Dux Bellorum at the Devon Wargames Group

 

This weekend I dug out the Dark Age collection of Vikings and Saxons to re-run my Dux Bellorum Pinhoe scenario recreating the Battle of Pinhoe, fought just outside of Exeter in 1001AD.

With plans to travel up to Newark next month on a 'Boys Beano Weekend Away' to include the Partizan show, a large game of Dux Bellorum on the Saturday and a curry in between, I needed to get warmed up and reacquainted with the rules beforehand and so the club meeting this month was an excellent opportunity.

Our game produced a classic Dux Bel Dark Age scrum with warriors going down along the line throughout the game, ending in a dramatic last two turns to seal the result.

If you would like to see how things turned out and more about our local piece of Dark Age history, then just follow the link to the club blog where I have posted an AAR of the game and other links to previous posts relating to it.

Devon Wargames Group - The Battle of Pinhoe, Dux Bellorum

Enjoy

JJ

Vauban's Wars, Wargame Rules for Siege Warfare 1667 to 1815 - Eric Burgess

General Herrasti personally sighting one of the city's heavy guns during the French siege of Ciudad Rodrigo

Dionisio Alvarez Cueto

Last week I finally got a chance to play a set of rules, Vauban's War, I first became aware of back around 2014 when I was deep into my Talavera project and spotted a series of posts on Eric Burgess' blog, with a mind to using the 18mm Peninsular collection to try out some Peninsular War type sieges.

If you are interested in finding more resources about Vauban's War check out Eric Burgess' blog in the link below.
https://dinofbattle.blogspot.com/p/vaubans-wars.html

My wife Carolyn indulged me last Xmas by buying me a set for a present and they were put on my 'Must Play at Some Time' pile whilst I busied myself completing other projects focussed around Age of Sail ships and AWI Mohawk Indian collections.

Fortunately there is another 'rules magpie' in our club and an old friend, Chas, who also had a copy of the rules and was keen to give them a run and was happy to take point on organising a try out game, with him getting his head around how they work and importantly producing the required fortress walls, saps and other impedimenta that go along with horse & musket siege warfare; whilst I concentrated on my other stuff, but very happy to dig out my French and Spanish Napoleonic collection to put on a game at 'JJ's HQ', which we ran this week ably assisted by Vince who came over to give them a go as well.

The table you see below is our first attempt at playing with twelve battalions of French infantry, massed guns and sappers before their first parallel, as the Spanish garrison of four line, one grenadier and two militia battalions, glower out from their walls.

The rules themselves are based around the Piquet system of card driven activation and opposed die roll resolution using differing die types from d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 d12+1 and d20 with a base die reference point and moving up or down according to circumstance.

As you can imagine the system really does tick our box in terms of 'friction' with a well thought through plan coming unstuck on first contact with the enemy, represented by the card hands for each player or sequence deck of initially eleven cards, that generate specific events and actions through a turn of play, with each sequence deck played through representing three to four days of the siege.

Vauban's War is a quality product with cards that can be cut out for play or you can order prepared casino style playing cards, together with other game record cards and nicely produced core rules

To that initial hand are added another three cards of the player's choice through which they can attempt to modify the events with stuff they would like to achieve at some time during the three to four days, thus when the first saps are being dug, you are unlikely to want to have a 'Let's storm the breach' card in your hand as that would be a bit of a wasted opportunity.

The number of cards to be played each time is determined by an opposed die roll with the Fortress Governor and Besieging Commander rolling off and the winner having the option to play their cards first or second and with the difference in score determining how many cards will be played, by player one then by player two (red or blue as identified on the card decks).

In our case the French commander, probably Soult for 1811, me, was rolling a D10 and the Spanish Governor, Vince a D12, definitely General Herrasti as seen above, with the inactive player able to blast away should he want at incautious sappers and infantry moving about during card play.

A sample of the cards can be seen below and the presentation of the rules is glorious with full colour illustrations and well laid out explanations of how to set up a game of this type of siege warfare with a typical siege likely to play for somewhere between five to twenty siege turns, that could see several sorties and assaults, not to mention the work to dig parallels and saps, set up gun batteries, manage powder supplies, spies, food stocks and undermine the opposition morale as well as the odd wall or two.

In my own experience I found understanding the rules clearer by playing rather than reading, but that just might be my preferred learning style, but having done a bit of pre-game reading and then getting heads together with Chas to actually play seemed to make the rules clearer and before long Vince and I were rapidly advancing through the card play and working out our die changes with little reference to the rules or QRS, which speaks highly of the rules enabling unconscious-competence quite rapidly.

Examples of the Casino style playing cards for red and blue, garrison and besieger

As we were playing my mind was cast back several times to my 2019 holiday to Spain, touring across the country to visit key Peninsular War battle sites, and staying in the castle at Ciudad Rodrigo and standing before the walls of Badajoz gazing in awe at the scars of 18 and 24-pounder shot marks caused by Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese siege batteries.

The main gate and ditch at Ciudad Rodrigo 2019
https://jjwargames.blogspot.com/2019/07/ciudad-rodrigo-peninsular-war-tour-2019.html

The pictures from those visits combined with those of our game as it progressed hopefully captures how well the rules involved us in managing our siege battle, with the pictures illustrating the French advancing their saps on two flanks to create battering positions to clear the first lines of defenders back within their walls prior to advancing forward for the third parallel and the creation of the forward battering positions to hopefully start preparing a breach.

During this play Vince was building saps out to attempt to flank my own positions forcing me to commit reserve infantry to deal with his advancing out from the walls via his saps.

Meanwhile two Spanish spies were intercepted by my security details and promptly shot, whilst my own spy narrowly avoided capture, only to return to the city and successfully stir up insurrection within, lowering the morale a notch as the Governor was forced to send troops into the town to put down a popular revolt demanding him to hand the city over.

The mechanics of recording the state of both the garrison and besiegers is easily recorded on the status cards provided with the rules, together with a simple stat sheet that keeps a note of the quality of the various forces and as we blazed away at each other with cannon and the occasional musketry the various smoke puffs seen in the pictures recorded who had fired in the turn, requiring a reload card to prepare said guns for another round of firing, and the puffs removed but recorded for when the occasional powder check supply card turned up seeing a test or an outright reduction in the powder supply available for future action.

In addition each turn would see the garrison consume its limited food stocks, equally vulnerable to further consumption or despoiling by enemy action, and with little chance of resupply unless relieved by an approaching allied army, all modelled in the card play and with neither side entirely sure of the state of the other, providing yet more narrative and drama.

The imposing defences of Ciudad Rodrigo 2019
https://jjwargames.blogspot.com/2019/07/ciudad-rodrigo-peninsular-war-tour-2019.html

This post can only be a first impression and with not enough time to progress to attacking the walls directly with the big guns, an incomplete one, but I and we had seen enough to convince us that these are a very cleverly constructed set of rules that has us wanting to play more and had me ordering up a new set of cards and scanning options for a Vauban Wall collection to run my own games.

I can see that the initial collecting and building of the key terrain items is the main ask for playing Vauban, with the rules designed to work with any figure collection, providing infantry are grouped into units of four bases, double rank, in my case, or single rank, makes no odds, artillery men and guns, general officers and figures in pairs to represent sappers.

The rules lay out the basic requirements in terrain collection with most armies any player would already have suitable for use.

The scars of strikes from 18 and 24-pdr shot fired at the walls of Badajoz by Allied gunners during the siege of 1812, as pictured during my visit in 2019
https://jjwargames.blogspot.com/2019/09/badajoz-french-siege-and-allied-first.html

I think Vauban's War is a cracking game and I'm really looking forward to playing again, but I know I will have to concentrate on finishing the other stuff first so will probably content myself with playing Chas and others until I can work on my own terrain.

With the advent of 3D printing and of course  Paper Terrain, the opportunity to build these kind of games has never been so possible and now there are a set of rules capable of generating a very playable system.

If these kinds of games are of interest, then have a go with Vauban Wars, as they really are a lot of fun and seem to me to capture what sieges in this period were all about.

Next up, more ships are building in JJ's Dockyard, and I visited a very historic castle in North Yorkshire during our trip away in March, plus adventures in Vassal land continue to delight. 

More anon

JJ

New Small Third Rate 64-gun - Warlord Games (Available to Pre-order)

Agamemnon opens fire on the Ca Ira, 13th March 1795 - Geoff Hunt
Purportedly Nelson's favourite ship was the 64-gun Agamemnon, here seen keeping well clear of the heavier guns aboard the 80-gun Ca Ira as Nelson sailed back and forth across the stern of the French ship raking her into submission.

It gives me great pleasure and a real privilege to be able to present a set of models that have been put together for over five months at the time of writing and which I was really excited about painting and preparing for my own collection, namely the brand spanking new small third-rate model ship of the line from Warlord Games.

When referring to this class of vessel in the classic age of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars we are mainly concerned with the 64-gun ship of the line, which by this period was basically a cut-price 74-gun ship with 24-pounders on the lower deck instead of 32-pounders.

However, as the saying goes 'you get what you pay for', the 64-gun small third-rate was fast becoming obsolete as a ship of the line able to hold its place in the line by the start of the nineteenth century prompting a British naval officer of the time to state:

'There is no difference of opinion respecting 64-gun ships, being struck out of the rates. It is a fact that our naval officers either pray or swear against being appointed to serve on board them.'

Ten guns difference to an uninformed observer doesn't sound a major deficit in power versus the standard or common 74, but that difference was further enhanced by the heavier timbers, wider breadth of the gun deck, enabling the heavier guns to be carried thus more firepower to deliver with a stronger ship able to resist attack from anything smaller, like a 64.

Building these small third rates for the British Royal Navy ceased with the conclusion of the American War of Independence, but the demands of a new war meant that the 64-gunner was still a fundamental part of British naval deployments throughout the latter period with five 64-gun Indiamen, then under construction in 1795 for the East India Company being taken over for use by the Royal Navy and principally for deployment with the Nore Squadron, tasked with its observation of the Dutch Batavian fleet in the Channel and North Sea, and also using similarly small third rates to bulk out its numbers.

The first of my three 'small third-rates' from Warlord Games with resin hull, metal masts, anchors, figureheads, boats and stern galleries, with parts interchangeable with the plastic large third-rate, providing yet more variety to your models, here seen as a British 64-gun model in preparation for my Camperdown collection, but also making a very nice stand in for Agamemnon when I come to play the Ca Ira scenario.

The fact that these small third rates were deployed in squadrons facing enemies often deploying similar sized vessels is seen by where these ships were deployed in numbers, principally against the minor navies such as the Dutch, Danes, Swedes and Russians in the Baltic, or out on the far flung, slightly quieter areas of the British Empire in the Caribbean and East Indies, where they were more likely to encounter French frigate squadrons or the Spanish using the 64-gun ship themselves to police their own colonial holdings.

That said there were four such types at Trafalgar in 1805, three British, (Africa, Polyphemus and Agamemnon) and one Spanish (San Leandro) so if you are a keen collector of models for this and earlier periods you are likely going to want to have a few of these smaller ships in the collection and challenge yourself to handle one of these ships in the Nelsonian manner, by choosing very carefully how and who you decide to fight.

So to give you an idea as to how these models can look I have prepared my three models styled in the look of three of the principle users of small third rates, the British, Spanish and with an eye to my own Camperdown collection, Batavian Dutch.

Back Found - Carlos Parilla Penagos
A Spanish 64-gun ship attached to the Ferrol squadron, indicated by the blue pennant on the foremast passes a British 74 gun ship flying a commodore's pennant from her mizzen 

The Spanish option has already been in battle and featured in our anniversary game of Cape St Vincent along with my scratch built option prepared for my Trafalgar campaign collection.

As the figureheads from the 74-gun plastic option fit the resin hull of the new small third-rate, I opted to use a spare lion of Castile at the bow to emphasise the Spanish look of this particular model.

 

The new small third-rate (right) alongside her larger sister (left)

Here, above and below, you can see the new small third-rate, on the right, alongside the larger plastic 74-gun option, to the left.

I know some folks prefer thicker masts, although personally I don't find any of the previous models a problem, but as you can see the new masts are very sturdy in comparison.

The wider deck of the larger 74-gunner on the left is obvious with the view from the stern galleries.

For my small Dutch third-rate, I opted to have her in the Revolutionary War trim with a figurehead bearing the Batavian coat of arms and the blue trim seen on paintings of the Dutch ships at Camperdown in 1797.

If you want to go for extra detailing, the Dutch squadrons at Camperdown seemed to have gone in for different coloured hulls with some sporting all black hulls and others in a black with white gun-port strakes, something I aim to add with my own Dutch collection of these models.

My three versions of the new small third rates from Warlord

I think these models are a great addition to the current range and for those of us interested in squadron and fleet actions, a must have option in our line of battle.

Warlord Games have big plans for the Black Seas range of model ships with lots of new models announced and planned, with these, the new sloop-corvette, the British second-rate, and models for other nationalities fleets, plus models for the War of 1812 on the Great Lakes, and even galleons for a much earlier period.

 

The new Small Third Rate Squadron, together with the British second-rate and galleons are now available for pre-order on Warlord Games web shop, with a link below to the models featured.

https://store.warlordgames.com/collections/black-seas/products/black-seas-small-3rd-rates-squadron

Next up, I got to play a very interesting set of relatively new rules for a very underplayed area of the horse & musket era of wargaming, which proved great fun and has me planning for some new games - more anon.

JJ