Sno-King Krieg Spielers

A few pictures from the Black Powder game played last Saturday at the store. Bill Stewart provided the bulk of the French side. Bob Mackler provided the bulk of the Austrians (with a few Russians thrown in!), I provided a brigade of French and of Austrians. I also created up cheat sheets to use in the game, one side had the QRS and the other had the stats for a Brigade (pdf example).

For this scenario I wanted the bulk of the troops on the table right away with the intent that the troops would immediately interact with the different types of troops and the terrain. I wanted to get a feel for how the terrain, skirmishers, cavalry, and squares played in a game of BP.

This was a good thing, as several issue cropped up during the game. Woods for example, not one word mentions how far you can shoot into or through woods, so will have to come up with a reasonable house rule for it. We also used the Broken Brigade/Army rules … will need to modify or not use those as well. By turn three the Austrians had lost a Cavalry regiment, Jaeger battalion and had two shaken battalions, which by the rules broke the army even though the Austrian side still have over 10 other units that had not even taken a hit yet!

So we gamed on and overall had a good time with the rules … Mike and Dick had an epic struggle for the lone building section (Dick should have been +3 not +2 to his results), Mike’s Grenadiers took over 5 turns to root out the French battalion. I think the rules worked pretty well for the assault, though there did not seem much hope that the unit occupying the building would ever win the assault.

The skirmishers worked just fine for the most part… after re-reading the rules I found a few instances where we did things wrong with them though. While we had no rules problem with cavalry, there play in the game did not “feel” right. Not sure exactly what was missing but for me they just did not feel that much different than Infantry unit.

Looks like we’re going to try and get another game in this month and will try out a couple of ideas in that game.

French
1st Brigade
2 x Line Infantry Battalions
1 x Light Battalion
1 x Hussar Regiment

2nd Brigade
2 x Line Infantry Battalions
1 x Light Battalion
1 x Foot Battery

3rd Brigade
2 x Line Infantry Battalions
1 x Foot Battery
1 x Cuirassier Regiment

4th Brigade
2 x Line Infantry Battalions
1 x Light Battalion
1 x Hussar Regiment