State of Play: Commands and Colors: Napoleonics – La Grande Battles: Vimeiro

  

Feeling emboldened by last week’s foray into the world of la Grande Battle (sic) last week with the even-more-epic-then-EPIC La Grande Battles: Austerlitz, T and I treated ourselves to the slightly more manageable Vimeiro scenario, and on a school night, no less. The two mentioned La Grande Battle scenarios feature in the Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) EPIC Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2016), the sixth expansion for the game, but the next expansion for C&C Napoleonics, appropriately called The Grande Battles (GMT Games - currently available for preorder, and slated for release this year)  I still find the conjunction of French and English jarring, but I can understand the impulse to avoid confusion with Marshal Enterprises/Clash of Arms’ La Bataille series of appropriately Napoleonic games.

Grande Vimeiro set-up.

Vimeiro is a smaller action than Austerlitz, and the Victory Banner target is somewhat lower – a mere 15 banners. It’s still a difficult fight for both sides, with complicated terrain negotiate and few opportunities to really get an upper hand.

T stuck to his usual tactic of trying to take out my Light units as a priority. The British Light regiments are nightmarish at range, getting +1 die on their already augmented five block weight of fire, for a six-dice (standing fire total). On one occasion early on in our C&C playing, I took out two French Line units in successive turns with a single Light unit as they came into range; that’s a tough lesson to ignore. While only three blocks in strength, the Rifle Light can also play havoc against the slow-moving French line with their three-hex range, giving them two bites of the cherry before a unit can engage them in melee.

Probing advance by the French on the British Right...

The play of a fortuitous Grand Manoeuvre card gave T the opportunity to get four units – two Line, two Grenadiers – adjacent to my right-flank Light and Rifle Light units, denying them their range advantage. Carnage ensued in the following turn; the Grand Manoeuvre allows no combat to follow the movement of troops, but puts them in the catbird seat for the next round, which in this case happened to be an Assault Left Flank. Over that and the two successive rounds, I lost a total of six units on my Right.

Pressing the advantage: French troops take the heights overlooking Vimeiro..

My right practically undefended, I expected T to march into Vimeiro itself and claim an easy four Victory Banners, two for each occupied hex and the beginning of the turn, but I suppose he’d used up the Left flank orders the Fates had allotted to him. We’ll come back to the British Right for the finale.

Meanwhile, I’d been edging my forces forward on my left. I managed to take Praganza at my extreme left, and to get troops up to Ventosa (gaining two Temporary Victory Banners, and pulling ahead, also temporarily), and to occupy the hill between the two towns. After some initial success against individual French line units probing my defences, an Assault Right Flank order for the French brought a wave of Line and Heavy Cavalry to the fore. T tried to distract me in the centre with a less-than-consequential Cavalry Charge in the centre, pushing up nearly to my baseline, but I was sure that if the battle wasn’t won on my Left, it would certainly be lost there.

The early push on the Allied Left.

We traded blows, units and banners around Ventosa, each taking copious damage but neither side managing to place the decisive blow. Ironically, it was what should have been a decisive action by the French that cost them the game, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. With the French at 14 Banners taken to the Allies’ 13, needing only one more to take the battle, T played a Scout centre card, and chose to have Thomiere – who had joined the fray the hill several rounds earlier - with his remaining line troops (two blocks) press his advantage of numbers against Fane’s remaining Light Cavalry (now down to a single block); the two units were still doggedly facing off on the hills above the anonymous town on the brook between Vimeiro and Toledo. Garnering no hits with either die on their initial strike, the French took one infantry hit from Fane’s Light (as the survivors now thought of themselves), bringing the scores to fourteen banners each. It was here that Atropos saw fit to cut Thomiere’s thread at this point; on his leader check, T rolled two crossed sabres, mortally wounding the French commander, and handing me a fifteenth banner and victory.

The Fates intervene.

It was a hard-fought battle on both sides, and but for an unlikely roll, it could have come out differently. The close-run things are always the most satisfying.

 

 

State of Play: Commands and Colors: Napoleonics – Le Grande Battles: Austerlitz

 

After nearly two weeks’ break form your actual wargaming, I was keen when T said he had a free afternoon and we should have a game. He had to cancel Monday, which was going to be Tuesday, but family intervened, but we managed to get together on Thursday after lunch. That would give us a clear block of nearly four hours – or that was the plan, at least. We usually have maybe two hours and change of a weekday evening, starting at about 9:00-ish (although we have been known to play through to midnight on occasion when we’re in the teeth of a really compelling game).

Four hours required something special, and I knew what I had to do.

Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) – La Grande Battle: Austerlitz, 2 December, 1805 (from the EPIC Napoleonics Expansion (GMT Games, 2016)). For the uninitiated, a regular C&C Napoleonics game is played out on a 9 by 13 hex grid. The EPIC box came with a bunch of scenarios for the new twin mounted boards (increasing the battlefield to 20 hexes wide and 11 deep) and two scenarios for an extra set of card-printed maps, Austerlitz and Vimeiro (Peninsula War) which are fought over a truly impressive 26 by 11 hex grid.

The day didn’t quite come off how we planned. T was held up a little longer than expected at work, but I had a bunch of errands to run in the morning, and I was still placing Russian units when he arrived. We also had a new constraint on the duration of our game, now needing to wrap it up at a little after three. But having got this far, we weren’t going to be deterred. This was our first wargame for the year; we would just play until we had to stop. A few minutes and a poured coffee later, we were into the action.

The Austerlitz Grande Battle scenario is very similar to the EPIC scenario included in the same box but zoomed-in a little; it covers the same region, but the extra six hexes width allow for more terrain detail (like the two feeding streams of the Goldbach), and additional units, offering a little more nuance to the order of battle. The downside (for this session, at least) was the increase of a Victory Banner target from 19 in the EPIC scenario to a heady 22 Banners.

The Alliance start at a disadvantage; the French are further forward in some areas three units on the centre-line, with another eleven units one hex back, right up there near a string of Temporary Victory Banner locations, compared to three Russian units a row from centre (though, to be fair, the Allies have a good chance of seizing the Pratzen Heights, but whether they can hold it, if the French manage some centre-section activations, would remain to be seen. A further disadvantage to the Allies is the card distribution; they get a hand of just four cards to the French player’s six. None of this is to excuse my own poor performance. It’s a tough gig, but winnable if you play the whole board and are blessed with a little luck on the day.

Now, for the opening of hostilities, let's have a Cavalry Charge...

The required luck was not with me, however, on that particular day. I could not get any traction on the Allied Right. Of my four opening cards, three were Left activation orders, one Centre. T spent the first three rounds moving troops forward on his Right and killing any Russians they came up against. The mid-game saw some action on the slopes on the Pratzen Heights, but I couldn’t get enough troops forward to make an effective showing, let alone hold the hills.

By the end of our final round, I had Russian Grenadiers pouring fire into the Castle (to no good effect), and I had managed to push the French out of Telnitz. I’d made some ground on my Left flank and in the Centre, but at a heavy cost.

...and still no Right flank activations for the Allies.

In the time we had available we managed to get through ten activations each. At the end of our truncated session, the French held no less than nine Victory Banners, to the Allies two. If we’d been able to manage an extra round or two, I’m confident I could have gained another two banners for holding the Stare Vinohrady (having already occupied two hexes), but T should have already had another two points for holding Bosenitz, the Castle, and Telnitz, but couldn’t get troops down to the river swiftly enough to take advantage of the clearance.

Fierce fighting over the vineyards.

La Grande Battle Austerlitz is a scenario we are both keen to revisit. T and I have been playing C&C Napleonics for so long that we’re both quite comfortable playing the larger EPIC scenarios given an early enough start. But this was something different entirely. There is just so much going, all at once. There are 103 units on the board at start, and fifteen leaders across the two sides. Overwhelmed isn’t quite the right word for what I felt, but on the smaller boards, it’s easy to forget that the scenario is often depicting a portion of a greater battle, like a flank or a rear-guard position action. With the Grande Battles boards you get a greater sense of the enormity of the Eighteenth- and early-Nineteenth-Century battles, the sheer weight of armies, each a dozen or more divisions strong, colliding on a meandering front, under a rain of canon-shot and shrouded in an acrid haze of powder smoke, the smell competing with the those of burnt hair and freshly spilt blood. Not overwhelmed, but somewhat humbled.

State of affairs end of tenth round, when we had co call the game.