A couple of months ago, Russ Lockwood, he of MAGWEB fame, visited the Washington, DC, area, was treated to a couple of Simon games, and invited us to his house to participate in a days gaming effort. Bob Hurst and I took him up on the invitation, and so, on a recent Saturday, we left Maryland around 0830, and arrived at the Lockwood estate in southern New Jersey at noon, a 3 1/2 hour trip. Russ had arranged for an all-day campaigning effort. He had set up four different tables, each complete with towns and roads and hills and rivers, etc., and furnished enough 15mm troops to keep 14 participants busy. I’m familiar with the effort involved in setting up a single table for a game, and so I was duly impressed with the time and effort invested by Russ to prepare for the day’s affair. I chose to be an Austrian commander, Bob was on the French side. There were 7 Austrian commanders in all, and when I arrived, I was told I headed a division, and had to write orders for it. And so I took a piece of paper and instructed my division to head west, and keep out of harm’s way. The Austrian Big Cheese looked at my order sheet and said this wouldn’t do at all, that I had to use certain key expressions given on the rules page. And so my orders were slightly changed… my troops would now PROBE forward, and SCREEN and MANEUVER and so on. But in my heart, I still knew that my boys would move west and keep out of harm’s way. The campaign took place in northern Italy… Russ drew up a detailed map of the area, and each of the four tables represented a section of the region. I asked him how the tables fit together, i.e., where did one table join the other… but Russ shook his head… can’t do it, can’t tell you, he said… this was big time strategy, and if the participants knew how the tables joined, it would take some of the fog of war away. Fog of war? If Russ wouldn’t tell me, there’s another way to skin the cat. I approached another Austrian general, who had already placed his troops on another table, and asked him to show me where he was on the grand map. He did so, and I was able to piece together the big picture. On Turn #1, Russ shouted “Move troops!”. Everyone pushed their units across the tables, and I took my division, strung out along one of the northern east-west roads, and moved them to the west 10 inches. Another shout for Turn #2… “Move troops!”, and my boys moved 10 inches. On Turn #5, my division reached the end of the table and supposedly, disappeared into no-man’s land. But they instantly reappeared on the next table, deep in the heart of some really rotten terrain. The table, measuring 4 feet by 8 feet, was chock full of crags and hills and gorges and cliffs and impassable terrain features. A series of valleys ran between the high ground features, and it was only in these very narrow valleys, along the roads, that troops could move. I was deep in the middle of the mountains of Northern Italy. Digression When I say “I moved my division”… what exactly was it that I moved? My command consisted of 6 infantry brigades, one cavalry brigade and one battery. We were using Russ’ rules SNAPPY NAPPY (SN), and he defines an infantry brigade as consisting of 2 stands of 15mm troops. The 2-stands are a ‘bare bones’ representation, enabling the player to see if his unit is in line or column or square. Similarly, a cavalry brigade is composed of 2 stands, and an artillery battery consists of a single stand. Due to the bare bones set up of SN, the rules are essentially generic in nature… replace the Napoleonic figures with Marlboroughian and you can claim you’ve got a Marlboroughian game. Do the same with Seven Years War figures and you’ve got a SYW game. And the same could be said for the ECW. SN’s 2-stand representation beats the single-stand unit set up of VOLLEY & BAYONET (V&B), or LE PETIT EMPEREUR, wherein the authors shout “This is Napoleonics!”, and hope you’ll believe them. I take it all with a grain of salt. How can a miniatures game represent an entire Napoleonic division by a single stand as in V&B? My division consisted of a total of 15 stands… six 2-stand infantry brigades, one 2-stand cavalry brigade, and one artillery stand. Since, due to the small unit size, it wouldn’t make sense to remove an entire stand when a brigade took damage, each of my brigades had its own data sheet, and each had five boxes, or ‘levels’ of efficiency. Cross out 5 boxes and the brigade disappeared. End of digression… Back to the Campaign On my table, in the middle of the mountains, there were 2 Austrian division, mine and one other. The other Austrian commander was busy… he faced a French division, and the two were methodically killing each other. My opponent was an 11 year old kid named Keith, with whom it proved a pleasure to game. Keith’s French division and my division bonked heads along one of the narrow roads. He moved his units up the road in column, saw my troops approaching, with my cavalry brigade in the van, and ordered his lead infantry unit to form square. Due to the narrowness of the road, there was room for only 2-stands abreast… neither of us, because of the lack of room, could ever form line with 2 or more brigades. But now, seeing the French on the road before me, I immediately ordered my lead cavalry unit to test the melee rules... “Charge!” I cried. And my Pandour Hussars (at least, I think they were Pandour Hussars) surged forward to contact the French brigade square. SN’s sequence for the half-bound follows that of the ACW rules FIRE & FURY. (a) The active side moves (b) The non-active side fires (c) The active side fires (d) Melee is resolved The sides then reverse roles... the former non-active side becomes active. What was of interest to me was that one of the French commanders on our table, sometime around Turn #14, suddenly decided that the sequence was ‘really’ one for simultaneous fire, and he wanted to fire when the opposition fired… to settle the dispute, we had to call on Unca Russ. With 14 gamers present, Unca Russ was continually in demand. Back to my cavalry charge. On Phase (a), as described above, into contact surged my Pandour Hussars. Phase (b) permitted the defending French brigade to fire, and they missed. Normally, on Phase (c), my Pandours would have discharged their pistols, but since they were charging, they couldn’t fire. In melee, Phase (d), we each added our modifiers. I examined my Pandour data sheet, and found out they were militia… each stand was worth 2 points, for a total of 4 points. But since they were charging a square, I deducted a -12 from my total, which sent me to a grand total of minus 8. The French, being of veteran grade, received 4 points per stand, for a total of +8 points. Now we each tossed a 10-sided die and added it to our points. The French commander, Keith, tossed a 6, giving him 14 points. I tossed a 3, which, when combined with my -8, gave me -5. We were interested in the difference, the delta, between the scores, which was 19, in favor of the French. A reference to a look-up table stated that my militia dropped two status levels and had to take 2 morale tests. All units are initially given one of 7 status levels… firm, wary, nervous, flustered, disrupted, panic and routed. A level is crossed out when a unit takes a hit. When all 7 levels go, so does the unit. Dropping 2 status levels said that the Pandours, who started as firm, had become nervous. But now we come to one of SN’s clever ploys. We hadn’t passed through the damage phase. I had to “roll off” each of the two impacts on the Pandours. Each time I failed, the Pandours would drop yet another level. Thus it was possible that, with a unit receiving a single impact from fire or melee, that via the “roll off” system, it could continually fail all its morale rolls, each time dropping one level. A single impact, therefore, could literally take a unit out of the battle. My Pandours, being militia, had to toss an 8, or 9, or 10 on a 10-sided die to pass… they had a 30% chance to pass a morale test. Oh! Oh! Without fail, they missed all their dice throws, and went rapidly sliding down the status scale… back to Pandourville they went, leaving me without cavalry support. Undaunted with my first cut at the melee rules, I sent in a second brigade, one of infantry. Russ had labeled all of his 15mm stands, and I think that this second unit was the Ignatz Landwehr, also of militia quality. This time, it was the Ignatzians that were driven back, not completely destroyed, but pretty much broken. I should note that on our table, measuring 5 feet by 8 feet, there were two battles going on. I was fighting Keith, and further to the west, the other Austrian division had its own fight. Due to the restrictive mountainous terrain, each area of battle measured about 3-inches by 3-inches. The combats took place along the roads, and each side could only bring up a single unit at a time. In other words, on the entire 5-by-8 table, about 99 percent of it was unusable. Russ could just as well have set up a small 2-feet-by-2-feet DBA board, and we’d have been just as happy. Of the four tables he set out, only two were in use, ours and one other… no battles were fought on the other two. Bob Hurst’s cavalry division started out on one of the tables, ran off the edge and then shifted to another, and then ran off the edge again, and he finally found himself on our table. I was determined to defeat the French, and so, on the road, I threw in brigade after brigade, trying to cause the enemy units… any enemy unit… to fall back. No use… my Landwehr brigades couldn’t hack it. Along the road, one of Bob’s cavalry brigades charged one of my infantry units… he had caught one of my unfortunate Landwehr brigades in line. Not to worry. SN permits an infantry unit, which has not yet formed square, when it’s caught by cavalry, to attempt an emergency reaction and form square. This is a sort of “local reaction” provided for the brigade commander. I asked Russ if he provided a similar sort of emergency response for a unit caught on the flank… why restrict the emergency reaction solely to an infantry-versus-cavalry affair… why not provide a “local reaction” opportunity for other situations? Russ’ reply was negative… you’re getting too tactical, he said. My French opponent, Keith, stood there and fought a simple defensive battle. He had no desire to charge to contact… in fact, he had no need to charge to contact, since I was doing all the charging. Suddenly, Keith received a message… the French units were “out of supply”… someone, or something, had severed their road connections to headquarters (located on another table). But I never found out what “out of supply:” did to the French fighting qualities… someone, or something, battered their way through to headquarters, and all was right for the French again. Since all my attention was focused on a table-top area some 3-inches by 3-inches, this permitted me to wander around, noting what was going on on the other tables. As I mentioned, only two tables were actually in use, mine and one other. The main battle was being held on a 7-foot by 12-foot table… most of the participants were clustered around this. B<>Messages Occasionally, a player would hand Russ a message… this was to be delivered to a fellow general, either a superior or inferior officer. Russ noted the time on the message and slipped them in his pocket, and when he thought the appropriate time had come, delivered them to the recipient. Late in the battle, the Austrian Big Cheese hadn’t completely forgotten about me… he sent me a message… “Hold your position!”, he said. At the time I received this, 4 of my 6 infantry brigades had been annihilated, as had been my cavalry. No problem. The last unit of mine to go was my artillery… this was a veteran unit. It was initially placed at the very end of my division, which had been strung out along the road. Due to the narrow roads, it took around 15 turns to work the artillery to the front. I think it fired twice during the battle. The battle started around 1300, and at 1700 (real time, my time), I gave up the ghost… my entire division had been wiped out. I had done all I could for the Austrian Empire. Bob Hurst said that during the battle, he tossed combat dice only once… he, too, was a victim of the restrictive terrain features, and just couldn’t get his units into action. When Bob and I left, we had no idea of the eventual outcome of the battle. Back to PW Review July 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com