First Battle of Freeman's Farm 1777 - Carnage & Glory AWI

The 9th Regiment, at the Battle of Freeman's Farm, September 19th 1777 by Brian Palmer 
Military Print Company

I spent a very pleasant afternoon with my eldest son Tom and my friends at the monthly meeting of the
Devon Wargames Group where I hosted an AWI game of the Battle of Freeman's Farm using my favourite horse & musket rules Carnage & Glory, this set being the Seven Years War/AWI module. I have posted a full report of the game with more pictures on the Devon blog.

Map of the battle British Battles.Com

This is only the second time that Tom and I have played the AWI module with more experience using the Napoleonic set. It requires a mind shift to move from skirmish screens and columns to pure linear warfare and once or twice Tom said to me that he thought he could rely on his skirmish screen to protect his redcoats only to remember that these were Burgoyne's redcoats not Wellington's.

General Fraser's Wing gets stuck in in our fight for Freeman's Farm yesterday at the Devon Wargames Group

One thing that I really like about the way Carnage & Glory attempts to capture the period being played is the attention to detail on the formations being used.

This period of horse and musket warfare is dominated by the armies being able to deploy and fight in line using column deployments to the left or right or on the head. Both sides found themselves having to manoeuvre around the battle field trying to firefight threatened areas. This entailed a lot of passage of lines wheeling, about face and column to line formation changes, not to mention the issues of negotiating the broken terrain.

The program neatly captures the requirement for units to change formation using the drills prescribed at the time and when selecting the different options on the computer a very handy little diagram of the selected formation change pops into view which proved very useful in making sure the players knew what they had to do, without having to leaf through the guide notes I handed out at the start.

The game really flowed seamlessly and produced a very nice simulation of the actual events. It was also very nice to field my snake rail fences which added to the overall look of the game. If you are interested in playing this scenario I have posted the relevant files and unit labels in "My Scenarios" in the right hand column.

There is more information about using Carnage & Glory rules at the G&G Yahoo Group Yahoo Group and the C&G Web Site