Over the weekend Nick and I had the first proper game with my new Steady Lads Steady rules for Napoleonic Wargaming. Vaguely reminiscent of Shako, but designed to be played with full unit bases and on a 40mm hex grid with 6mm figures they are as close to my ideal rules as I've got. They'd worked well in solo games, so it was time to try them out in a proper games and with decent sized force (about 30-40 battalions/regiments each).
Having last year picked up a copy of the excellent Battle Studies in the Peninsula by Partridge & Oliver last year, and with a Peninsula campaign perpetually in the off'ing we decided on the Battle of Tudela. The big tweak we made though (since Nick likes Brits and to make things more equal) was to replace Saint March's militia brigade with a Brigade of seasoned British troops). You can download the scenario.
The playing area was just under 3ft x 6ft, and yes it took a few hours to draw all those hexes!
In keeping with the real life battle only a couple of divisions started on table, the rest coming in at random times as the battle progressed - which really helped to make it fluid and unpredicatable. Only Digeon's Dragoons failed to actually arrive.
So here's a quick summary of the proceedings.
All in all we both felt the rules worked really well. We probably spent about 10 hours on the 20 turns, but that also includes cooking a full Sunday roast and a Goulash on Saturday. We could probably get slicker on the rules (I'm looking at doing some quick reference cards to supplement the QRS), and also a bit of parallel working when unit activations don't conflict.
***Imported from old blog***
