Spectators at the Picnic War and Other New Stuff

I am a sucker for making nice markers for my games, and for games with extras, as it were. Following the production of my objective marker for the Swedish GNW army, I decided to make a morale tracker for Maurice too.

The Morale Tracker
The scene: Outside a small country inn in Pommedeterrania, Nord Sachsen.

"Don't you two have anything better to do with your day?" Frau Brauerinne asked the two gentlemen that were were only customers at his unearthly hour of the morning.
"But Frau Brauerinne," protested Herr Rotearmee, "How could we have anything better to do on a fine Tuesday morning than sit outside your inn with our wargame, while the armies of Geataland and Shortengrad gather on the plain before us?"
"Indeed," added Herr Blaupants, "Your ale is the finest in the region, the weather is good and we have a grand entertainment before us. What else could be better?"
"What is more," appended his colleague, "We have here on our table the finest in kriegsspiel. We can model the battle that is about to be fought over the honour of Miss van Frufru based on the dispositions of the two armies as we observe them."
"Yes," continued Herr Blaupants, "It will be a grand entertainment, and when the citizens of Bad Reinigung come out to observe the battle, we can use our model to make a small fortune by betting on the outcome."
The two old gentlemen cackled heartily and toasted each other with steins of ale.
"Oh ..." Frau Brauerinne failed to finish her sentence, speechless. She waved her fist with frustration and stomped off.

Building found in a box at Caliver Books.
Figures and benches by Baccus 6mm.
Tree from Irregular Miniatures.
Dice frames from Minibits.

Other new stuff
Every so often I paint a Swedish army for the Seven Years War in 15mm. I have sold every other one that I have painted, but have started another one for our Pieces of Eight game that will one day see the light of day. These two units will be government musketeers in Pieces of Eight. I rather hope that I shall be able to expand this army to a full Maurice army too.

Upplands Regiment

Västerbottens Regiment

Figures are Freikorps 15 from LKM.

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.

Polemos: Great Northern War Review

We played Polemos:GNW for the first time yesterday. I have had the rules for a long time but have never yet managed to play them. One of the things that has put me off is difficulty in reading and understanding the rules. Normally I am very good at learning rules from the rules and do not need someone to demonstrate them first. However, I have really struggled with Polemos:GNW. There seems to be a lot of assumed knowledge on the part of the rules' author, which makes understanding the rules difficult. For this reason I have not previously got around to playing them. So, we steeled ourselves, girded our loins and set to.

The Rules

The rules themselves are fairly standard in many respects, with attack and defence values for each unit and opposed die rolls to see if you succeed. You then consult a table to see what result your attacks have had. The effects of combat see your units gaining levels of "shaken", possibly recoiling back from their enemy, or even being driven back. Casualties per se are not removed. Instead, when a unit reaches three or more levels of "shaken" it will rout. Under some circumstances it can be rallied, but otherwise it is removed from the game. This is how units are destroyed.

The really new idea that they present is in tempo bidding. Tempo is initiative. Each side gets a fixed number of tempo points each turn and add the score of a six-sided die roll to that. Then both players decide how many points they can afford to bid to win the initiative and still do what they need to do in that turn. The bids are compared and the higher bidder wins the initiative. Both players deduct their bids from their total tempo points and that is how many points you have left to do things. These points are used a bit like PIPs in the DBx series of games, but the person that lost the initiative has to spend more points to act with their units, which means that they could wind up unable to do as much as the player with the initiative can. One problem with the tempo bidding was allocating points to commands. This can take a little time as you try to work out what you need to do where.

The Game

So, how did they play? We set up a small battle on a 4'x3' table with two Baccus starter armies. I took the Swedes and Steve took the Saxons. The figures were set up 2' apart for an encounter battle as recommended in the rules.

The first thing we found was that we had plenty of tempo points each as we manoeuvred towards each other. During this phase of the game I made the mistake of positioning my field gun in the wrong place, so I was unable to bombard the Saxons while they bombarded my right wing (to little effect). Once we had closed to contact, however, tempo points and winning the initiative became more critical and we quickly found that we did not have enough points to do everything that we wanted to do. This was especially the case on my left wing, where some squadrons of my cavalry burst through the enemy lines and pursued the routing Saxon cavalry almost to the edge of the board before regaining control and halting. They spent the rest of the game waiting there because they were too far from their commander for me to be able to afford to spend points on them. Elsewhere on the battlefield the infantry had finally closed and were firing at each other, while the cavalry on the right wing were manoeuvring around the wood on the hill, trying to get at each other in an inconclusive cavalry melee that saw both of us with troops routing.

Our game took four hours, before Steve had to leave, and the game had not reached a conclusion, although it seemed to be favouring me, because Steve's right wing had all routed from the table. This left my left wing able to regroup and then they could have fallen on the enemy flank. However, this would have taken time that my centre and right wing might not have had. At this point we decided to call it a draw.

Conclusions

The game was fun to play despite our difficulties with actually reading the rules. More than any other rule set I have played these rules required game play to show how they worked. I would say that they are not for beginners purely because of the way they are written.

The tempo bidding was good fun and a great way of determining who would be able to act first and how much they would be able to do. Both Steve and I like this type of mechanism where you are trying to second-guess your opponent all the time.

Combat was simple enough with the opposed rolls, although the long list of modifiers might put some off. There were a number of situations that cropped up in our game, which did not appear to be covered in the rules but we were able to come up with solutions easily enough and I have now asked about them on the Polemos Yahoo Group, so I hope to have answers soon.

One thing that the rules really need is a coherent quick reference sheet. The QRS that comes with the rules seems to have bits put in wherever they fit rather than putting all the firing tables together, the close combat tables together, etc. This did cause us a few delays in game play as we tried to work out where the relevant tables were.

Overall, we enjoyed the game a lot and will be trying the rules again. We hope to significantly reduce the amount of time that the game took to play as we become more familiar with the game and its mechanisms. Producing a better QRS could help with this. We shall see how it works out.

If you have the time and patience to work through the rules then the game play is ultimately rewarding and I would recommend these rules to you. If you need everything served up in bite-sized chunks then these rules are not for you, unless you can find someone to teach you.