"The Prussians are in the woods"

I am rather enjoying the series of Seven Years War games that James is hosting at the moment, despite my pretty poor performance at bridge blowing. The latest scenario is detailed and illustrated on James’ Olicanalad blog so I won’t say much about it here. It’s playing out rather nicely after one evening and seems reasonably balanced. Given that the Prussians are expected to attack from the off I might be tempted to find some way of giving them the chance to move first were you to play it. Having said that, last night’s game started with the Russians winning a long run of initiative and getting their main force onto the table quite quickly but the Prussians still seem likely to take the large hill which was their first objective.

And they're wearing bearskins

I am the Prussians and the relative success of the infantry attack has rather surprised me. The attack saw a sustained firefight with not that many casualties. In the end it was a flanking force of grenadiers that did the damage, although they miserably failed to win a melee when attacking from the side a battery of guns that had already lost a stand. In part the attack’s success has been due to drawing an up 1 for line infantry morale card, thereby making them somewhat more resilient to being morale chipped, and having a superior commander and therefore a Brilliant Leader card hasn’t done any harm either. I also drew an extra Artillery Reload card, but the effect of this was somewhat lessened by both batteries rolling up poor. I’m still optimistic though that once they’re up on top of the hill they will prove very useful.

The firefight rages

I know you will be keen to understand the latest rule changes. They are reduced morale chip losses due to combat thereby leaving more chips for challenges – seems to be working so far, although possibly the minimum morale should be set at one per infantry and artillery unit and two per cavalry unit. Dress the Lines cards only appear now when an officer is lost – the jury’s out on this one, but last week we had so many between us that there was a run of fifteen initiative spread between both sides where nothing whatsoever happened. The newish morale challenge rules (requiring a stand loss) seem better to me and I also like the no negative effect for reactive fire. The movement of reserves into the line on a Deploy card also worked although I notice that it hasn’t made the Russian main force take up two lines as they debouched from the town.

It was also good to see the return of a pointless argument on a subject that no-one knew anything about. The orbit of the earth around the sun having been exhausted – at least for now – our thoughts turned to what name the Romans used for Hades, as in the underworld. My money’s on it actually being Hades, but why spoil the fun by finding out.