More than DBA. Matt has a couple of Han Dynasty DBA armies in 15mm. I have always enjoyed Sun Tzu and Matt is a flat out ancient China fanatic - he's very knowledgeable on the subject.

You know? Matt once gave me a copy of the book Three Kingdoms. If you know Matt something like that means he really likes you! The stories within got me excited about this period. 

Well, Matt also told me about the Warhammer Ancient Battles supplement for this period, called The Art of War...and that if we ever saw it we should get it. It just so happened that I was in Colorado Springs last weekend and inside a game shop that had a copy on the shelf! I flipped through it and bought it!

Now, I do not want to play Warhammer Ancient Battles - the subject matter in this book is however incredible and invaluable. And - it includes rules for heroic duels and "Military Strategists" (think Sun Tzu)!

What I want to play is Hail Caesar! So, I ordered a copy of that. It came today! Yay! The Art of War book will help me build armies for various periods in ancient China - but our attention will be in the Three Kingdoms period. Uh, yeah, we'll use some Military Strategist goodness too!

So, I'll build some army lists that work with the HC rules and pass them to Matt for adjustments and then, order up some Chinese soldiers! 28mm to boot!

New Arrivals - Rules (Part 1)

Well this week proved to be a boon when it comes to new rules - but proved to be a bust when it came to health! I have been "something" all week. I think it was allergies because I didn't feel "ill" just miserable with the throat and sinuses. The wife says I was sick, she's probably right.

Anyway.

My copy of the new Foundry rules "Bull Run to Gettysburg" arrived on Thursday. I got it on Amazon from one of their resellers. Foundry has it marked for like $55 and the Amazon reseller now says $41. But, when I ordered it it was only $23.98! What a steal! What intrigued me is that the rules description mentioned "simultaneous" actions - which sorta reminded me of those good ole days of Johnny Reb. So, I took a shot and ordered them.

As I was home in bed yesterday instead of at work, I did have a chance to read through them...and...whatever. They look fine. The turn sequence sorta is like Legends of the Old West: I move then you move. I shoot then you shoot. Then we melee. Then the next turn begins. However, unlike those rules (and, again, reminding me of JR) charges by both sides are handled first in the movement step - and - all shooting is considered to be simultaneous. So, essentially IGOUGO, but a better. Those that know me know I like to have less than total control over my "command ability". But, hey, I not a zealot on that point. These are games we play, not simulations! Show me some fun and let me make some cool decisions on the battlefield that matter.

Before I get off of the JR similarities, let me mention that this is a "casualty counting" game. When a unit loses a figure, you mark it off. When a stand loses all of the figures, take it off.

Some of the things that popped out at me as things to like are (1) the basing matches my army exactly! 40mm squares with 4 figures per stand. (2) the effects of long term shooting is to degrade the shooting of a unit. (3) artillery is represented in sections - 1 to 3 per battery. (4) The account for "green", "experienced" and "veteran" morale levels. (5) the main maneuver element is a regiment, and for infantry they are 3 to 6 stands.

There are lots of other neat ideas in the rules, some presented as "optional rules". At first glance, I like the shooting/melee and morale tables - but I will say that first of all, I must try them out in a game and secondly that the list of morale modifiers is quite lengthy - not that this is bad - just lengthy.

Of course, as seems the trend today, there are lots of awesome images of beautiful Foundry miniatures with professional paint jobs and sections devoted to painting and modelling and all that jazz. It is a very, very nice hard-cover book very much on par with the production values found in Black Powder.

Before I make any other comparisons to Black Powder, I'll have to play a game or three. Black Powder's combat system works - and it works well. Like Black Powder, the author of Bull Run to Gettysburg has developed these rules over the last 25 or so years from games played - so that bodes well. I'll post on this topic again after having played.