Volley! At Farnborough, After Action Report

 Today I attended a Blucher tournament at my local wargames club and I took a bunch of photos. I played as Peninsula French, and had a great time.

Game 1: 
In game 1 I was attacking my Ottoman opponent.

My opponent has set up with all his infantry, artillery and his 2 objectives behind a river. His masses of cavalry are set up in the top right. I wan't confident in attacking across the river, so I deployed to try and wipe his cavalry, if I could break them his army would probably reach it's break point.

Large numbers of Turkish and French cavalry would engage around the forest on the right flank, but it would remain fairly indecisive.

My dragoons have fallen back after heavy combat with the now much dispersed Ottoman cavalry and reform behind reinforcing Badenese Infantry in squares, and fresh Westfalian Chevaux-Legers. On the far right Turkish cavalry remain immobile in front of a line of French infantry, neither wanting to advance upon the other.

At the end of the game the fighting has been very inconclusive. Sporadic infantry fighting across the bridge and all the cavalry fighting on the right actually resulted in 0 broken units on either side when the time was up. The result is a draw, with a slight advantage for my opponent holding more objectives, which he began with for rolling the defender.

Game 2:

In my second game I was matched up against against the Hundred Days British, and rolled to defend. This was an extremely short match and so I only have 2 images.

The centre of the map is dominated early on by my dragoons, preventing the British advancing off their hill.

The only other image of the battle shows 2 British corps stuck between my 2 main corps. The fighting was fierce, but at the end of the fighting 5 British units had been routed to 2 French, and the British army had broken. A convincing win for the boys in blue.

Game 3:

In my third and final game of the day I faced a very different British army. This one was from the Peninsula and so featured a number of Spanish and Portuguese allied units. 

On the left flank I have a corps of Infantry deployed forwards of one of my objectives in order to defend from the hill. My opponents Heavy Dragoons have forced my leftmost infantry into squares but my own Dragoons are forcing the British infantry in the centre into their own squares, both sides would be punished by artillery for this.

On the right flank I have taken the role of defender slightly more liberally and am pressuring hard. I am pretty sure forcing my opponent to spend his precious momentum points dealing with this flank made defending my left far easier.My Dragoons and horse artillery continue to dominate the centre, forcing any attack to halt.

My Dragoons here have charged in to destroy a weakened battery of Heavy Artillery in the centre (already removed). A unit of British Infantry have already been broken by the Horse Artillery in the centre, whilst my foot guns on the hill deal heavy damage to the Brits forced into square to their front.

Several turns later 3 of my Dragoons have moved to support my right flank infantry. The allied Spanish and Portuguese cavalry have been moving back behind the infantry squared unable to stand up to the French cavalry. This has allowed me to reorganise the infantry who had been taking punishment from British musketry.

Towards the end of the game the French left flank is thinning out, but the Heavy Dragoons remain wary to advance into squares and musketry. By this point artillery is too exhausted to really threaten the squares, and so attacking will have to be by brute force.

However the both players focus has been on the right flank, where French Dragoons have made it behind the squares to threaten the Allied horse behind, whilst French infantry trade long distance shots with the infantry (French infantry are just out of shot to the left). The French Dragoons would charge with mixed success, but neither player would gain the advantage and soon the game would end. The result was a spirited draw, although a minor win for my French, with 2 British units broken to 0 French whilst maintaining control of 2 objectives.

At the end of play I won an Arc of Fire marker for coming 3rd out of the French commanders. I had thought there were 14 participants, though on retrospect their may only have been 12, and I think we all had a great time. Lance did a great job hosting the event, and though I felt the rules were fairly advantaged for the defending player I don't think it affected the enjoyment of the games at all.

I have a selection of Photos from other games, although I am not sure what most of them are they are

they all look like good close games.

Shots of Other Games

French (left) vs Ottomans (right)

I think this is Prussians (left) vs French (right)

French (left) vs Russians (right)

French (left) vs Prussians (right)

French (left) vs British (right)

The Finished Brits - The completion of all 3 armies.

Having now finished the final army at Talavera, the British, the project as planned lies completed.

In the future I may make a game board/the relevant terrain for the battle and maybe even get some friends together to play it, but for now this is all. Unfortunately all my units have their Kings and Regimental colours the wrong way round, this was an error I realised early but I decided that uniformity would be best, maybe I will fix them at some point.

I'll post some pictures of the British, and a few where I've laid all the troops out on my bed, which is the only space of roughly the right size for the game that I have currently. Coming in at a little under 1.5k troops, I really like how the whole thing looks.

Thank you for reading, if you want to see the French army click here and for the Spanish click here.

The British

The British Army

The armies laid out on my bed

The French viewed from behind the British Lines.