State of Play: Napoleon 1806 (2/6)

 

  

After revisiting the Peninsula with Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010), we returned to the first game I picked for by personal 6x6 challenge at the beginning of the year (and this blog), Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2017). T and I first played this back in January, twice, a couple of weeks apart. The first game we dived in for the full game, but we made so many mistakes that I’m considering our second game (from mid-February; mistakes were made here as well, but not so many) as game number one of six.

A couple of activations into the first turn.

Since it’s been so long, I set up the three-turn introductory game and used the Rules for the Conscript (kind of the basic game; most of the meat, but not as much gravy). I’m happy with the way this one went, but I think I’d like to stick with the Conscript rules for one more week to reinforce our understanding of the game before moving on to the Rules for the Grognard* (the advanced rules) for games 4-6.

T took the French (no surprise) and I played the Prussians. The game s played out on a point-to-point map, which is beautifully rendered to look like a field map of the region, with roads, river-crossings, forested paths and significant towns and cities marked out in calligraphic font. It really is a thing of beauty and a joy to play on.

It’s been a while so I’ll take a moment to recap the details of the game. The pieces represent the Generals and marshals commanding their respective columns. These pieces are blocks with a French or Prussian eagle on one side, and the other offering a tiny portrait and name of the commander and any extra information conveyed in little symbols. Cards drive all the functions of the game; initiative, movement and combat, and at the beginning of each turn three cards are drawn into the player’s hand to offer small bonuses in combat, or to play for reinforcements to individual columns. The strength and disposition of the columns are recorded dynamically on shielded boards, with cubes representing each unit’s infantry and cavalry strength, and orange cylinders marking accrued exhaustion. Exhaustion plays a crucial role in the unfolding action of the game.

In both the introductory and full scenarios, the goal of the French player is to control four target cities, Bamburg (which they hold at the start of the game), Erfurt, Lille and Leipzig (for a sudden death victory). Each side also gains points for hits against enemy units. The Victory Point Track runs from 0-20. Twenty points for the French is another sudden death victory (however unlikely); if the Russians can shift the needle to zero, it marks a sudden death victory over the French.

Combat occurs between combatant units occupying the same space, and relies on the drawing of cards to establish the results of the altercation. Each unit will draw a set number of cards, usually two. If the attacker instigates combat on arrival – as mart of a move activation – they draw one less card. If the defender is in a citadel (target city) or in a forested area (designated by a green location square) they draw an extra card. The cards are revealed simultaneously, and the damage is added up. This can be hits (loss of unit strength), accrued exhaustion, or a combination of both. If the damage is even for both sides, the battle ceases and both sides stay in the contested space. If one side has an advantage in hits applied over the other, the loser has to retreat a number of points corresponding to the differentiation (in a 4-2 result, the loser would withdraw two places).

The introductory game is only three turns long, beginning turn 5 and completing at the end of turn 7. As the Prussians, I set out from the start to play a defensive game. I moved nearly all of my units to the target cities; this is harder than it sounds. Nearly all of them begin in roughly the centre of the board. Each time you activate a unit, you declare the unit or units to be activated and draw a card. The card will tell you how many points you can spend activating that unit. Movement translates to one point spent to move from one location to an adjacent location on the map. If you move two or more units together, you spend a point for each unit over the first, then you can move the stack with whatever is left. Sometimes you won’t be able to move at all, say if you declare three units together, but draw a two-point card. They sit there and they’re done for the turn. This is a really interesting break on what is really a game of manoeuvre, and something I’ll explore in more depth in a later post.

T was hampered in his initial movement by another neat rule involving movement. When a unit runs into another unit in their army, they must stop; there’s no passing or through-movement in Napoleon 1806. The French columns are a little more scattered at the opening of the introductory scenario. Pulling a five-point card to activate Soult is great until you realise he can only move two or three places before he runs into Lannes or Ney. T lost some ground this way early in the game, but it won’t be a mistake he’ll make next time.

I used a couple of lower-strength units as road blocks to hinder T’s movement toward the target cities. This was less effectual as T would meet them with his own columns in tandem, and even with an extra card for defence, these poor Prussian militia were no match for the onslaught of French Regulars. In the shorter game, though, they did indeed slow T’s progress; though he held the bridge or the forest pass, no other units could get through the choke-point to take advantage of the newly “opened” passage until the combative units’ next activation.

Erfurt seized, Louis and Blücher routed.

T took several points in damage to my units and the taking of Erfurt in the second turn (turn 6 on the turn track), though he didn’t have the cavalry superiority to harass my retreating columns, but couldn’t get his heavy-hitting columns up quickly enough to offer a true challenge to Lille and Leipzig. If he'd managed to move Bernadotte and Devout up sooner, and was able to bring Murat up to screen his advance from my spoilers, the outcome would certainly been in question. 

Overall, Prussia was victorious but only due to France not meeting its objectives, especially being so hampered in their movement at the beginning. As the Prussians, it wasn’t a very satisfying victory, but in the end, it was really a refamiliarization game, so neither of us were taking it so seriously. Next time, the gloves will come off.

We have four more plays-through to met my required six games, which will give us a good opportunity to tease out the system’s nuances. Armed with just what we each learnt so far, the next outing should be quite interesting.

French and Prussian column dispositions at game's end.

 

* Interesting aside: most of you reading a wargaming blog will probably know this already, but the term Grognard (pronounced Grr-Urn-Yard – with a very soft “d” (and an Inspector Clouseau accent)) is a term that became popular during the early campaigns of Napoleon. Le Petit Caporal created la Vieille Garde (Old Guard) from soldiers who had served in the Imperial Guard, and were under the age of 35 but had served in at least three campaigns (though many had served in fifteen or more). It was thought that the soldiers of the Old Guard had earned their place and stature through devoted service, and so they were given some latitude not afforded to the rank and file of Napoleon’s army. They were allowed to grow their moustaches and sideburns in decorous fashion (and many tried to out-do each other in this), and, while fiercely loyal to a man to their leader, they had a reputation for complaining about everything; their rations, their billets, long marches, lack of action, and so on. Within the Grand Armée they were known as le grognards (the grumblers). One source suggests the term was given to them by Napoleon himself. The soldiers wore this epithet with pride, and further complaints.

Review: 1759: Siege of Quebec, Second Edition (solo game)

 

  

1759: Siege of Quebec (Worthington Publishing, 2022) was originally released in 2018. In 2022, a second edition of the game was released alongside two new additions to what is now Worthington’s Great Sieges series; 414BC: Siege of Syracuse (Worthington, 2022), and 1569: Siege of Malta (Worthington, 2022). Syracuse and Malta were each nominated for a Charles S. Roberts Award (in the categories of Best Medieval Wargame and Best Gunpowder Wargame respectively). I wanted to review these in chronological order, and had fully intended to review Siege of Quebec much closer to the other two. For the three people who have been waiting for this, I apologise. For anyone else who is at all curious, my earlier reviews can be found at the links below:

414BC: Siege of Syracuse review

1569: Siege of Malta review

To my shame, I didn’t back the Kickstarter for the three games (in retrospect, not supporting this and not backing Worthington’s War of 1812 Campaigns trilogy (Worthington, 2019) were among my biggest KS-related regrets; I spent a lot more money trying to track these all down piecemeal, and I have yet to find a copy of War Along the Chesapeake at a price I’m willing to pay). I managed to acquire them the old-fashioned way, over the course of about a year. I bought Siege of Quebec first, and played it a lot. And lost a lot. I bought the other two on the strength of the satisfying experience Siege of Quebec delivered; Siege of Malta came next – at the time, Siege of Syracuse proved to be the most difficult to obtain, but I’m happy to report that since those dark days, all three games have been reprinted and, at time of writing, all three are still available from the publisher.

I should add that this review is based purely on my experience playing the game in its solo mode.  Even the first edition had a two-player mode, but I haven’t yet got around to trying it out on another human. When I do, I’ll write it up and post it here, but for now I’m happy to keep it a solitary pleasure.

Appearance

Siege of Quebec set the stylistic tone for Worthington’s the Great Sieges series. The board is a 17”x22” mounted map, and is an exercise in elegant simplicity. The main geographical elements relevant to the game featured, along with positions marked out for the generic blocks used for the British, French, and native forces. It also features a Morale ladder for tracking the state of the two sides’ morale, which is important. If one side’s moral falls to zero, that marks an automatic victory for the other side. While the colour pallet is muted generally, Quebec is still the most brightly-coloured of the three games’ boards. The red of the British blocks is duplicated in the template positions of the British troops on the board, while the pale blue of the first edition has given way to a soft white for the French units. The forests from which the farms and settlements were carved is represented by little silhouettes of trees in an appropriately forest-tone green, as are the three spaces designated for the Indian units. Coloured discs represent the British and French batteries, and blocks cut with a prow at one end mark the British naval detachment sent to support the British troops. The waterway of the St Lawrence River is represented in a duck-egg blue. The whole tableau, while quite schematic at first blush is pleasant and inviting, and clearly shows the game situation at a glance.

The gameboard, set up and two turns in.

Overall, the map is austere and practical; movement is conducted between preordained positions. As their forces are depleted, each side may transfer their units via a Move order, provided their plans are not frustrated by the enemy. Ship silhouettes appear at the lower and upper St Lawrence as well as place of safe anchorage further downstream. The British ships begin the game in the lower St Lawrence, and on a given command may traverse to the upper St Lawrence position, at which time troops may be moved (again by order, either chosen by the British player or as an event in the British deck if you’re playing the French) to the plain of Abraham to engage in the battle for Quebec.

The Morale Chart.

The playing pieces are simple elongated wooden blocks, painted in the primary colour of the related force, Red for the British and White for the French. One block from each side is used to keep tally on the Morale board. The game can be won or lost here. one or both sides will take a morale loss with each unit destroyed, and through some events or as the result of an order roll. 

British and French Order Books.

French Field Order Book, ready for play.

There are two Order Books (one each for the French and the British); these are bi-fold PACs with the seven orders you may choose from each turn. Each order has a choice of four tables to roll on for the order’s effectiveness depending on how the AI responds, which is printed on the representative non-player cards. The solitaire game is driven by a deck of cards, a deck each for the British or French bot-antagonist. All the information you need to play the game can be found either in the Order Book or on the cards. Two extra card decks are also included for the two-player version of the game. I won’t be addressing that mode of play here; I am keen to try this as a two-player game, so maybe some time in the future.

An imminent British victory.

The cards are where the game comes alive. Both decks are well laid out, each card containing a wealth of information relating to the game, as well as interesting historical notes relating to the card's action. As with the other games in the series, the cards are also illustrated with evocative artwork reflecting the era. 

Play

1759: Siege of Quebec is a simple game to play and easy to learn. That’s not to say it’s an easy game to play and simple to learn; The mechanisms that drive play are straight-forward enough to minimise confusion and allow the game an easy flow. The game revolves around the interaction between your chosen orders and the response from the newly presented bot card. In a game of regular-level difficulty, you will shuffle the 33-card deck for the opposing force, deal off 24 of these cards, and set out your order book. Each turn, you choose an order, which may involve attacking a particular location, or reinforcing your own locations (moving available troops), or, if you’re playing the British, getting your ships up to the upper St Lawrence River location to facilitate troop movement to the Plain of Abraham, where they can initiate battle with the French forces at Quebec. Then you will turn over the next card on the bot-deck. The card will have three lots of information; an Event, which will be resolved before anything else takes place (these can present a positive for the player, but they are more often potentially negative, or reliant on a particular situation or state to be in play. If the requirements for the event aren’t met, it is ignored. 

Hold order chosen. With the Counterattack counter order from the card drawn,
I'll need to roll high for a favourable result.

The next piece of information is the card’s counter-order; this is the response to the order you’ve chosen, and it will correspond to one of the tables below your chosen order. Then you roll a die to determine the result of our order, make the appropriate changes to the state of the board, and choose your next order. 

No ships in upper St Lawrence yet, so the event is ignored.

This description sounds very procedural – even to me, writing it down – but the short time scale of the game and the lack of any kind of bookkeeping means the procedural steps give way to a sense of pure narrative. When you get into the rhythm of game-play, the interplay of order and counter-order become a natural story unfolding on on the map before you. The events of the months of siege transpire in the space of an hour, leading to a definite win/lose conclusion. 

 

Appraisal

All the games in the Great Sieges series play very smoothly. They are quick to set up (after the first time or two), and you’ll have a result in an hour or so; I can usually get the box off the shelf, set it up, make a coffee, lose a game and come achingly close to winning another, and pack up again inside of two hours. The situation of the siege lends itself well to the shorter play, small footprint style of game that the Great Sieges series embodies. 

After playing through Siege of Quebec again a few times to refresh my thinking about the game,  I suspect that I've come back to this one being my favourite of the three. Both Syracuse and Malta have their charms, they each do some things differently and offer interesting situations, and are equally difficult to - I don't want to say "master," maybe conquer is a better word (mastery suggests there is a formula you can use to win most of the time; that is not the case here). It might be because the French and Indian War is of particular interest, or it may be because this was my introduction to the Great Sieges series. It's a very good introduction. I'd go as far as to say that this and the other Great Sieges games make for an excellent introduction to the more procedural style of solo wargames, especially for players less experienced in wargames generally. 

Things aren't going so well for the British...

Siege of Quebec is a tough gig for the British; in all the games I’ve played – well past three dozen by now – I’ve only won as the French, though I’ve come damn close a couple of times as the British. The French have the advantage to a point, as they only have to run down the clock until winter sets in (the end of the deck), and the British have to withdraw to their winter quarters. I should say, I've also lost as the French a lot more often than I've won. It’s this slim margin that makes it so enticing to have another run at the town as the British, the feeling that maybe this time we’ll get it over the line.

Whichever side you choose to champion, you are battling an implacable seemingly prescient foe. There is too much chance built into the bot, with a random selection from an oversize deck, and the shuffling of said deck, for any kind of programming to be at play, but with four possible counter-orders with each turn of a card, I swear there is a higher that 25% average for the counter order revealed to be the worst possible result for the order chosen, more in the order of 35% or more. Regular readers may have noticed that I'm prone to run down statistical rabbit-holes like this, so I’ll keep a record of my next half-dozen games and report back whether this feeling actually bears out.

Much of the appeal of this game, and the others in the series, is the time-frame; it seems we're all time-poor these days. But it's not simply that. Like Tawara 1943 (Worthington, 2021) the system packs so much game experience into such a short time-frame Oscar Wilde described a cigarette as the perfect kind of pleasure; “It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.” He could have been talking about Siege of Quebec.

 

State of Play: Commands and Colors: Napoleonics - Peninsula hijinks

 

 

I had a lecture to attend Monday evening – I’m on the committee of a community group that arranges various public talks on subjects related to the history of science and technology – so I told T so set up a short game, and suggested a Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) scenario, since it’s the game we’re most familiar with, and I know there are some shorter, five-banner games in the mix.

The talk was interesting; it was on the nascent passenger air-transport industry in the 1920s and ‘30s. It was a small crowd, and I managed to extricate myself and get to T’s place not much later than when we usually meet for a game. When I got there, T was setting up Rolica (French first position), 17 August, 1808, the first scenario in the base set. Five banners, so a nice quick game. We thought.

T likes to play the French. Personally, I like to mix it up. When we first started playing – thinking about it, it was the year that C&C: Napoleonics first came out – we worked through the scenario book two weeks per scenario, taking turns playing each side before moving on to the next one, and we did that for every box (except for the largest scenarios in the Epic Napoleonics set). I think he feels like he wins more games as the French. I’ve never come out and asked him this, but I’m usually happy just to get a game in.

Rolica (French first position): Opening situation.

Another thing I just realised; whosever house we’re at, we play on our respective dinner tables. Probably out of habit, we always sit on the same sides of the tables, at each table. The guest sits on the sideboard side in both instances. It probably started as something to do with convenience of access of something. Nothing sinister or superstitious - we’ve both won and lost plenty in our respective spots – just a random observation I decided to bore everyone with.

Returning to the Peninsula was like catching up with an old friend. We’ve periodically returned to the base set, and just have played all the scenarios at least six or seven times each, mush more than any of the other sets. Rolica – first position is an interesting situation because it finds a component of the French army on the back foot, conducting a fighting retreat from a well-disciplined army of superior numbers that seemingly came out of nowhere.

Anglo-Portuguese Alliance force, left column.

In the set-up, the French force is inferior in numbers, but in possession of a good defensive position. T would have been best served waiting on the hills for me to come and try to push him off them, using his useless cards to rearrange his forces to cover the two hills on the French baseline that offer temporary Victory Banners for possession for the Anglo-Portuguese force, and hoping for better cards. But we’ve played for many years, and I know my opponent.

To be fair, he did try. No shot was fired for the first three full rounds. T and I made adjustments to your respective force dispositions. I started to bring my left and right columns forward, but still well out of musket-range. I also made the decision to move my Line up into the trees. I have a Bayonet Charge card that would allow me to reach the hills from that position, but I wanted to have enough troops within range of the charge to make it worthwhile.

French forces probe the Anglo-Portuguese line.

By the fourth round, T had lost patience. I confess I’d kind of counted on this. Early on in our playing together, I’d quipped “A fast game is a good game,” when T was wrestling with himself over the use of a couple of cards. It was something members of the Wednesday (then solely RPG) group would say to each other when somebody was taking too long with their turn in combat or waiting ‘til they were up to look up the effects of a particular spell. T took it to heart and it has become a philosophy and a mantra in our Monday games. 

For his fourth turn T played a Cavalry Charge, bringing up his two Light horse units to fairly good effect. No units wiped out, but some damage. Their presence slowed my progress on the two banner-hills. I managed to push his cavalry on my right flank with my Portuguese Light Cavalry, taking one of his blocks in the process. By this time his patience was running thin. With his next action (Assault Center) he brought some of his line down off the hill to take reduced shots at my line troops in the trees. One hit out of three actions. His cannon, still on the hill, also took one block of my Foot Artillery.

Roll result for a First Strike against French Line. Rarely do the dice-gods smile so.

After some minor backwards and forwards action, I was two banners up, and managed to get my Portuguese Light Cavalry onto the hill on his Left flank for a third at the beginning of my next turn. Realising my movement on his Right flank, T played a Coordinated Advance, allowing him to whittle my Cavalry on the hill to a single block, and to get his Light Cavalry and an intact Line unit down to engage with the troops I was painstakingly bringing around to try to take the second hill, and to take pot-shots with his Light at the Portuguese cavalry which has taken the prize hill on his left. 

I had a First Strike card that I’d been nursing since the third-round draw, and now it paid off in spades as I routed his Line regiment. This gave me my fourth banner (three permanent), and took the wind from the sails of T's attack. His Heavy Cavalry, reduced to three blocks, withdrew from combat, having done some damage (and thereby retaining the squadron’s honour), but ultimately not earning themselves a flag. For the last action, my Portuguese Line mounted the hill at centre-right, and attacked a remnant Line unit that had already been thoroughly punished (down to one block) and took the last banner.

End state. Look at that row of Victory Banners...

The final score was 5-0, though T had dealt some punishment of his own, just not enough to annihilate a unit. It would have been a much tougher win if I hadn’t managed to get the Light Cavalry on my right to the prize hill, and to keep it in the face of withering fire from the French Light. All in all, a very satisfying win.

Brutal fighting on the outskirts of Rolica.

The plan for next week is to get back to 6x6 gaming, though I'm not sure what we'll be going on with at this stage. There is a lot going on, family-wise, that impacts the both of us, so we'll have to see what we can manage. Stay tuned.

State of Play: Commands and Colors: Ancients, Expansion 1: Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (6/6), and Here I Stand(!)

 

 

So, we played at T’s place again for the last Commands and Colors: Ancients – Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (GMT Games, 2006) for the year. Probably. When I got there, T had set up the Jaxartes River scenario. This is a tough one; I’ve heard a lot of people complain over the years about hour unbalanced the scenarios for Commands and Colors of any stripe are. Jaxartes River (328BC) is one of those set-ups that lend a specific example to that complaint. I’m inclined to think, if you insist on balance out of the gate in every game game, stick to chess. Or draughts.

Hopelessly outnumbered.

The situation was as follows: Alexander, having defeated the remaining Persian states, began building a settlement on the Jaxartes to anchor the defence of his northern border. The Scythian tribal leader Satraces thought the works looked ripe for a quick smash ‘n’ grab – apparently, he hadn’t got the memo. Historically, Alexander lured the Scythians in with some puny-looking light troops on foot, then when Satraces took the bait, he sent his own Macedonian cavalry to cut off the Scythians’ routes of escape and set upon them. Satraces fell in battle, and with his death his army lost heart and fled. While most of the Scythians survived, their spirit was broken, and they never again bothered Alexander’s army.

Disposition at start (from the Macedonian side)

T began the game bringing his cavalry up on my right; the river is fordable but stops movement, so he had to fight from the river, rolling no more than two dice, reducing the hitting power of his Medium horse. The result was no block loss, but with two units pushed into retreat (lucky the withdrawal for the Scythians is so deep or this would have been a much shorter game).

This game saw war machines come out for the very first time in all the C&C: Ancients games we’ve played, and they were devastating. I think I took hits every time they were deployed, fortunately, that was only once each. The way the cards played out, T never had the opportunity to get his Heavy Infantry into play, and I’d already decided at the beginning to sit on the shore of the Jaxartes and attack anyone that tried to ford it while they’re still in the water. If I’d had some Medium horse, I may have tried to cross to the other side of the river and take the fight to the enemy, but that would have amounted to handing the Macedonians two or three banners with the Light Cavalry I had to hand.

Near defeat.

T was hamstrung with his choice of cards; with a good hand and welcome draws, he would likely have been able to collect on his five banners in three to four rounds. That’s not hyperbole; early on, when we’d been playing C&C: Napoleonics (base set) for less than a year, we were replaying Rolica second French position), I won the game 6-1 in five rounds, taking the last three banners in the final turn. As it transpired, a combination of poor hands and indecisive actions drew our altercation on the Jaxartes River out to nine rounds. In round seven, after he’d dispatched the third unit on my left, I managed to get my three centre units activated to swarm the Companion Cavalry and actually destroy the unit (though Alexander escaped the entrapment and formed up with his Auxilia across the river), at a cost of a single block of my Light Bow, for my second and last banner of the game.

It was a good win for T; he played a solid game with what he had to work with. I chose to look at every round I survived after the first three as a Pyrrhic victory for the doomed Scythians.  

End state: overwhelming Macedonian win.

In the scenario, Alexander’s Macedonians hold several advantages. The Macedonians have a numerical advantage on the board, with thirteen units to the Scythians’ nine. This is compounded by the weight of the Macedonian forces. A completely arbitrary but somewhat useful tabulation of the force available to Alexander might look like this; if we say that, purely based on punch, Light units are uniformly weighted at a value of 1, Medium troops/cavalry at 1½, and heavy units of all stripes are weighted at 2, the Scythian forces add up[ to roughly 9½, while the Macedonians clock in at 17, and that doesn’t take into account the bonus granted the Companion Cavalry (they can ignore one sword hit in every engagement). The Scythians only had two things in their favour; starting the match so far forward, so as to mitigate any single retreat results on my Light horse, and the river, which somewhat levelled the initial blows dealt.

The intention is to create a situation where the historical outcome is the likely one. That doesn’t mean it’s unwinnable, but it is going to be an uphill slog, and will require both cunning and luck (in both cards drawn and dice-rolls). I went into the game under no illusions about the likely outcome, but I did think that I should be able to make two or three palpable hits on the Macedonians before suffering my own fifth hit; and I managed two banners, including Alexander’s Companion Cavalry, though Alexander himself slipped through my fingers.

-----

After a couple of weeks’ absence, I returned to our Wednesday game. This week we began our first foray into Here I Stand (GMT Games, 2006), Ed Beach’s classic multi-player concerning the political and cultural upheaval of the Reformation period in Europe. Were all new to the game, but B assigned us all some homework; Beach’s C3I article on learning the basics of the game, and Filippo Cipriani’s video introduction. There are six factions and five of us, so B – our host and owner of HIS – is handling both the English and the Protestants. K, the junior member of the household played the Papal States; D, the Hapsburgs; H the Ottoman Empire; and yours truly as the French.

We played out the first round. The English put down a rebellion of uppity Scots, the Ottomans built up their forces and glowered across the border at the Austro-Hungarians, the Protestants made some gains in the northern reaches of the Holy Roman Empire, and France acquired Florence and eyed Menz. The year ended with me getting unsubtle hints of excommunication from the Pope, but I think he will have bigger problems to deal with in the next round.

As mentioned, HIS is new to all of us, so we’re all feeling our way at this point. We fully intend to see the game through, but based on Wednesday’s performance, I can’t see us getting through more than a turn a week. Regardless, I’ll bring weekly reports to this channel with a little more depth than this quick sketch.

 

State of Play: Commands and Colors: Ancients - Expansion 1: Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (5/6)

 

 

Things have been a little busy lately, with family crises and other impositions on our time, but T and I managed to carve out a couple of hours to play the Gaugamela scenario from Commands and Colors: Ancients, Expansion 1: Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (GMT Games, 2006). As it turned out, we didn’t need two hours. Set up always takes a little time, but once we got into the game, things moved apace, and with another ahistorical result.

I took the role of Alexander for a change, and T played the Persians under Darius. Blood was spilt in the second round; the first three banners were scored by T on my left flank, sweeping up some of my Light troops. The scenario has a seven-banner victory threshold, and by the fourth round, T had swept around to my right flank with his cavalry, and now held four banners to my one.

Mid-game I made some gains, including miraculously dispatching his War Elephants in the centre with a volley from my light bow (in truth, I was hoping for retreats, rather than hits, for the chance to maybe thin out the adjacent units, but I was happy to take the point).

The parlous state at the end of the fourth round.

The elephants vanquished.

Blows continued to be exchanged, until a Leadership Centre order allowed me to bring Alexander, with his Companion Cavalry and another medium cavalry unit, up through the centre to meet Darius and his infantry. The blow was swift and bloody, and Darius’s supporting units were cleared from the field of battle, earning me the two banners I needed to close the gap between our scores. Darius – true to history – fled, joining up with an Auxilia unit which, by happy chance, happened to be in the path of the Persian leader’s escape.  

Darius escapes.

The banners held were now even, at six a piece. My next action, already selected (Three Units Center), was at hand. Then, treachery! T played an Order Light Troops, allowing his Auxilia to destroy the Cavalry unit accompanying Alexander’s Companion Cavalry. It was the second time in the game that a Light unit had completely destroyed a superior unit in a single blow, and proved the winning play for Darius, who presumably made his departure in the midst of the battle’s confusion.

End state: Persian win, 7 banners to 6.

T and I are fairly evenly matched at Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010), mostly by dint of playing nearly all the published scenarios at least twice. One or the other of us may have a winning streak for three or four weeks, but overall I’ll only best him around fifty percent of the time. Neither of us have as much experience with C&C Ancients, and until this year, all of that experience has been with various Roman situations, but after a disproportionately high win-rate on my side, the scales are balancing for Ancients as well. A victory is a victory, but a tight game, well fought on both sides, is the most satisfying game, win or lose. At just eight rounds – sixteen orders between us – Gaugamela was nasty, brutish, and short, but very satisfying.