Badahoth/Badajoyce

 The latest game in the Peninsular campaign was a battle near Badajoz, brought about mainly by your bloggist neither understanding the rules nor having bothered to take any account of publicly available information about the size of the various French forces. James wrote about the first evening here, and the second evening saw it reach a conclusion.

I, in my capacity as Beresford on this occasion, attacked from the outset, not so much because I thought it was a good idea, but because in the context of the campaign I thought I should. One has to assume that all sorts of things are abstracted in the campaign mechanics, and in this case it was the reason why the British would be the aggressor against an equal force with large reinforcements arriving any moment soon. One must just assume that there was a good reason why they did. 

Anyway, much to my surprise it all ended in a draw with both sides being very low on morale and not being in a position to do much; indeed the last hour or so of playing was rather dull. Whilst the arrival of the French reinforcements was imminent (*), the British were withdrawing steadily and it was by no means clear that the new troops would be able to cause much damage before nightfall. In the end permanent casualties were fairly light on both sides, although the hospitals will be pretty full with those recovering. I left James (no Mark or Peter this week) to do the paperwork, but overall I think I came out of the affair far better than I was expecting. The main reason for that was, it seemed to me, the resilience against morale challenges which the British in particular benefit from in the rules we use.

Lots of photos were taken and James will no doubt write it up in detail in due course. When I was originally rolling up my army lists one small crumb of comfort was the inclusion of some extremely feisty heavy cavalry. They repaid this faith by destroying two units of French light cavalry and causing the Polish Lancers to think better of it and withdraw. Let's hope we see more of them during the campaign.

* Fortunately for the British and Portuguese the order in which the cards were turned up in the third turn effectively delayed their arrival for a further turn after that.