I rolled up a two vs two game using the Pick up Game section in the back of the rule book for a mid war eastern theatre encounter. The results can be seen in the pictures of the base labels below.
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| Union Force Labels |
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| Confederate Force Labels |
As can be seen the random dice roll selection resulted in a lot of artillery and in hind site I should have reduced this somewhat. The union were allocated a cavalry division to act as forward pickets and to see how they were effected, if at all, by the update.
Next it was time to come up with a battlefield and scenario. This of course had to include my new rail road items so I came up with the following map. The union would be defending the station and river crossing with cavalry outposts in the two farms while the confederates would be tasked with capturing these. A 3 x 4 foot table was selected to try and get the forces engaged quickly for rules evaluation.
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| Table map [ 3' x 4' ] |
The terrain features were classified as follows for movement:
River - Broken Ground for Infantry and Cavalry, Impassable for Artillery.
Wood - Rough Ground
Open Wood - Broken Ground
Orchard - Broken Ground
Wheat Field - Open Ground
Poor Road - Open Ground (even though on map it's drawn as Good Road)
Fences - As per the rules no effect (we may house rule here)
I also allocated suggested deployment positions for the Union forces. As it happens, on the night we decided to deploy one corps on each side of the road rather than one behind the other.
So how did the game play?
Well a lot of book reading occurred in places, mainly related to artillery plunging fire and line of sight effects of various terrain. The change in formation into line and supported line caused some discussion as this seemed different to what we had played before, but we couldn't remember if the difference was due to a house rule or not. The amended firing phase was picked up quite quickly even with the greater range of weapon types now catered for and it didn't take long to realise, that yes, firing has been made a lot more effective. The changes in the arcs of fire was also seen as an improvement with players having to take more care with positioning to bring fire to bear. If you didn't know the arcs have reduced from 45 to 30 degs for infantry and from 30 to 15 degs for artillery.
Unfortunately with all the discussion between moves, and because the Union cavalry pulled back before contact, we didn't get any melee combat this game. We did find artillery fire seemed more effective under these rules and when we got close enough so was musketry. We got the attack by the confederates over the bridge wrong this time but know what to correct next time, which will be in a few weeks time when we intend to get to grips with a few more aspects of the update.
First impressions of Brigade Fire & Fury are very good with, it was felt, several improvements over the original .
After a bit of tweaking to OOBs and map I will make these available in my Scenarios download section.
UPDATE, now available as ACW Defend the Station.
UPDATE 2, have added some Power Point resources that I use to do the maps to my Download section.
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| Table with suggested troop deployment |
So how did the game play?
Well a lot of book reading occurred in places, mainly related to artillery plunging fire and line of sight effects of various terrain. The change in formation into line and supported line caused some discussion as this seemed different to what we had played before, but we couldn't remember if the difference was due to a house rule or not. The amended firing phase was picked up quite quickly even with the greater range of weapon types now catered for and it didn't take long to realise, that yes, firing has been made a lot more effective. The changes in the arcs of fire was also seen as an improvement with players having to take more care with positioning to bring fire to bear. If you didn't know the arcs have reduced from 45 to 30 degs for infantry and from 30 to 15 degs for artillery.
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| Union troops line the riverbank. |
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| Union guard the station, dismounted cavalry having fallen back. |
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| Rebel yell, straight over the bridge. |
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| Union await the charging rebel column. |
Unfortunately with all the discussion between moves, and because the Union cavalry pulled back before contact, we didn't get any melee combat this game. We did find artillery fire seemed more effective under these rules and when we got close enough so was musketry. We got the attack by the confederates over the bridge wrong this time but know what to correct next time, which will be in a few weeks time when we intend to get to grips with a few more aspects of the update.
First impressions of Brigade Fire & Fury are very good with, it was felt, several improvements over the original .
After a bit of tweaking to OOBs and map I will make these available in my Scenarios download section.
UPDATE, now available as ACW Defend the Station.
UPDATE 2, have added some Power Point resources that I use to do the maps to my Download section.
As usual more pictures at the club's Facebook Gallery
Tony.
Nice map! How’d you do that?
ReplyDeleteGame looks great and glad you liked F&F. It’s very similar to RFF. That indeed is s lot of arty. I love ACW battle reports. Keep it up!
For the map I used PowerPoint.
DeleteI first scanned the page from the rulebook that gives the map key then produced separate .jpg images for the different terrain types that I could then use to fill shapes I drew in PowerPoint (woods, open woods, corn field etc) Linear features were just drawn in PowerPoint to match those in the rules. The pictures of buildings orchard, encampment etc were just cut and pasted as elements into PowerPoint that can be dropped into the map as required.
The most problematical was the hills. These I drew in Paint then selected the portion needed, copied, pasted and resized as required.
I understand, thank you. That’s s very good idea.
Delete