Yesterday night some courageous friends and I tested a mechanized version of the Variable Length Bound game model.

Playtesters were Alessandro, Marco, Maurizio, Pino. many thanks.

The game scenario was a stand of a French Infantry Corps, supported by a cavalry Corps, covering the retreat of the main army succeeding a field defeat of the previous day.

Orders of battle are here.

win.pdf

ney.pdf

The Enemy was a russian corps containing an Avangarde Division and all arms, very strong in artillery.

Terrain scale was fixed to 1/3000 due to our 15mm base sizes availability.

Game started at 6 am with the french ready in defence on hilltops, very close to a river and bridge, their way of retreat.

Russians had to give movement orders to approach the enemy, only a small amount of brigades were on table at the beginning..

Here some pictures of the game. Our table was not rich because we planned to make just a test of the rules.

You can see French on the right, infantry corps on the right and cavalry on the far left of the battle line. Some russian avantgardes are positioned just beyond gun range.

The order of battle was refined following suggestions from Maurizio, for example the french cavalry corps was placed in support of infantry, and batteries belonging to divisions with a single brigade were put under command of the brigade the division command was eliminated.
Game in fact started at 2:40 for generals, they needed to give orders to each individual brigade. This seemed a lengthy procedures of players, and later I will propose a solution that I will implement for next game.

The screen showed THE VLB CLOCK, a list of units with formation and movements in cm, calculated for the bound duration, and a list of events happening at the end of a bound.

Bounds have been happening with a time resolution of one minute. This is way too short, and for the next game I have a solution which I will illustrate at the end of this page.

Here you can see players trying to reason and react to events. Some thoughts:

Players were not used to look at the screen for events happening, at it was too far away. For this reason very often they thought to have already done formation changes and order receipt while they had not yet reordered on received a messenger.

Eventually I told them that no, the brigade had not yet changed formation or the artillery was not positioned in battery and they could not fire.

I guess a solution is to have the screen much closer at hand, and it has to clearly show also units changing formation.

Much before the end of the game players entered in the spirit of the game. It was realized that russian approach had been done in a way that units were arriving peace meal in front of the french lines, under gun range. The attack was becoming totally incoherent.

Simulation time was of about two hours, from the russian entering table with the main columns, to the Jager brigade reaching the hills and starting to engage the french line.

At this point we decided that it was worthwhile to end the (short monday) evening here and make a new game next monday with same units, but with both russian and french armies ready for battle just outside gun range.

In this way we will be able to test the engagement mechanics.

Afterthoughts

No tables, no dice (someone might be deluded), no headache with paper notes, and a lot of fog of war. At the end of the game players asked about the state of their units, I had not told them about their status during the game, I did not bother to know myself, and suddenly found that some brigade had lost hundreds of men due to gun fire and maybe 20% of their CV, without even having reached engagement range! Very fun for everybody.
We came up with a number of improvements for next game:

• a window telling in broad terms the status of units in terms of men losses in necessary, but to keep the fog of war this will be very generic like:
  • negligible losses (< 1D6 % casualties, random check)
  • some losses ( 5-10% casualties )
  • heavy losses (10-30% casualties )
  • large holes in the ranks (30-50 %)
  • unit annihilated (>50%)
  • similar logs for CV fire and fatigue losses, with inspiring messages.
• Orders: there should be a special command to send a message to a commander, which will automatically propagate to all brigades and batteries down in the command chain. Players felt a bit of frustration when they were asked to provide orders for each individual unit on the table. This can be easily accomplished by automatically generating new orders for the command and all units down in the command chain.
  • Technicality: (just for me as a reminder) “msgall” is similar to the “msg” command, but loops over all units down the chain and generates events for each of them. Distances have to be given per unit though, while looping this is unavoidable.
  • Technicality: (just for me as a reminder) “msg” no longer has distance as an argument, this has to be shown AFTER showing the command chain on screen.
• Time resolution: even if I was sticking to 10 minutes delays for most of happenings, the introduction of a 3 minutes command delay for every command given by a commander caused events to happen even at distances of one minute. This bounds was felt by players to be way too short. A granularity of 10 minutes will be added as a parameters, in order to cluster close events in time.

These are the modifications I will implement for next monday, stay tuned and thank you for following all this!