WSS: A Couple of Days of Solo Testing

 

This wasn't a game at all, really. But I had an opportunity to get the toys out and do some more rules testing.

Priorities were:

* Get more experience of bread-and-butter situations, to see how smoothly the systems operate

* Repeat incidents as necessary, including what-ifs and different tactics, to see what works

* Try some fiddly situations - the things which always find out the weaknesses in the rules - thus I had a couple of enclosures and a village in the middle of the field

* I also wanted to do some back-to-back comparison of two different rule sets - trying the same situations with both

And, of course, it's nice to take a few photos, but the pictures only occasionally give a clue to any kind of battle narrative (since there wasn't one, really!), and there are some odd shots of freak dice rolls, just to keep the boys in the labs happy, which is a bit of a niche market!

I'll put a few captions in here and there, just in case you wonder what the blazes you're looking at!

As ever, lots of Les Higgins figures, with some Irregular friends.

 

The river at this end is the edge of the battlefield - just to brighten the place up a bit

 

 

The French start off in possession of a couple of ploughed fields, including some dismounted dragoons. Yes - I believe the fields are cut from some corduroy trousers I grew out of in the 1970s

 

 

Hessians

 

 

More Allies - Austrians, this time

 

 

This might have been Corporal John, but he wouldn't admit it

 

 

This is the brigade of horse on the Allied left, commanded by Cadogan, who has his dog with him, of course. If it isn't Cadogan, he is looking after Cadogan's dog

 

 

The French right flank

 

 

Grands Fromages

 

 

The lads from Toulouse, appropriately unformed in the village

 

 

The British contingent start by trying to capture the farm fields

 

 

One of these rule systems uses a lot of D6s, which serves to remind me that one effect of buckets of dice is a trend towards average results and smallish standard deviation - this looks like a bloodbath, but it tells us that the British (red dice) have edged this combat - no kills either way, and the British inflicted 2 retreats on the French while the French only managed to inflict 1 retreat in response, so the net result is that the French will fall back 1 hex, which gets them out of the field...

 

 

The British have taken the fields - they have also somehow schlepped their battalion guns over the wall

 

 

Austrian I.R. Alt-Salm suffer from long range artillery fire, thanks to very poor saving throws

 

 

Having been driven out of one of the fields, French dragoons mount up, form column, and gallop across the front of the enemy, who are too surprised to do anything about it

 

 

Les Fromages remain unmoved

 

 

British cavalry (Schomberg's Horse?) should have won this scrap, but the dice were unusually decisive on this occasion - that's 3 hits right off the top, so they were eliminated

 

 

Not a lot of storyline here - a period of doing repeat trials of particular situations with the two sets of rules

 

 

Time to test a full frontal infantry attack (with both rule sets)

 

 

Late on, I'm doing a lot of repeats of cavalry attacks on infantry. Educational...