Tactical Napoleonics: second game of Lasalle 2

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.