Four years in.....
For our annual Summer game, Seth kindly brought his Austrians and Bavarians to have another go at the historical battle of Hanau of 1813 during the conclusion of Napoleon’s Autumn Campaign.
We wanted to do this one again as it was an anniversary of a sort; the first official crack at our rules was done on the 200th year of this battle. Now that we are happy with the rules, we were curious to see if the game would be different from the first going.
We are amazed that it has only been some four years from discussing about the original idea to now Organizing the boxes to find those units required for the game, I laid all I have out on the table. Almost 2200 figures…. eep. Along with Seth and all the others who have painted and based units for these rules, we have almost all the units required to do any of the big Napoleonic affairs!
The Hanau scenario is an interesting one. You have the French army in retreat, disorganized, strangling home with only a few viable combat units; the Guard being the most potent. Opposing them is a large but weak Bavarian force, very poorly deployed with supporting Austrians on the wrong side of a river. Now to be honest, the extremely poor deployment was caused by uncertainty on which road Napoleon would travel but it certainly did not help the A-B effort. But we like doing historical battles so it is up to the players to make things happen. As it were, Seth and his Bavarians would almost do the impossible and stop the Guard! Almost.
The following are a few pictures of the game with any notes done in the captions.
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The arial view of the battlefield with the French emerging from the forest (left) and the Bavarian infantry in two lines with the Austrians on the far bank of the river. Seth's Hanau on the table edge (right) Photo by Seth.
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| The boys in cornflower blue |
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| The French left of Sebastiani's and Hansouty's horse. I went with the historical deployment with both the line and Guard formations mixed up to a large degree rather than the simpler groupings. This, of course, had an adverse effect on command and movement and so took the French much longer to make their force made. |
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| The French Imperial Guard Infantry and Artillery of the 'centre' |
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| The French left of "Macdonald's " (a combined formation of many smaller French commands. All were very small and, as an indication, most battalions were well under 100 men in strength!) |
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| The Allied army awaits Napoleon's onslaught. |
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| Seth's Bavarian infantry are 28mm HaT figures. A bit smaller than others, but look good altogether on the tabletop. You can sense Seth is determined to get a good effort out of them! |
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| The horse about to clash. |
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| The French Grenadiers-A-Cheval on their black horses about to ride down Austrian jaegers as the Austrian horse move to support. Photo by Seth - as you can tell as it is from HIS side of the table...... |
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| The Guard was largely immobile in the early phases of this battle. The need for artillery fire and later poor command rolls. I am a bad General when it comes to dice rolls! |
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| Seth did a good job whittling away at McDonald's French (top) who must maneuver slowly out of the woods |
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| To represent the large line of stragglers and such which constituted much of the French army, we placed down some miscellaneous wagons which could be "captured' which would give the Allies some victory points and which the French needed to protect. As it were the French finally punched through and away to France but the Allies effort was better than the original battle. |
