A british victory in a game of blucher

[slimreidy1]

Last weekend we played ot a real cracker of a game using 300 points of British & French using our favoured Napoloinc rule set Blucher. The usual pictures and AAR can be found over on my blog if on the following link if any one fancies checking it out 
Cheers folks,enjoy your weekend
http://slimreidy1.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/victory-for-british-in-game-of-blucher.html

[Fenton]

Good stuff

Looks like a great game

[toxicpixie]

Great looking game! That sounds cracking, and really shows off the big base approach of the rules well.

[jchaos79]

So nice!

[Techno]

Excellent.

Cheers - Phil

[Steve J]

What a lovely looking game

[Roy]

ooh, that looks nice 

[Westmarcher]

Do like the look of your Blucher games, Neil. 

On the whole, it appears to be a very popular rules system. The only feature that I'm not so keen on is Sam Mustafa's basing convention where he appears to have painted himself into a corner by having 'massed artillery batteries' for the British instead of being able to spread their artillery more evenly along the line (Volley & Bayonet, which I think has half width bases for artillery, seem to be able to cope with this better).

[toxicpixie]

West Marcher - Blucher allows very few massed batteries for the British, and actually forces you to penny packet your artillery out amongst your line brigades

It's actually really handy - you lose the massed firepower and range but generally bump an extra dice on your already dangerous infantry making them extra dangerous very cheaply.

Means your enemy can't hang around degrading your ability to resist them then go in, as you'll shoot better than they do either when skirmishing or at volley range.

Of course I you're British and you expose your units to concentrated long range massed artillery the. Get thumped on the way in the. Mobbed up you pay for it

Good game for rock-paper-scissors and what feel like historical actions!

[Westmarcher]

That's good that you can penny pack your artillery then, Nathan. So, how do gamers represent that (miniatures / model wise) on the table? Do you place an artillery piece on the base or simply just say there's no need to, you just assume it's there?

[toxicpixie]

Depends on your scale and preference really - the unit cards have a gun shape to mark if it's got attached arty, and if you use full size bases then you can pop a gun model on. My 6mm guns are on irregular ish shaped plastic card as individual gun & crew so I can pop them on as attached or stick three on a flocked up sabot base if I want to use them massed!

That would work fine in 10mm as well, I reckon.

If you use "competition sized" 60mm bases (a hang over from Polemos?) that might be harder - you might squeeze them on but I think there'd be too large a gap or too few actual infantry figures to look good.

In larger figure sizes I think you might struggle, but using a 6mm model as a marker might work, Ive seen some square markers done that way for 15mm and it looked pretty good.

Just a note on attached arty - it doesn't fire individually, but boosts the Infantrys fire instead. But then it's a game were a base is thousands of men so even a battery of half a dozen guns won't count for much on their own!

[slimreidy1]

That's good that you can penny pack your artillery then, Nathan. So, how do gamers represent that (miniatures / model wise) on the table? Do you place an artillery piece on the base or simply just say there's no need to, you just assume it's there?

We just presume they are there, although my dad has some free standing guns for his Austrian army to put on the base to represent they are there. Also in our game my dad only had one massed battery in his army opting instead to give most of his brigades the attached artillery trate. Also bearing in mind with massed artillery battery's you have limited ammo. You start with 5 dice and after each shot you remove a shot,the fire power goes 5,4,4,3,2,2 dice. Once you fire your last shot it's basically time to get the hell out of their lol,really I find that artillery massed together only really softens up one or two of your opponents brigades before it becomes redundant,it's definetly not a battle winner.

[toxicpixie]

Definitely - in a long (ie normal length Scharnorst or as written pick up game set up) game then massed arty can shoot itself dry and have to retire quite early on. Attached arty keeps on giving its bonus till its Brigade goes down

[Leman]

Looks very good, but I just couldn't get on with that rules set.

[Womble67]

Very nice indeed

Take care

Andy