Building our experience with Lasalle 2The other day Chris, Paul and I played a game of Lasalle, using the scenario for Unter Laichling in April 1809, "Bristling with Guns", on the scenarios page here. Chris took the Austrians of Rosenberg’s IV Corps while Paul led the French (St Hilaire) and Bavarians (Deroi). Most of Paul’s troops began on table while fully half of Chris’s command were in Reserve. There were two objectives, one each in the villages of Schierling and Unter Laichling. The Austrians deployed with the Bellegarde Regiment on the left, two battalions of Grenzers in the centre and the Vincent Chevaulegers on the right. They did not garrison the village of Unter Laichling at this stage. St Hilaire deployed in the French centre and Deroi’s Bavarians began on the right. Paul left the wooded area on the French left unoccupied. The French and Bavarian artillery deployed in the hinge between the two commands. The Franco-Bavarians advanced briskly on the Austrian positions, although the left of the French advance was slowed somewhat by the threat from the Austrian cavalry. An artillery duel began, in which the Franco-Bavarians gained an edge, twice disrupting an Austrian battery. Where the hell are my reinforcements?Both sides were awaiting reinforcements and the French 57th Line and Austrian Czartoryski regiments appeared relatively early. The Czartoryski arrived just in time to occupy Unter Laichling before Paul’s battalions attacked. Had the Austrian cavalry not been slowing the French advance down, the village might have been taken without a fight. The cavalry also had the effect of channeling the French advance into the centre, which prevented Paul from attacking the village from three sides. Although the Austrian right was holding its own, in their centre and left Franco-Bavarian weight of numbers was starting to tell. Chris’s final reinforcements kept refusing to appear and in their absence, his Grenz regiments in particular started to crumble in the unequal struggle. In the final turn, Austria was reduced to her morale break point. The French had still not taken Unter Laichling, although Paul had lots of fresh units and with more time he could have taken the village, However the last turn represented nightfall and moreover the foot-dragging Austrian reinforcements had finally arrived on the table. We agreed therefore that the French would have to withdraw to their side of the valley and renew their attacks in the morning. Nevertheless, for bringing the Austrians to their break point and holding one of the two objective villages, the French secured a minor victory. Honours about evenWith hindsight, I reckon both players performed better on their right. Paul had the advantage with his Bavarians from the outset, maintaining pressure on the Bellegarde regiment facing them (Neutral I may be but I was secretly pleased for the Bavarian figures: this was their first ever game!). Chris, meanwhile, used his solitary cavalry unit well to slow down and constrict the French advance. He slipped a battalion into the village just in time and his right was still secure by the end of the game. This was Paul’s first and Chris’s second game of Lasalle 2. They were soon on top of the rules and the game flowed well. They both seemed to have fun and are ready to play again so next time I’ll add some advanced rules. I’m keen to try the advanced skirmisher rules in particular. Unter Laichling as history and gameSo how did the scenario play against the history? Pretty well I think, although of course there are conflicting accounts of exactly what happened on the day. One memoir claims the French took the village of Unter Laichling but doesn’t explain why they didn’t end the day in possession. It seems likely they either never got in or did so, only to withdraw under Austrian pressure. Whatever, as in the real encounter, the Austrians in our game ended the day still in possession of the village and the hilltop position, where they would be when the battle of Eckmühl began the next day.
And how did the scenario play as a game? Again, I think pretty well. The points values equate neatly to an attack-defence scenario in the rulebook and while both sides seemed to feel under pressure, neither complained of being unfairly disadvantaged. I do regret that Chris just couldn’t roll the dice to get his final reinforcements onto the table, despite the odds of succeeding improving every turn. This did limit his options and I was grateful for his philosophical acceptance of his bad luck. That said, Austrian accounts of the battle report that the Archduke Charles’ sole contribution to the day’s fighting was to redeploy certain units without informing their Corps commander, and so handicapping the performance of his own army. Perhaps Chris’s misfortune with his reinforcement dice was a fitting echo of Charles’ meddling on the day! What next? While the fight for Unter Laichling was going on in the South, the rest of Davout’s Command was advancing through the hilly woodland to the north, trying to find and envelop the Austrian right flank. I am working on a scenario for this fight and will be interested to see how Lasalle plays in dense terrain.
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We and Games Workshop got historyBetween 1997 and about 2015, Games Workshop was a central part of our family life. We played every system they released between Gorkamorka and 40K 7th edition, with the exception of Inquisitor. Nick, our older son, was (and still is) a gamer above all while his younger brother, Will, enjoyed the modelling and painting, even selling his skills to raise cash while at university. I both played, but not as well as Nick, and painted, though not a patch on Will. The boys have grown up and moved out and our gaming opportunities have become rarer. Wargames still have a pull: I started playing historical games again and Nick has been happy to join in, while Will still enjoys picking up obscure modelling materials at wargame shows. At most, we now play a couple of GW games a year. I stopped buying White Dwarf soon after Age of Sigmar was released, not in protest exactly, but the new universe just didn’t interest me. 40K 8th edition also passed us by, though I did enjoy the one brief game that Ian Barber ran to introduce the new system. In short, for no particular reason, my 40K knowledge ended with 7th. My Firstborn: beaten by my first bornUntil autumn 2020 that is, when Nick bought me the Indomitus boxed set as a surprise lockdown gift. We had both been curious about 9th edition and he couldn’t resist the bargain of large new forces for two of our favourite 40K armies. A small test game between Orks and Cadians went well (for the Orks), Christmas brought the Space Marine and Necron codices and we were back in the thick of it. Nick came over on Father’s Day and we played our first biggish game with the new rules. Nick took Necrons and I led the Ultramarines. Nick had some of the new Necron models but my army was a continuation of my 7th edition force. Who knew when I originally collected them that I would be fielding ‘Firstborn’ Space Marines? Honestly, I turn my back for a moment and the lore changes everything! We fought over a ruined Imperial settlement, which allowed a lot of cover to both sides. This favoured the close combat specialists who could close the range without exposing themselves to too much firepower. I was happy with my deployment, including landing a drop pod and some terminators behind Nick’s line, so for a short time Ultramar seemed ascendant. Then Nick’s warriors shot up my Assault Marines, his scarabs ate up my dropped squad and his destroyers destroyed my razorback squad. That basically put the lid on my efforts and by game’s end he held all but one objective. It was an exciting game that moved fast despite us both having to refer often to our faction rules. My mistakes included focussing overmuch on Nick’s Monolith, which I did nearly destroy but only after pounding it with my Vindicator for most of the game. Those shots could have been more successful thinning out Nick’s Necron warrior horde. I also failed to appreciate that under 9th edition Ultramarines can fall back from close combat and still fire. Had I done that instead of staying engaged, I might not have suffered the humiliation of a whole squad succumbing to a tide of tin cockroaches. My ‘gun line’ on the other side of the table might also have lasted longer by keeping more distance between itself and the Skorpeth destroyers. Just wait until next time! As ever, it was a pleasure to be across the table from Nick, adding another chapter to the story of our games since the late 90s. That’s a lot of happy memories, for which I will always be grateful to Games Workshop. Good to be back?So how does it feel to jump straight from 7th edition into 9th? I can’t deny it’s confusing. I suppose vehicles have changed the most and they strike me as more resilient than before. Right up to 7th edition, a couple of lucky dice rolls could wipe out a very expensive piece of kit. Things can still go wrong for vehicles but they generally hang around for longer, no doubt making them a less risky investment. The stripped back rules themselves are appealing and I especially like the way morale is now treated. I love the extra involvement provided by command points, which give a nod to Chain of Command, one of the best World War 2 rules on the market.
Anything I don’t like? Nope. I even like the Primaris Marines, who seem more like the superhuman giants encountered in 40K literature. The ‘Firstborn’ plot twist is a clever bit of reverse lore engineering. I would, however, observe that 9th edition seems no less complex than older editions. The basic rules are now wonderfully simple but the complexity has transferred over to army and faction rules, the range and detail of which is bewildering. I had expected today’s 40K to be more accessible for new, casual or ageing players like me, but I don’t think it is. If I am to play my next game half-way effectively, I’m going to have to revise, remember and apply all the subtleties required to get the most out of an Ultramarine force. I really look forward to our next game but will timetable in some serious pre-fight preparation first. I have been working on some new scenarios for Honour Games' big battle rules, Blucher, based on the battles around Leipzig in October 1813. I began by revisiting one I had already uploaded for Mockern, the fight to the north of the city between the Army of Silesia and Marshal Marmont. I wrote this a few years ago and reading it again, I realise it wasn't the most helpful document for somebody looking for a scenario without the need to research the historical battle. For example, I failed to explain which units were infantry and which cavalry. I also left out some key information like the number of MO dice and a clear reinforcement schedule.
So I have now uploaded an amended scenario which will, I hope, be more useful than the previous version. While I was at it, I also tweaked the scenario for Montmirail, 1814, to make it more accessible. I decided it was also time to remove the one and only scenario for Lasalle 1, since anybody who still wants to play Lasalle 1 can adapt a scenario from Lasalle 2 without bursting a blood vessel. Both scenarios can be found here. Last month Chris and I played a game of Lasalle 2, the tactical Napoleonic game by Sam Mustafa of Honour Games. Chris was new to the rules and picked them up very quickly. We replayed the Markkleeberg 1813 scenario that I had first tried on Spencer and Dan, described here. After the first game of Markkleeberg I had changed the victory conditions by removing the sudden death victory provision, which allows a player to win by ignoring geographical objectives and simply killing enough enemy units. In our first game Spencer had bunched all his forces into his right wing and tried to overwhelm Dan’s left, while leaving Markkleeberg with its objective marker alone. A valid approach in a stand-alone game (and it nearly succeeded) but it meant the battle played out very differently from the actual events of 1813. With sudden death removed, victory now depends on who holds real estate in two locations: the village on the Polish right and the hill in their centre. I also modified the arrival of some Prussian reinforcements, after rereading the sources and producing a ‘best guess’ sequence of events drawn from the five different accounts that I have of the action. The current version of the scenario is here. I am happy with these tweaks as the game with Chris played out more closely to the actual battle. My Prussians tried and failed to kick Chris’s Polish garrison out of Markkleeberg while the Russians attacked the central hill. To cut a long story short, after a bitter struggle the Russians briefly reached the objective on the hill but couldn’t consolidate their hold and the Poles retook it in the final turn. Victory therefore went to Chris, with my troops back near their starting positions in the valley. The game moved quickly and we both enjoyed the rules. The fluid turn sequence keeps both sides fully involved and presents the players with tricky choices about how to use their scarce momentum points. There was only one incident when our experience of ‘conventional’ rules made us question whether what happened was right. Namely, a regiment of cavalry charged and overthrew an enemy battery, without that battery being able to fire canister as the cavalry closed. This did feel tough on the guns but chewing it over afterwards, I concluded the issue was of our perception rather than a failing in the rules. In most circumstances, Lasalle would allow a battery facing cavalry to its front the chance to fire before that cavalry charged. It just happened in our game that the battery had already fired at a different target earlier in the same turn, so it is plausible that the cavalry could have closed while the battery was reloading. Also, even without firing, there was a slim chance that the battery could have won the combat against the charging cavalry, which, had this happened, might have been rationalised as the gunners successfully loading and firing canister in the nick of time. Try these rules! It’s interesting to see how fashions in wargame rules evolve. When I started playing Napoleonics in 1974 or thereabouts, the fashion was for simultaneous turns, highly differentiated national characteristics, detailed casualty calculations, quirky game aids (anybody remember the bounce stick??) and almost no command friction. In recent years there has been a shift to IGO-UGO turn sequences, more abstraction of the mechanics of combat, and greater focus on the options and limitations placed on command control. All welcome developments as far as I can see. The combination of MO points and totally fluid turn sequence in Lasalle 2 takes us into yet new territory. This approach may sound odd to some, but I would urge every Napoleonic gamer to give it a try. I suspect that with Lasalle 2, Sam Mustafa has set a new standard for tactical Napoleonic games that other rules writers will be emulating for some time to come.
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