Games with Norman; DBA and Neil Thomas 19th Century

 My son Norman had a random day off yesterday, so I took advantage of my retirement to head on down to his house for a visit with the grandchild and a bit of gaming.  The original plan was to start with some Dux Bellorum, however …. While it is a game I enjoy, we don’t play it often enough to remain comfortable with the rules, so when I put the boxes on the table, I suddenly realized that I should have reviewed the rules in advance, because I wasn’t up to relearning them on the spot.  Next time, do better! (And that may be as soon as this coming Saturday…)

We dug into Norman’s collection and decided to put his recently expanded collection of dwarves on the table against their traditional foes, the orcs.  While this was a fantasy game in appearance, we followed Norman’s recent custom of deploying the armies as historical analogues from the DBA 3.0 lists.  Thus, the dwarves were based on the Tudor rebels of the late Wars of the Roses, and the orcs were based on the ancient Britons. 

Wars of the Dwarves and Orcs

I took the dwarves, since their track record to date has not been good, and I wanted a handy excuse for why I would be losing.  Much to my surprise I pulled off a victory in the first game, despite being hampered somewhat by a difficult hill in my deployment zone.  So we racked up the forces again, with the orcs attempting some revenge with a raid into dwarvish territoy.  (As DBA works, both armies have the home terrain type of “arable”, so the difference was that I got to choose the pieces that were semi-randomly deployed.) Although it was a close game, the dwarves pulled off another victory, so we decided that it was, perhaps, time to play something else … 

Norman is a more sensible gamer than I am, so he has managed to restrict himself to three gaming projects stored at his house, the collection of 1/72 scale plastic DBA/Hordes of the Things armies, a collection of 28+mm fantasy figures suitable for Frostgrave or D&D, and the 1/72 scale Proxia collection of 19th century imagi-nations figures that we typical play with the rules from Neil Thomas’s Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe (19CE)  We are scheduled to be playing a 19CE game with all three of us, including my son William, this coming Saturday, so we thought that it might be a good idea, after the Dux Bellorum problem, to revew those rules.  

Norman dug out his H.G. Wells-ish toy inspired scenery, and we turned to the book for a generic scenario to be played on a very compact 2x2 battlefield. Norman has recently completed a couple of units of militia for one of his Proxian armies, so we decided to get them on the table with an 1848-ish battle between a rebel army and a monarchical old order army.  I immediately volunteered to be the rebels.

Some of the new militia

Some random rolls (from the book’s scenario description) left us with a few twists; a third of my army was late to the battlefield, arriving on the 3rd turn (of 10), and Norman’s artillery was also bogged down and never made it at all.

Initial position; victory was decided by control of the town and the hill

Norman’s troops enjoyed a quality advantage.  In the 19CE rules, failed morale rolls result in the loss of an additional troop stand, units having four to begin with.  I don’t think his professional army failed a morale check and I am pretty sure that my rebels never succeeded in one.  This did seem to bring the right level of brittleness to my army.  Once all of my troops were on the table I enjoyed a numerical advantage of 6 units to 4 units, but with the quality difference, I needed it.

Rebel skirmishers in the woods

I was also allowed to deploy a band of poor quality skirmishers in the woods at one corner of the battlefield.  Norman decided to take advantage of his qualitative superiority and surged forward to attempt to seize the town.  He seized it, was thrown out, and seized it again in the course of the short game.  While their morale never cracked casualties mounted on the government side.  The battle for the hill was also a seesaw, and, as night fell, the last intact rebel infantry unit reached the otherwise empty hill, while the government forces held the crucial town.  Overall, it ended as a draw.  We both felt that we had lost and that we had it in the bag at different points in the game, so it seemed pretty well balanced overall.

I don’t think that either of us has written up a review of the rules, but now that we have a half a dozen or so games played over the past several years, I think that we could manage a fair one. (Positive, too; we do keep coming back to them, although we also have a game using the Whitehouse and Foley rules  A Gentleman’s War on our extended agenda…)