Other people's Portable Wargame battle reports: The Battle of Wavre

The intrepid Archduke Piccolo has now fought an army-level battle, this time using situation that led to the Battle of Wavre (1815) as his starting point.

His battle report can be read here (Part 1) and here (Part 2), and what follows is a small selection of some of the photographs he used to illustrate his battle report.

To date, I've never play-tested the PORTABLE NAPOLEONIC WARGAME rules with an army-level scenario, and I read this battle report with great interest. Archduke Piccolo has identified some changes to the rules that he feels are needed if they are to meet his requirements ... and I must admit he puts that case for making them very well indeed, and I recommend other users to consider his suggestions. Besides being a very interesting battle report to read, it was an excellent critique of the rules, and gave me feedback that will help me to develop the rules at some point in the future.

I felt that he identified the one particular aspect of the corps-level (and thus the army-level) rules that I think makes them a bit different, namely the Orders rules. I quote:

As time went by ... even successful commands began to break up and lose cohesion. To begin with, it was scarcely worth rolling a die to see if orders reached their destined ears or were carried out, if but one command applied to the whole formation, it was in contiguous grid areas, and it was somewhere accompanied by its commander. Once battle was joined, the problem was still not so very apparent, if the Corps' sub-formations were closely engaged (as was III Corps, along the line of Wavre and Nieder-Wavre). It was once local successes began to be achieved, and the sub-formations becoming separated, that Corps and Army cohesion became problematic. If anything that was even more the case for the defenders.

I think this very feature, frustrating as it can be, is probably what gives this Corps and Army-level Portable Games rule set its own special character.

Incorporating this 'friction' into the rules was something that I spent quite some time thinking about, mainly at the behest of Arthur Harman. I tried to keep the mechanism as simple as possible ... and it seems to have worked exactly as I had hoped it would.

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Please note that the maps and photographs featured above are © Archduke Piccolo.