The year is 1816. With Napoleon finally gone, the Allies could not settle their affairs and so Austria and Prussia marched against each other. Near the small village of Konigsgratz, the two armies clashed for the first time.
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| The initial deployments with Prussians to the left |
I traveled across the border and made the trip to Seattle to the 'Drumbeat' day-long meet to introduce my newly painted Prussians in this scenario against Seth's Austrians. There is an old wargaming axiom that newly painted units quite often perform poorly their first game on the table. Would a whole army do the same?
As we set up the game, it became apparent that the room had more games than needed players, and thus only four guys were available for the game. For the game we were envisioning, not that many. However we plowed on.
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| the Austro-Bavarian commanders |
I am of mixed mind about the game, event and results of the game and so will not make comment one way or the other. While one of the players had issues with the rules but as I think he plays only one other set of rules too much - one could say exclusively - as to cloud any perspective, the other players seemed to understand the concept and play within it. Poor "Thielemann" commanding the Prussian left flank against half the Austro-Bavarian army doubted my compliments, demonstrating that he had lost half his command and the remainder was weak. "Yes", I said,"but by doing so you have kept the Austrian reserves on this side of the table and are allowing the Prussians on the other wing to dominate." [ or will have, had we not packed in early to make the table available ]
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| My newly made paper buildings with Austrian defenders |
But this is my point of this style of war game, it is not the tactics, but the troop management and use of reserves. Too bad the game was so short as not to allow this to become apparent.
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| Pirch coming in from reserve aims his troops to the town |
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| Prussian Landwehr |