Falling Off the Horse

I suppose it had to happen. Sooner or later in any wargame career, you make a mistake, get confused or forget where you were. The question is, what do you do about it?

I have a case in point, which is the thirty-seventh wargame of the 1600 – Something campaign. This seemed, from my list of actions in Spring 1606, to be fairly straightforward. My note said Spain against France in Burgundy. Both armies have (A + T) against them – army plus train. So I knew exactly where I stood. Two armies of twelve bases, plus an artillery train each, of six bases, of which two are artillery. A total of eighteen bases.

I set to, and rolled up some fairly dense terrain, which led to some fairly lengthy thinking about how to deploy the forces. There were plenty of hills and woods, and not much in the way of open terrain. But I bashed on, as one does, and deployed what, hopefully, would be helpful dispositions.

Then I looked at my notes for the move. Puzzled, I checked the map. Then I looked at my notes again. The actual forces were an army, plus an artillery train, plus support from adjacent armies – the French from the Ile de Paris, and the Spanish from Savoy. So, each side now had twenty-four bases. I dug out another two cavalry, two shot, one light horse and one pike base a side.

Now this was slightly straining my resources, but not too much. I could still delve into my hordes of Scottish and Irish pike and shot foot, and I had plenty of cavalry. But deploying them was starting to become a problem. I ended up with both sides deploying in significant depth, four or five lines.

You can see the problem in the photo above. The French are to the left, with their baggage on a hill behind the stream, while the artillery is deployed to try to command the only really open bit of ground. Even so, they are a bit cramped. The Spanish are, if anything, worse. Concerned about their relative lack of cavalry, they are five lines deep on their right. The artillery is deployed on the hills in the foreground and to command the gap between the woods in the centre. It all felt a bit wrong, but I could not quite explain why.

I bashed on. The Estimable Mrs P was out, and so I pressed the ‘forward’ button, and it commenced. In spite of being the defenders, the French advanced. The Spanish light cavalry and artillery on their left threw back the assaulting infantry on the hill. The Spanish light horse on their right was routed. The French advanced through the woods in the centre. Yet something did not feel right to me.

The Estimable Mrs P returned and, after a while, had a look at the table. ‘Very nice, ’ she said. ‘There are a lot of soldiers on it. ’ In that instant, I had a lightbulb moment. The reason why I was struggling with the wargame was that there were too many troops on it, and no flanks to speak of, nor really any possibility of tactics except ‘advance and get it over with, boys.’ So I stopped.

Some time ago I wrote my first guideline for solo wargaming in that book: What happens on the table stays on the table (see pages 8-9 if you don’t believe me). And here I was, breaking my own guideline. Ho hum. These things happen. The battle was to be dismantled, and I had to have a think.

It possibly did not help that at the same time, I was trying to regularise my rules for setting up a battle. Typing up a process for choosing army lists, determining terrain and deployment, while making mistakes in creating the wargame in real life, is never likely to encourage one, especially as the original process was for a single table. So, just after typing, they needed to be modified.

Still, I am nearly there. The original table has been dismantled. The armies are sitting in a box waiting to be redeployed. And I am trying to work out how to create the edges of the battlefield. The idea is to keep the original (or nearly so) intact and simply add two ‘sleeves’ of terrain to give me some flanks to work with.

So, there you are. I have broken one of my own guidelines for solo wargaming. A good job, I think, that I decided to name them guidelines and not rules, or I would have broken my own rules. I think that had I realised originally that this was a twenty-four base-a-side action, rather than eighteen, I might have thought of extending the table. But, on the other hand, I might not.

Nothing daunted, I will bash on with the campaign. These sorts of things happen, and if we let every mistake, error or disaster hamper us, we would never get any soldiers onto the table, and would become collectors rather than wargamers. And that, I think, would be a rather sad thing. After all, wargaming is a creative sort of hobby, with its rules but also with a dynamism of its own. The 1600 – Something campaign has got momentum, even if this is a bit of a bump in the road.

In campaign terms, the Estimable Mrs P wondered if France and Spain are the superpowers. They are, sort of. Or at least, Spain is, as it is sitting on a massive treasury. It does not, really, have that many troops. The French, on the other hand, have quite a few military forces, and some, but not that much, money. Both sides are committed to the western side of Germany and the eastern corridor of France as part of their strategic objectives are to maintain or otherwise the Spanish Road from Milan to the Low Countries. This is the first real effort by Spain to force the French back. On the other hand, with Luxembourg lost, they still have work to do.