Eye candy for Christmas, and a map!

Here's just a couple pieces of eye-candy, to give you an idea what we want to accomplish. This image is large, but will give you an idea of the battlefield we are building. The units depicted are to scale, with each block on the map representing one foot. Yes, that means the table is 30 feet long!

Order of Battle

This is our planned order of battle. For now it's simply a list of units. As time permits, Ed an I will turn the units into links to other pages where the progress toward assembling and painting can be followed. You will also notice some unit designations missing. That's simply because I haven't yet decide which units they be.

British C-in-C
1st Battery, Royal Artillery (6,9pdr)

1st British Division
2nd Battery, Royal Artillery (6,9pdr)

1st British Brigade
2nd Royal Guards (Coldstream)
42nd Highland (Black Watch)
92nd Highland (Gordon)
95th Rifles, 1 coy

2nd British Brigade
30th Foot (Cambridgeshire)
39th Foot (Dorsetshire)
3rd Foot (East Kent)
95th Rifles, 1 coy

3rd British Brigade
Nth Foot (tbd)
Nth Foot (tbd)
Nth Foot (tbd)
95th Rifles, 1 coy

2nd Brunswick Division
1st Brunswick Foot Battery (6,6pdr)

4th Brunswick Brigade
Leib Battalion
1st Light Battalion
2nd Line Battalion
Jager company, AvanteGarde

5th Brunswick Brigade
1st Line Battalion
2nd Line Battalion
3rd Line Battalion
Jager company, AvanteGarde (Light Infantry?)

6th British Brigade
10th Foot (North Lincolnshire)
58th Foot (Rutlandshire)
Roll’s Swiss Regiment
Rifle coy, Roll’s Swiss Regiment

Cavalry Division
1st Royal Horse Artillery Troop (6,6pdr)
1st British Cavalry Brigade
2nd North British Dragoons (Scots Greys) 3 sq
12th Light Dragoons (Prince of Wales) 3 sq

2nd Brunswick Cavalry Brigade
Brunswick Hussars 4 sq
Brunswick Uhlans 1 sq
20th Light Dragoons 4 sq
Troop of Foreign Hussars 1 sq

French C-in-C
1st French Division
20th co, 1st French Foot Artillery Regiment (6,6pdr, 2 5.5” how)

1st French Brigade
116th Ligne 3 bn
117th Ligne 3 bn

2nd French Brigade
5th Legere 3 bn
121st Ligne 3 bn

2nd German Division
Hessen-Darmstadt Foot Battery (4,6pdr)

3rd German Brigade
3rd Confederation of the Rhine Regiment (Frankfurt) 1 bn
Hessen-Darmstadt Regiment Gross- und Erbprinz 2 bn

4th German Brigade
1st battalion, 2nd Dutch Infantry Regiment
1st battalion, 4th Dutch Infantry Regiment
Hanoverian Legion Infantry Battalion

3rd Italian Division
9th Italian Foot Artillery Battery (6,6pdr, 2 5.5” how)

5th Italian Brigade
4th Line Regiment 2 bn
5th Line Regiment 2 bn

6th Neapolitan Brigade
1st Light Regiment 1 bn
1st Line Regiment 1 bn
2nd Line Regiment 1 bn

Light Cavalry Division
3rd Dutch Horse Artillery Battery (8,6pdr)

1st French Cavalry Brigade
4th Hussars 4 sq
29th Chasseurs a Cheval 4 sq

2nd German Cavalry Brigade
3rd Dutch Hussars 4 sq
Hanoverian Legion Chasseurs a Cheval 2 sq

Heavy Cavalry Division
7th co, 5th French Horse Artillery Regiment (4,6pdr, 2 5.5” how)

3rd French Cavalry Brigade
13th Cuirassiers 4 sq
24th Dragoons 4 sq

4th Italian Cavalry Brigade
2nd Italian Dragoons 4 sq
2nd Neapolitan Chasseurs a cheval 4 sq

Introduction

A couple of years ago Ed and I applied our mutual interest in the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game to GMing a game for Millennium 8 in Austin, Texas. The game was successful and the players had a good time. The success prompted us to start planning for a bigger and better LotR:SBG game at Millennium 9. We plotted the scenario and even started buying figures. Until one day…

…Ed sent me a picture of a painted Perry Brothers’ Brunswick Uhlan. Well, that led me to the Perry web page and soon we were talking more and more about 28mm Napoleonics and less and less about LotR. Before long the plans for the LotR game were pitched overboard and Ed and I were assembling Napoleonic armies. His were French while mine were British and Brunswickers. We chose Le Petit Empereur (LPE), by Chipco, as our rules because the armies don’t require many figures and we both have played many LPE games over the years. While we preparing our armies for Millennium 9, we started talking about other rules that we would like to play.

The game presented at Millennium 9 was a great success as reported by Ed on the Discussion Board at the The Miniatures Page. Some additional photos are available here and here.

We both expressed an interest in playing 28mm Napoleonics at a 1:30 figure to men ratio. This makes battalions of somewhere around twenty figures or so. Once we had the scale, we needed rules and so we bandied about ideas. My first impulse was to go back to my war gaming roots and adopt a The Sword and the Flame variant. TSATF is a game I know very well and I really like the mechanics. Ed had a pre-publication copy of Wellington’s Rules and sent it to me for review.

I must admit that I really liked the rules with the first read though. Wellington Rules captures the essence of two of the mechanics that I really like in TSATF. Those being movement allowance is a function of a base amount plus a die roll and the concept of stragglers degrading combat effectiveness. The third game mechanic that makes TSATF uniquely cinematic is the use of a standard deck of cards for initiative and casualty determination. Admittedly, the results of the card mechanics is a very cinematic game and isn’t well suited to the Napoleonic type of game in which we’re interested. Wellington Rules, however, has more deterministic command and control and casualty rules. Additionally, we feel it’s better to use a published set of rules at a convention as players will be able to obtain them if they so desire. Needless to say, it didn’t take us long to order the published version of the rules and pursue or planning in earnest.

So there you have it in a nutshell. That’s how we got from there to here. In upcoming posts, you, my dear reader, will be introduced to the big Napoleonic game Ed and I will be GMing at Millennium 10. We will be posting our progress in planning and assembling the armies. We will post reviews of the rules as we get some experience with them under our belt. So off we go into the fray…

Huzzah!