Saturday 2 June 2018

BLB3 Great Northern War Playtest

For some time now we have been experimenting to find the best rules fit for the Great Northern War Project. The initial plan had been Black Powder and whilst these give us a good, quick. fun game they can end up feeling like a Carlist or AWI game where we use the same rule set. We have tried GA PA and also the Grimsby Clubs home grown rules. All have worked well in their own way but not really gripped us.

Some time back we decided that when the new version of Beneath the Lilly Banners came out we would give this a go as Great Northern War sits squarely in the middle of the date range. They are also planning to do a Great Northern War supplement so if the core rules feel right then this may be a good option.


Having bought a set and failed (as usual) to read them through properly I asked Steve to have a look, he is usually much better at picking rules up and had looked at the previous incarnations, so sure enough we played a VERY small game to walk through the mechanisms.

This would be an attack defence game, Mark taking the Saxons whilst I had the Swedes, with the armies as follows.

Swedes
5 Battalions of foot 1 Guard and 4 Veteran all withe Elite status
4 units of Horse Veteran and Elite Blade
1 field gun

Saxons
6 Battalions of foot all Drilled
4 units of Horse Drilled bullet
2 Field Guns

As usual Steve and Julie's hospitality was spot on with tea and biscuits in abundance, no one else got much of a look in with the chocolate ones!

The able was 6 x 4 as movement is fairly slow and we wanted to get to grips. Our limited knowledge of the rules meant turning to the rules a lot so we needed to get moving.
For this game being quite small we used all my troops, Marks Danes and Norwegians in reserve for next time perhaps.
Each side roles a D10 and the score decides the number of units you can move, All toops, three quarters, half or a quarter of your force. This can be modified slightly up or down based on the quality of your commander. Ours were all pretty good to keep the game moving, despite this I only moved my whole force once in the game.

I got three quarters of mine move one and opted to move the foot brigade on my left and the two horse brigades in the centre. Mark got all his but opted to just move his horse to a wider frontage to mirror mine. It quickly became apparent that manoeuvring is a slow process, half rate for wheeling. A fair reflection of the period, but with movement for foot being just 4 inches it was going to take a while to get to grips.



Next move I got half my force to move and opted to leap forward and charge with my first horse brigade.
I find that combat is handled quite well, you need to reach a fixed number to get a result, usually a 5 or 6, however the better your troops the larger the dice you are rolling on and therefore the easier to reach your number (in theory) so my Swedes were always more likely to hit their needed number Veterans rolling on a D10 and drilled rolling on a D8.

I beat Marks Russians in the first round but he passed his morale so we then threw in another unit each. The second round was a draw but Marks casualties meant his Russian unit dissolved leaving me facing his Saxons, we struggled to find what happened to the Saxons so threw a moral for them, they retired and I followed up catching them and they in turn dissolved.

All well and good but I now had a block of badly mauled cavalry about an inch from Marks Saxon foot who have not fired yet so will have a lot of bonuses when they do. Not ideal.


I opted to advance behind his lines to reform, what I hadn't realised was that there is an orders system and movement is simultaneous so Mark would write his order and I would write mine and he wouldn't know what I was about to do. Instead I declared what I was to do and Mark was able to respond by refusing the flank of his line and volleying my horse in the rear at point blank range. The effect was pretty much as you would expect and most of the cavalry brigade was gone.

Whilst this was really frustrating it did show the effect of using the rules properly and I could have come out of this with a much better result.
By this time we had been playing nearly two hours and the foot were nowhere near each other and had not fired a shot, the brigade on my right had literally moved once in the whole game. So we put the rest of the battle on hold so we could walk through the mechanisms for volleys and melee's. We shifted the Brigade of three foot forward to short range, moving them about 20 inches in a go (being up hill this was the equivalent of 6 or 7 turns movement)  and walked through the effect of the volleys, closing fire, canister and charges.

The effects of this were as we had hoped and worked really well. My right hand unit were stopped by the guns canister and eventually reduced to one base of three remaining. The central unit was mauled by closing fire and only inflicted one casualty as they went in due to the effect of the cover,  The Swedes went in but due to the high number of casualties received Mark held me for the first round of melee. On the end with no cover I fared much better, I was able to inflict three casualties before charging home and winning the melee, destroying Marks unit. All feeling very much as we had hoped.
At this point we called a halt as we had played nearly 3 hours and wanted our beds.

So initial thoughts, we need to read the rules some more for the next game. The firing and melee mechanisms work really well. The orders system works well too. The impact of troop quality is really good and allowing the Swedes to be veteran with a plus one on morale for Elite makes them very strong indeed. The musketry, guns and cover afforded the Saxons can make up for this so its about planning balanced scenarios.

The one thing that really didn't work was movement. At 4 inches per turn and only 2 inches up hill we struggled to get anywhere near contact in a one night game. Whilst we decided not to let this put us off playing more games at this stage it is difficult to see how you can play a one night game with them unless you remove all manoeuvring and start armies closer together. My left hand brigade moved a full move every turn and never came near to getting into musketry range. It remains to be seen if we can alter this by increasing all movement and ranges and whether this unbalances the game.

I like the idea of rolling for how many of your units get to move so you don't automatically have everything going. However with the movement being so short this can exasperate an already very difficult situation and leave whole brigades of troops who never take part in the battle at all.

All that said I think we need a couple more games before drawing any conclusions. For now happy with the majority of what we have found despite the major reservations around movement.

Steve is keen for us try "Field of Battle" so whilst this game is fresh in our minds we will try this other set next week so can compare and contrast. I will let you know how it goes of course.

Watch this space.

23 comments:

  1. Cookies and eye candies...what's not to like?

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  2. Agree with the points from your review. The short move makes for a slow game and the order system makes it worse. Cavalry tend to decide everything as they are the only ones to go anywhere.
    I play these rules with 2 changes.
    The infantry move I extended to 6 inches left everything the same.
    Dropped the order system and use the old Johnny Rev order system where ji
    Brigadiers can only give limited number of types of orders.
    With those changes it works great on a 6x4 table

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    1. Thanks Kevin, I think we will almost certainly make changes if we decide to keep using it. Initial thoughts were to double all moves and ranges. I suspect we will have anumber of playtests before we decide anything but good to know other people had the same experience.

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  3. Great post- Armies look amazing. Agee with your review. I have given them a solo run and made the mistake of trying it on a 6'x6'....without considering the movement! I had to speed it up-
    What size basing do you use for your GNW?
    Thank you!

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    1. Hi John, thank you. My GNW is 50mm frontage and 80mm deep. I went for the depth to give me both room to protcect the bayonets on charging Swedes and room for a "virtual" third rank.

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    2. Thank you! Wow- nice and deep- no wonder they look that good. I might rebase!

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    3. If you look at some of the older posts that are labelled basing you will see the theory behind the basing andwhy I went for the sizes I did. It was a first for me but I am glad I did it.

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    4. Thank you - yes I did look after your reply- I'm beginning to think of rebasing...but am dreading the time it will take- because I'd want to do the same to my WSS as well.

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    5. Get that John, not to be entered into lightly.

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  4. I did think artillery are overly effective, both in terms of effect and the morale deduction on their target. Although that is tempered by the chance of the misfire (but only slightly). Barry tends to play on a four foot wide table I believe which may explain the shorter move so no issue in increasing it. I like the morale, especially for horse under fire, and thinks it works well. Games do tend to come down to a single mass moving forward where command is restricted so this needs a little thought for big games I feel. However, they are a much improved version and have some great ideas. I’ve already adopted the counter system for orders (the ones from Warfare are nice if expensive).

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    1. Cheers Paul, I need to get some counters for sure. I think the set will work really well if we fix the movement. In BLB2 Swedish foot get 50% movement bonus to represent their tactics so this may help. Tempted to try adding either 50% or 100% to all moves and ranges and see what that does. The game mechanics are very well done I think.

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  5. Interested to read your review of your first game as I've just bought the rules myself. I enjoyed the pics too.

    There are two types of movement for infantry, march which is 8 inches and line which is 4. One of the trickier command decisions in the period is when to deploy from column to firing line.

    Get caught in column by a foe in line of battle and you are in trouble, more so if its cavalry. Deploy in line too soon and your infantry may never arrive. I think this is good and well attested period flavour so I wouldn't try to 'fix' it. instead you might bring up your cavalry to cover the deployment.

    As noted above the game flows better with order counters. Easy enough to make some if you want to.


    I look forward to your Field of Battle game. I think it's a great set of rules.

    Thanks for an interesting blog I've always found it a rewarding read.

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    1. Thanks very much, glad you enjoyed it. We will be trying BLB3 again, possibly first with no movement changes and using the column and if that doesnt cover what we want then an increase in movement and ranges may be in order. As with anything we want to play it properly before making any changes.

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    2. Problem with that is for GNW I can't think of a single battle where being caught on column was a major event or problem. So is it period flavour?

      Gnw is about smaller Swedish armies being more aggressive and usually more dynamic. So it's movement and charge stats, not columns?

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    3. Cheers Jason, Apparantly BLB2 gave Swedes an extra move bonus with this in mind, the period specific set comes out end of the year and may cover this, lets see. In the meantime we will play again and then tinker t get what we want from it.

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  6. I've been through the new period new rules thing in the past. My conclusion is different rules don't make period flavour, just more problems. So yeah I stick with BP for most stuff now, and just use the special rules and a few period mods to get the flavour, which tbf is perceived differently by every gamer.

    So kudos for trying different rules, but after messing around with stuff like ga pa I ended up back with BP very quickly.

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    1. I may end up back with BP, we have had 2 good games with them so far, I just want to try the different options before making a final decision.

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  7. The collection looks lovely.We use field of battle for SYW and it gives a really nice game

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    1. Clive will let you know at the weekend how Field of Battle worked.

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