How The Picnic War started

"Sir, I think you should look at this?"
"What is it, Svensson?"
"Sir, it appears to be Miss van Frufru."
"Egad, what's she doing here? Hand me my telescope."

All figures by Baccus 6mm

"By gad, Svensson, that's not just my Fifi. That's Count Ivan Bigunov too. And they appear to be having a picnic. Oh the poor girl. With what horrors has the threatened her that she sits there so quietly and makes no attempt to ride away? He must have lain in wait for her to be so prepared that he can lay on a picnic so replete with food. See, Svensson, how she takes a bite of his sausage, so unwillingly, and yet she chokes it down, for she is helpless in his clutches. See how Madame Cunegonde, Miss van Frufru's maid, must serve both the vile Count and my Fifi. See how Fifi must drink his vile wine and sample all the viands he has placed in front of her. She does well to give him no cause to strike her or worse. Oh, my Fifi, how brave you are to sit there so stoically. How courageously you fend off his detestable advances ... but wait ... what is this? Oh dear God, no! It cannot be! But I see with my own eyes that it is true. He ... has ... bagpipes! Will he now play the bagpipes with my Fifi? Alas, it must be so."

"Svensson, inform the army that we are no longer on exercise. We must to war for the honour of my poor Fifi, before the despicable Count can force her to learn to play the bagpipes."

My enthusiasm for eighteenth-century wargames, and indeed my painting mojo, which has languished for most of this year, has been rekindled by a game of Polemos the other day. We also plan to play Maurice, which requires me to have an objective marker. I looked online to see what others had done, and checked my ULP for suitable figures. In the end I resolved to do a picnic scene with the poor Miss Fifi van Frufru being serenaded by the foul, warty Count Ivan Bigunov. This is the result. It uses an early eighteenth century horseholder from a dragoons pack and some figures from one of the camp packs.

Polemos:GNW - Second Impressions

Following our first game of Polemos (see post dated 25 January 2009), I asked a couple of questions about the rules on the Polemos Yahoo Group. These were answered very quickly by Nick Dorrell, the rules' author, so full marks for support of the rules and a big thank you to Nick. I have now re-read the rules and they make much more sense with a game under my belt; it is much easier to see how the rules fit together and how the various parts interact. So, with all this behind us, Steve and I set to and played another game. This time we played an attack/defence game. Steve took the Saxons again, defending the small town of Nieder Kurzhosen, which is rumoured to be situated near Cleethorpes. I took the Swedes in a bid to drive the Saxons from the field.

The Scenario
The Saxon garrison of Nieder Kurzhosen has sallied forth from the town in an attempt to drive off the Swedish advance guard. They are afraid that the Swedes will be able to cut communications to the Saxon main army if left unchallenged, so sitting out a siege in the town with its poorly maintained defences is not an option. The Swedes wish to drive the Saxons from the field and sack the town because they are badly in need of the local schnapps, which drink is famous throughout the country.
The Game
In a bid to speed up the game, and taking our cue from the rules, the Saxons set up in their half of the board, while the Swedes were allowed to set up within 1' of their base edge. This meant that the two armies would start about 5 Base Widths (BW) apart. The Base Width is the basic unit of measurement in Polemos: GNW. My Baccus 6mm GNW figures are based on 60mm x 30mm bases so 1BW is 60mm. The table was 4' x 3'. The figures were deployed as shown in the picture below: The progress of the game was simple. We had two hours in which to play the game and managed seven turns. The Saxon infantry occupied earthworks in front of the town and stayed there for most of the game. Only one infantry battalion ventured forth to fire on the Swedish cavalry and that was both late in the game and ineffective. The Swedish infantry were assailed by the Saxon cavalry over on the Swedish left flank in a ding dong battle that saw first one Saxon cavalry unit routing and then a breakthrough by the Saxon second line that routed a Swedish infantry unit. Overall this fighting was inconclusive and honours were about even. On the Swedish right flank all of the Swedish cavalry assailed the Saxon dragoons and drove them from the field in the end. Typically, I had managed to give my worst commander command of my best cavalry, so their progress towards the fight was slower than might have been desirable. The following pictures were each taken at the end of a turn and hopefully should give you a taste of the flow of the battle (More pictures from this game may be found in my Photobucket account).

Conclusions
This game flowed much better than the last one. We achieved roughly the same result in half the time. Issues that were not covered in the rules still cropped up but we were able to work out our own solutions to them until I could ask about them on the Polemos yahoo group. All of my questions so far have been answered very quickly and I would commend Nick on his customer service in that regard. We still think that the game needs a better QRS, but other than that, it plays well and is worth checking out if you enjoy this fascinating period of history when Sweden was a great power.

The game itself felt about right for the period, although I would quite like to see the infantry getting stuck in more. Cavalry seem to dominate because of their extra movement. Command and control is key to winning the game and it is very easy for your commands to become disrupted. It then takes a while to reform them, or, if you have more pressing things to do with your tempo points, your errant troops will just sit there until charged or night falls. This emphasis on command and control really makes the game for us.

So, what does this mean for the game. Well, we enjoyed the game more now that we had clarified a couple of issues. The learning curve is steep but has been worth the climb for us. The down side is that our usual gaming slot is about 2-3 hours so even a small battle of Polemos is unlikely to be completed during one of our usual gaming sessions. We shall certainly play Polemos again because the look and feel of the game work for us but we shall need to allow more time, especially if we try a larger game.

Afterword
Both armies used in this game are Baccus 6mm starter armies. Baccus are linked from the sidebar if you want to investigate further. They also produce and sell the Polemos rules, which were used in this game.

If you are interested in the Great Northern War, I would recommend reading Voltaire's Life of Charles XII (the Everyman edition is good and usually fairly cheap secondhand) and Robert Frost's Northern Wars. The former should give you a good feel for the war from the Swedish perspective, while the latter is a drier but more informative history book. If you opt to buy either of these books, please use the links above because clicking through the Amazon link at the top of the page will help support my thrifty gaming project. Thank you.

Other sites you may find useful are:
Dan Schorr's Northern Wars site. This site keeps running out of bandwidth so get in early in the month. It has many useful pdf files about the period and is probably the most useful site for the period that you will find online.
Nick Dorrell's Great Northern War site has other information and links to other sites too. This is also an excellent site that neatly complements Dan's site.

Late January Update

We are now most of the way through January and I shall certainly not complete my secondary objective this month. On the other hand, I have now completed painting all of the goblins and am most of the way through basing them. Pictures will follow when the bases are finished. I am looking forward to getting these figures onto the table now, although this time last week I was wondering if I would ever finish painting them.

One problem I have had with achieving my objectives this month has been our games of Koenig Krieg. We have played a couple of games this month and enjoyed them very much. The pre-game manoeuvring section of the rules is particularly fun, because you manoeuvre your brigades on 'blinds'. Each 'blind' is a large cardboard counter that represents a brigade. Depending upon the initiative level of your general, you may get a number of dummy blinds too. In short, you set up your 'blinds' so that only you know where your troops are and try to scout out the enemy forces and manoeuvre your own troops into a strong position for the attack. This makes each game different and very interesting.

Anyway, playing Koenig Krieg has led to me being distracted by my Great Northern War armies, so I have been fiddling with them, rebasing some of the figures and generally preparing them for more games, instead of painting Goblins and Normans. I have also realised that the armies at Helsingborg are too large to work comfortably with the Koenig Krieg rules. Therefore we plan to try Polemos:GNW this weekend and see if that suits us better. Failing that, I shall fall back on Volley and Bayonet, which are simple, fast rules and fun to play. They don't really have as much period flavour as I would like, but they do make for a great game that can be finished in a reasonable time. We shall still play Koenig Krieg because the rules are good fun, but our games will be smaller than the one I had envisaged.

Below is my Swedish army for Helsingborg in 1710. As you can see, the bases need finishing. The same is true of my Danish army for the battle, which is all painted but still needs the bases finishing. I propose to work on these armies as a secondary objective in February.
(Click the picture for a larger version)

All this focus on older projects and actually playing games using them, seems to me to embody the essence of thrift. I have had the Great Northern War armies painted for nearly 10 years now and have played maybe four or five games with them at most. This is due to a lack of opponents that were interested in the subject matter. With the emphasis now on using what I have and making the most of existing resources, this is the perfect time to work on completing a project that has lain dormant for ages. With the bases on the figures done, the next step will be completing the terrain, which is also half-finished and in storage at the moment. I hope it has not gone mouldy!