Friday, November 5, 2010

Thursday FPGA


Since I've been swamped lately, essjam was nice enough to bring over his 6mm Nappie collection to put on a Fast Play Grande Armee game.
Some things of note about this scale and rules:
1- Scott's (essjam) collection, 3 corps each of French and Austrians, fit neatly into a plastic milk crate. As posted in an earlier post, they look great, too:
http://baronvonj.blogspot.com/2010/03/grande-armee-thursday.html
2- Like most wargamers, I've played in a lot of Napoleonic games. I've been spoiled enough to play in some really beautiful engagements with giant tables packed full of gorgeously painted 28mm figures. And after 8+ hours not a dang thing is accomplished, except maybe a few cavalry skirmishes on the flanks. Not so with FPGA. It's a truly elegant system that lets you play huge battles to a conclusion in 3-4 hours.

This particular fight involved the French trying to make headway into Austria, fording a river (the Danube?). At first, we played it that the river was fordable only at the bridges. This proved a bit much, as my poor frenchies were forced to send one stand (brigade) across at a time where they summarily executed one by one. So, the river was changed to fordable. This may sound like giving too much leeway, but a brigade counts as "vulnerable" while crossing an obstacle like a river. This means they have to re-roll any successful hits in combat, and they're easier to combat by attackers. Even outnumbering the Austrians 2-1, it was proving a tough slog.
We called it early when my wife finally came home from a long business trip. Not because she made us, but because we missed her: )
It's like their sitting there laughing at me! And what are those in the background? Reserves? What self respecting wargamer has reserves?

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