Some games of Blucher

I fought another three games of Blucher in 2023 but seem to have photos only of the first two. They all utilised my new, flat scenery, and were all played against fellow club member, Simon, who kindly introduced me to Blucher.

French vs British

This was very much a fight to take and hold the central, urban objectives. I commanded the British. AFAICR I may have achieved some initial success but was beaten back on my left flank.

 Russian vs Ottoman

This game was loosely based on an historical battle. I took the Russians and attacked uphill turning the Ottoman right flank.

Ultra-low relief scenery for Blucher

As planned I developed some light, very low relief scenery for use with the Blucher unit cards which sit on top of the terrain pieces. The aesthetic idea was that the table should resemble an aerial view and be as convincing as possible at first glance, at least from a distance.

As my wargame club is in walking distance, I usually load my stuff into a shopping trolley. I always have that option, but my idea for this project was to keep things as light as possible so the game could be carried in a bag. Given that the armies are just cards, burdening myself with heavy and bulky 3D scenery seemed disproportionate, and, indeed, rather odd in comparison to the flatness of the units.

Anyway, here is the scenery I made or utilised in the order of table placement:

HILLS

As the hills are placed under the game mat, there are no aesthetic requirements and they can be very rough and ready. I’d accumulated a lot of foamboard offcuts, so I sandwiched these between hill templates cut from new card and trimmed with a scalpel.

The templates were sized and shaped to maximise storage in Really Useful Boxes, and the templates and offcuts were stuck with a Pritt stick, a huge bonus as Mrs Phalanx is particularly averse to glue fumes.

I've nearly exhausted my supply of offcuts so if I need more hills or other shapes and sizes I'll revert to my initial plan which was to make hills from card and plastic milk bottle tops.

Alternatively, I can also use any of my existing hills, most of which are reasonably light. Once under the game mat, they will all look the same!

GAME MAT

This is an old felt cloth and not my best game mat, but it's light and soft, and shapes itself over hills put underneath. Think of the creases as natural folds in the ground!

ROADS, RIVERS, MARSH, PLOUGHED FIELDS

These had already been made or bought for previous games. A small metal bridge is my one concession to conventional wargame scenery.

FOREST

These are made by applying a diverse mixture of Woodland Scenics Underbrush Clump-Foliage to leatherette templates using Hob-E-Tac glue. They bend to fit hill contours. They have been fixed with a spray of Scenic Cement. As suggested in the rules they are mostly 3-base widths long which is also a nice fit for storage in RUBs.

ROCKY GROUND

I didn't want anything heavy, tall or messy. I eventually hit on the idea of using broken up cork floor tiles.

BUILT UP AREAS

The village or town areas are 100mm (4") squares so they can be conveniently occupied by a single unit card with a little space to spare to remind players that attackers are entering rough ground. The buildings are from old Monopoly games picked up in charity shops. Some are finished as city areas, the rest as villages. Making the BUAs was fun.

FORTIFICATIONS

Flat lolly sticks with matchsticks. I added Tetrion Filler to one side to create revetments.

The terrain pieces are stylised but convincing enough. More pictures of the scenery will be featured in game use in my next post.
 

2023 Plans

RCW Reds: now accommodated
by Xenos Rampant

My intentions for 2023 are so focused that I feel confident enough to call them plans. They are:

(1) To continue with To the Strongest!

I have a number of fully-painted 15mm and 10mm armies which haven't yet been tabled. I also have some individually-based 28mm forces that might be used on sabots, and to facilitate that I recently supplemented my Late Medieval Swiss/Burgundians with another modest eBay purchase.

(2) To play Xenos Rampant (my current obsession) and other Rampant games.

I have three projects which have now become Xenos Rampant projects:

• 15mm Eurasia vs Oceana Near Future Sci-Fi. Existing figures and vehicles are based and mostly undercoated but I am now adding a few more models. I also have a huge collection of domestic detritus which I had intended to turn into SF industrial scenery. I will hopefully be able to attempt a game early in the new year and am currently working on foamboard storage trays to fit RUBs so the armies can be stored and transported safely.
  
• 28mm Irish War of Independence. I actually have completed armies for this, as well as a host of additional unpainted figures which I recently rediscovered.
  
• 28mm Russian Civil War. These are based and undercoated.
  

(3) To play Blucher

I have some ideas for making very flat, light scenery to complement the unit cards. This will make it a handy game to carry about.

Any painting or modelling will be directed into these three areas.

Blucher - Making a late start

Blucher campaign extensions and army packs.

Seven years after buying the rules I finally got round to an introductory game of Blucher, Sam Mustafa's grand-tactical Napoleonic game.

Many thanks to fellow club member, Simon, who organised and umpired the game. My opponent, Dave, commanded a Spanish force in defensive positions while I attacked with the French. I eventually managed to take a village in the centre of the Spanish position, but did not achieve the breakthrough I was hoping for. Simon pointed out that I should have made more use of my troops' superior skirmishing ability before rushing in.

Napoleonics are a foundational wargaming period. I've flirted with them over many years, but I'm no expert. While the tactics of column, line and square are for many the very essence of period flavour, I'm more pulled by grand-tactical games that allow one to fight whole historical battles, at least potentially.

Blucher is widely played and reviewed so it's rather late to go into detail about the rules. What I do want to write about is the use of the pre-printed unit cards and some thoughts on modelling terrain.

While the game we played employed conventional 6mm scale scenery, the armies consisted of the commercially available preprinted unit cards and I have to say that I was so engrossed in the game that I never missed or even thought about the absence of lead (or plastic) figures.

I now have all the extension sets and army packs, and these give me far more wargaming flexibility than a collection of model figures rooted in one time and place. Although I have 6mm Napoleonic armies that I was going to use, I'll now stick with the cards.

Two of the great advantages of card, tablet or block armies are their modest storage requirements and the ease with which they can be transported, and I'm thinking about scenery which meets the same criteria.

While I could create purely 2D scenery using felt, I'm currently considering slightly more realistic scenery which is nevertheless in ultra-low relief. Done properly I think it could look quite good and rather like an aerial perspective.

I already have a good collection of game mats, relatively shallow hills and roads and rivers, so that leaves urban and forest areas. For villages I'm thinking of using a template with low grey rectangles to represent houses, although I do have some Monopoly houses and hotels that could be put to use. I also have some 2mm lead buildings, but part of the aim here is to reduce weight and maintain a symbolic style. The houses would be of uniform height (no church steeples) so that unit cards could sit level on the top when villages are garrisoned. Forests would be templates covered in clump foliage, again of uniform height.

Reorganising my 6mm Napoleonics for Blucher - a reapparaisal

After some very helpful discussion on TMP I'm inclined to go for smaller, 60mm square bases which will allow me to use my dining-room table without having to get out the 6' x 4' extension boards. For artillery, I'd follow the Polemos standard and mount each gun on a 30mm square, using them in pairs for Blucher.

60mm x 60mm bases, or 60mm x 30mm?

I could break down the infantry and cavalry bases into two 60mm x 30mm bases to give me greater flexibility for playing other games in which the bases would represent battalions, but if I did that it would be more difficult to fit in skirmishers and the general positioning would not look quite so good IMO.

And while 1 base equals 1 battalion works well for pre- and post-Napoleonics, I feel that a lower level Napoleonic game really cries out for multi-base battalions which can be formed into column, line and square.

Reorganising my 6mm Napoleonics for Blucher

The publication of Sam Mustafa's Blücher sent me sorting through my old boxes of Heroics 6mm Napoleonics which I first started accumulating in, I think, the early 80s.

The core of the collection are Austrians for Aspern-Essling 1809, all historically organised in 18-figure battalions. The rest are a more miscellaneous collection of Austrians and French bought off eBay and rather horribly flocked IMO. The Austrian uniforms are not quite in period with my original figures and the French infantry seem to have rather a jumble of uniforms on each base, but I'm past seeing that level of detail and past caring about that level of accuracy.