Napoleonic's: First Battle

No Deadzone this week but I did manage to get my first game of Shakos & Bayonets in when Stu popped over for his fourth game of the festive period. This was the first game I'd played in a while as the festivities and Covid disrupted the normal playing schedule.

As this was our first time with the rules I went with a couple of small forces so we could get used to the game. 

French

Grenadier Officer (veteran) - 26 points

Light Officer (scout & musket) - 28 points

Grenadiers (8) * 2 - 184 points

Voltigeurs (6) (veteran, sharpshooter) - 128 points

366 points

British

Line Officer - 25 points

Guerrilla Officer - 25 points

Line Infantry (8) * 2 - 176 points

Guerrilla Infantry (8) * 2 - 134 points

360 points

As outlined over on the Cirencester Wargames blog the rules use a combined deck of activation cards with each player taking it in turns to either play a card or use command points to take a special action. The type of card used to activate a unit is determined by it's type so for instance the Guerrilla's use the Irregular cards and the Grenadiers the Line card. Each side has it's own coloured cards for each unit type so you only ever activate one side's set of units at a time. 

The fact that your opponent could play one of your activation cards (this will certainly happen multiple times during a game) and then you could use command points to activate the unit again mean that you could seize the initiative pretty quickly if the cards fall your way. But each side & unit type only has a certain number of activation cards (generally 3 or 4) so the units will run out of steam at some point. In the activation desk are three Clock cards and once the third of these are drawn the discard pile is re-shuffled so it's likely that some unit types won't see all their cards in one 'round'. Rounds aren't really the right word for this as the game continues in one long stream of activations until the end of the game. 

The books don't come with many scenario's but the ones that are included have the game end when the red clock card (there are also two green ones) is drawn for the 5th time. This means the length of the game is pretty variable but is likely to be longer the more different troop types you have.

The game itself moved along at a good pace with the spotting rules that I thought could slow it down not proving to do so and units caught in the open under close range (<12") musket fire dying reasonably quickly. One unusual feature of the game is that it uses a D10 as counting from zero to nine when normally the 0 side is a ten. So this tempers the normal excitement on seeing that 0 come up.

In the game itself the French got the early activations and got into some good positions with one unit of British Line being roughly handled by some Voltigeurs. The Guerrilla's made a name for themselves when one unit forced a Grenadier unit to flee after taking heavy casualties in two rounds of fire. 

The game ended with the second British Line unit charging in to the Voltigeurs to exact some revenge for their fallen comrades but with the French closest to the wagon.

So all in all it was an interesting game and it was good to get Stu over and the models out onto the table. With the rules not including many scenarios I will need to get my thinking cap on to see what I can think up.