Narva

Francesco, Marco and me are going to play Narva with the Twilight of The Sun King rules!

We are going to use Tabletop simulator, with a Kriegspiel flavour, using coloured blocks and an old map of the battle.

I fancied to find the satellite view of the battlefield today, you may find the picture below.

A description of the game will follow soon.

Battle deployment

We have decided to play the historical battle. The russians are deployed along the full length of the circumvallation, they are very weak without additional lines of support. Many units are either manning the siege lines or away (the four units close to Narva and the right wing cavalry on the other side of the river may not join and do not play any role in the game).

The Swedes are arranged in depth, so that they will hit the enemy with full supports.

The russian cavalry is numerous but the Swedish right wing may rotate and meet them by defending the woods.

The swedish King has a lot of initiative and will be able to move quickly in contact. Let us see what the dice will be.

Note

Please use the new supplement, the old Battle rosters were not correct. We double checked on nafziger and other sources and they agree with the second edition data.

Move 1

our gaming plans is one hour per day, when possible, so today we managed to make one move, having the need to remind ourselves of this very smart ruleset by Nick.

My good friend are betting on me, in command of the Swedish, on being so bad as a tactician that I will drive my army to complete defeat.

First move my right wing moved to counter a possible russian dash of a cavalry attack, by positioning my units in the wood.

The rest of the army has marched straight forward to attack the enemy fortifications but my left wing has been slowish.

The russians have decide instead to retire some troops defending the fortifications which will never be attacked by the Swedes and start forming a second line, the fortified lager close to the bridge.

The russian cavalry has moved to attack as well.

Move 2

Second move sees the Swedish Left and Center wings attack the fortifications, while the reserve cavalry moves right to meet the russians.

Move 4

Some bad luck for the Swedes. The Guard cavalry did not manage to break the enemy and the attack in the center is completely stalled.

The good news for the Swedes is the breakout on the left, this is where they historically managed to break through.

Bad tactics:

• never attack enemy artillery in fortifications.
• Much better to attack fortifications with maximum depth. The swedish infantry in the center were too confident of their strength and eager to break the enemy by spreading with only one cavalry line in support.
• Generals who allow to throw a second morale roll. This rule saved the russians many times from loosing a melee. Generals at value 0 essentially never die and you may keep them leading troops forever. Something to be changed here? Maybe Generals should just die without being replaced.

Game end

Game ended on the 6th move, with the Swedish not being able to pierce the fortifications in the center and with their cavalry routed by bad luck plus artillery firing on their flank at effective range (not a just a nuance!).

As I said in the beginning, I am definitely not a good tactician.

The very good note is on the simulation side. The feeling is that we are really commanding armies of the 1700 and that we need to follow their way of waging war.

At our next game we will use the suggestion from Nick about generals attaching to units for morale purposes. Generals lost on morale rolls will either be lost forever or reappear one turn later or more with a die roll (1,2,3 on D6), at (0) as suggested in the original rules.

We had great fun!!!

Other info

Here some information on the battlefield

Apparently in the center there is a long hill which runs up to the fortiufications, where an earthen fort is built. maybe this is the reason for the Swedish to position the artillery on its top and bombard. Also the two strips on the left side seem to be marshy spots.

At least the hill should be included in the game, it may be a significant terrain element for the battle, non allowing the russian guns to fire across it for example.

Regarding fortifications, it seems to us that while on the left side there is some space to deploy behind the very first line, from the hill up to the extreme right it is possible to deploy only a single line of troops, since the two lines of fortifications form a very small corridor. The russian camp itself must have been on the left, close to the bridge, where the artillery park is shown.