Monday, September 27, 2010

Moving on to the next battle

Dear god, it's been nearly a full calendar month without any postings! Whatever is going on? Well, sadly the boring real world gets in the way now and then and weekends are fully-booked, which brings all opportunity for gaming to a crashing standstill. Shame, but there it is!

I have been toying with ideas however, primarily one about doing a historical re-fight. It dawned on me that my newly-completed armies could represent very good forces in a SYW-style refight. If I doubled the scale, a very big battle!

I checked online for some scenarios, and found a bunch of them available online for free via Sam Mustafa's excellent website for his rules 'Might & Reason' (championed here on my website on several past campaigns!) The link is:


After tabling the forces and relative sizes, I realised that the Battle of Hochkirch from 1758 was a plausible candidate for my dining room table, if I halved the unit size (i.e. represented each unit with a single base rather than the normal two.) I'm currently tinkering with scales and reduced areas, plus also trying to work out how to represent the landscape on the table (it appears that the battle map was basically a large sloping hill, with around seven different contoured heights given on the scenario map.) I was planning to make the terrain by putting some books under my grass-green throw-rug, but having 7 books mounded up at one end of the table and none at the other seems a touch ridiculous! Still, I'll contrive something roughly close enough to the historical map to let the refight go ahead - after all, with time so difficult to find, no little technical problem will cost me the chance for a tabletop scrap! So far, next weekend looks free, so I'm off to polish my breastplate and have my sabre sharpened up.