State of Play: Napoleon 1806 (3/6)

 

Tuesday night saw T and I meet once more on the plains eastern Germany to re-fight Napoleon’s Prussian Campaign of 1806. This was our first foray into the full seven-turn campaign scenario of Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2017). This week we stuck to the Rules for the Conscript to ensure we were solid on the basics before adding more complexity.

As the French, T marched out convincingly. In the first turn. In the full game, the French units are more scattered across western Prussia. T began joining his stronger columns with weaker ones to add some punch in combat. I kept some units paired and left some more agile. When activating a column, you declare the unit or units you intend to move in that activation, then you draw a card and check the top right-hand corner to see if you have enough points to commit the planned move.

It's raining again (turn 5).

For each extra unit in a column, you lose a movement point (kind of a coordination cost), so to move a two-unit column three places, you’ll need a four or five-point card. Invariably, a third of the time you’ll pull one-point cards and not be able to move at all. This is complicated by the advent of Rain; this is an event that, if drawn by either side in the card-drafting stage at the beginning of the turn, gets placed in a space on the board as a reminder that all moves that turn cost an extra point, and each unit moving will take an extra exhaustion point at the start of their move (whether or not they actually move).

Between us, we drew Rain in the second, fourth and fifth turns. This slowed things down significantly, but not significantly enough to stop T from getting his units into place to take Leipzig in turn 5 (giving him three points plus another one on the differential between the damage he dealt me and that which my units had given his forces, and to deliver a one-two punch at Erfurt (defended by Blücher and Kalchreuth) in the sixth, to both take the city (another five points) and wipe out one of the two defending units (Blücher – taken out of the game by accrued exhaustion – for another five points) for a sudden death victory. It was a crushing win. I didn’t think he’d be able to get his second column up quickly enough as they were four positions away, but when he activated them, T drew a five-point card and the way was clear. Erfurt didn’t stand a chance.

The city and the vanquished.

I admit to being to a degree complicit in my own defeat. Like all point-to-point movement maps, the Napoleon 1806 board has its own idiosyncrasies. Rivers meander through the countryside, separating swarths of the countryside, except at bridge crossings; some towns don’t easily link up with others, and natural choke-points develop. A well-placed unit might delay the progress of an enemy column for a vital turn or two if manoeuvred into the right spot ahead of the other’s advance. In the Introductory scenario, the disposition of the French forces recommends a push on the twin target cities of Halle and Leipzig. If the French player can get their forces to the cities before the Prussians can reinforce, they can easily carry the day. In the longer Campaign game, with the more staggered starting positions for both the French and Prussians, I – as the defender – should have anticipated a different strategic approach from my opposite number. I should have committed more forces to holding actions at strategic junctions; instead I slipped into the habits of our previous games and sent the strongest of my forces to defend the citadels rather than trying to run down the clock.

For the Prussians, the campaign of 1806 is a knife fight, and you need to be willing to take some damage in the short term to be better placed to prevail in the long term. the decks are weighted in favour of the French. This reflects their combat experience and (arguably) superior leadership at this stage. Unless you can bring our or five cards to bear against an antagonist who can only field two, you’re probably going to come off the worse for it. And those kinds of numbers aren’t a guarantee; in one fight I brought four cards to bear (an extra card for defending in a forest) while T could only manage one (penalised one for a moving attack), and we did a hit each, though I did manage to put one more exhaustion on his chaps. It’s a tough gig. Not impossible by any means, but situational awareness is crucial.

The end-state of the campaign; Erfurt and Leipzig in French hands,
and Bamburg unchallenged.

Despite the comprehensive defeat by the bulldozing French, I'm happy to report that both of us made better use of the cards in our hands both made inroads into the subtleties of the game. Both of us made more effective use of the cards in our hands. In the card-draw phase of each turn, along with the mandatory play of any red-banner event cards, each player may play one blue-banner card for its effect; I was able to add a reinforcement block to a unit twice in the game, as well at take two exhaustion-points off one of my harder-worked columns in another turn. We also made good use of the green-banner cards we had to hand. These are available for use situationally. These cards include (for the Prussians – I still haven’t closely examined the French deck) start-of-turn actions like Reinforcement (adding a block to an understrength unit), and Forage (knock two exhaustion points off before starting the turn), and a particularly useful card that allows a unit proximate to a bridge to destroy said bridge (the red blocks that appear in some of the photos). The taking out of select bridges may have been a game-changer for me if I’d been concentrating more closely on the French patterns of movement.

But that’s the beauty of playing a game several times over. There’s always the next game, and another chance to do-over what you did wrong last time.

 

The parlous disposition of the Prussian forces just prior to the final blow.