First Game

First Game
Our current move to the mid-18C began at a show a couple of years ago when I saw a group of Pendraken 7YW Austrians used as a decoration by someone selling earthworks. I was so taken with them that I persuaded my friend Paul that we should go into the period using these figures. He was willing, and went along with my suggestion that we should each do both Prussians and Austrians, to avoid ending up with only one army with no opponent. He’s not really into the history, so the research was mine. We decided to go for Chotusitz for our OOBs, being a nicely balanced battle. Now, you have to look at our backgrounds to get the final result – I came to this project from years of playing Fire & Fury, so was aiming at using Age of Honor and fighting big battles. He came from a background of Warhammer and, latterly, General de Brigade. So it was important to me that the troop basing should be useable for AoE, and for him that we could play at the battalion level – at the time, dithering between Age of Reason and Koenig Krieg. About a year later, with various detours into WW2 and AWI, I read about the upcoming Kriegskunst, and brought it to his attention, knowing that the GdeB parentage would spur him on. So, a couple of weeks ago, we had a long Sunday game day arranged, and decided to field all of our armies so far and test out Kriegskunst. Our troops are based (accidentally – remember, my motivation is AoH) on the 15mm base sizes but with more troops, so an infantry stand holds 6 figures in 2 ranks (rather than 2 x 2) and our cavalry in 3s rather than 2s. We had decided to use the standard 15mm Kriegskunst distances and ranges, and just count each infantry base as having 4 strength points and each cavalry base as 2 strength points. So, we played 15mm but with 10mm figures. Our armies were as follows. Numbers are actual figures, and need (except for artillery) to be reduced by one third for the 15mm equivalent: Prussian 2 Regiments Dragoons, each 30 figures, each divided into two wings – 2 brigades 3 Battalions Grenadiers, 2 of 24, 1 of 30 figures – 1 brigade 16 Battalions Line infantry, each 30 figures – 4 brigades 2 Medium guns Austrian 1 Regiment Dragoons, 30 figures, divided into two wings – 1 brigade 1 Regiment Hussars, 30 figures, divided into two wings – 1 brigade 4 Battalions Grenadiers, 3 of 24, 1 of 30 figures – 1 brigade 15 Battalions Line infantry, 6 of 36 figures, 9 of 30 figures – 4 brigades 3 Medium guns Each side also had a CinC and a spare staff officer We played on a 5’ x 8’ table, with a sizeable village in the left hand Prussian area and a good scattering of woods, hills and a couple of farms. The game started with 4 players and increased to 6 when the latecomers arrived. I had made a pile of rather nice orders chits (laminated by Paul) and a good stack of situation markers. We had decided to be quite strict about written orders – something unusual for us. Paul and I had copies of the rules, and had both read them – at least once! I had corrected the QRS and produced enough for all players. This actually looks like a recipe for disaster. Unplayed rules, which most of the players had not even read, big armies, different conventions. Actually, it went rather well, if slowly. We were playing for about 5 hours. The Austrian centre took the village (and then the grenadiers apparently fell asleep), the Prussian right made slow progress against the Austrian cavalry, and the Austrian right was doing a good job of clearing the Prussian supports from around the village – helped, it must be said, by the Prussian left wing reserve brigade not being able to change its orders until the last but one move. We got in about 5 hours of actual play. Setting up took about 1 ½ hours, because players needed to be briefed and it was the first time the armies had come together, so organising took a while. As far as I was concerned, it worked like I imagine a 7YW battle would work. Everyone had a good time. The awful (and unforgiveable) proofreading did not affect the game much – mostly because the process of checking and rewriting the QRS sorted out the problems beforehand. The difference between numbers of figures on a base and strength points caused no problems at all. It would probably have worked better (faster?) had we used wing commanders. Previous experience with GdeB helped.

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