Thursday, October 24, 2019

Musket Action: Napoleonic

Jim's Austrians v. John's French
I forgot to take a photo at the start, this is the end of turn 2.
The Austrians started with an Landwehr division deployed where they still are beside Mitzi. with 2 grenadier battalions & a cavalry brigade on their left.
The French started with a veteran infantry division behind the farm with artillery & a cavalry brigade on their right.  The Austrians have taken most of the plateau, but losses are even.
Both sides also had an infantry division & a cavalry division coming on from the corner at the far end of the table on turn 2.
The reserves have been deploying out of road column at the far end. 
On the near flank the Austrian cavalry has been destroyed, but their grenadiers are coming up.  In the centre, yegers are masking the French guns, but not much else is happening.
On the near flank, the grenadiers are clearing the plateau.   In the centre the French are redeploying their guns to face the grenadiers & deploying their reserves on the far side of the river.  French Legere in the wood are delaying the Austrian infantry reserves.  At the far edge French hussars are bottling the Austrian cavalry up while their dragoons move up on the infantry.
The Landwehr have moved forward to the fence line & faced their right to the river.  The French dragoons are threatening the Austrian infantry on the far slope.  Austrian cuirassiers have swept the French hussars aside at the table edge.
The French dragoons smashed through the Austrian front line on the far hill, but were destroyed in turn by musket fire from the 2nd line & cuirassiers in their rear.  
At this stage the French conceded as it was clear they were going to fail army morale very soon.

This was my first chance to actually play Musket Action v.2019 after umpiring 3 play test games.  I really enjoyed it.  As rules should, it seemed to reward the player's good moves & penalise their mistakes without too much interference by the dice.  It shares a lot with Hail Napoleon, but also has some major differences.  The big one is using the Bolt Action Order dice system to decide the order of activation of units rather than IGoUGo.  The main problem with the BA system for Napoleonics is slow play due to actioning one unit at a time when there are a lot of them.  We have addressed that by having only half as many Order dice as units on each side & allowing group activation of adjacent units of the same brigade. This also had the unintended consequence of providing an automatic Army Break Test.  We are finding that when one side gets close to running out of Order dice they are stuffed & give up - no calculation needed. 


1 comment:

Truscott Trotter said...

Good fun and the order dice acting as an army moral level was a good innovation.