OK Enough Fun, Time To Get Back To Work

Yesterday Jeff, (http://armchaircommander.blogspot.com/) hosted a group of Nova Scotia wargamers for a 15mm  Nappy's Battle of Friedland game.  Hopefully he will be posting a Blog post including some of the great pics he posted on FB.

(Thanks for these pics Gary )

The Russian Right Wing commander trying to balance questionable command decisions with even more questionable die rolling. Luckily as many a Russian commander knows: "Quantity has a Quality of its own" and I errr..I mean..."he" eventually  crossed the streams and stormed the village on the hill with great loss despite the 5:1 odds.....(against my opponent ).

I will admit to a tinge of nostalgia at the sight of a table, loaded with 15mm troops yet not crowded, BUT, given that I needed to don reading glasses and peer closely to tell one unit from another, I'm not tempted to rebuild my 'lost' 15mm armies. Actually, I don't need to, apart from the horde of 15mm figures Jeff has painted, he has also acquired used figures from several different people including a bunch of my old 1799 Austrians and Russians, some of the latter which I have had the pleasure to command in battle again from time to time.

The rules are not really to my taste but by the end of this game, I was finally beginning to get a grip on them and enjoyed the battle despite several faux pas due largely to not yet having a sufficient understanding of the rules to properly assess risk. Of course, now that I'm getting a handle on the rules, the four NB Franco-Russian battles that Jeff had planned to fight are over! None the less, knowledge is never wasted and it was a good day in good company.

I even finally managed to play alongside the Fiery Monkey Boy at last!(see http://themonkeythatwalks.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-new-hope.html  for more pics and comments)  

FWIW The Russian Dragoons in Bicornes  are some of my old Battlehonours 1799 figures. In 15mm, the uniform anachronisms get a little lost in the crowd once you step back.

Meantime, at home, on a blustery snowy day, I've managed to clear some of the more drastic ideas from my head out and started to test the one page version of my 4" grid, 1 stand=a unit  version of the old Square Brigadier.

The game is a simple meeting engagement on random terrain with "brigades" arriving on random roads. Each side has a General, 14 single stand "companies" grouped into 4 brigades + 2 independent batteries on each side.   This is near to 1/2 the number of  units I have or intend to paint up.

Turn 4 is over and all troops are now present.

The game will resume Monday if the fates are gentle with a report to follow.