Battle of Lobositz at Havoc

Recently I attended Havoc, a regional wargame convention in Sutton Mass.  It was put on by the Battle Group Boston wargame group (More Information).  They did a great job and attendance though on the lighter side was very good.  It was after all over two years since their last convention.

I ran a number of games.  My first one was on Friday night.  I have always run a big miniature Horse and Musket game on these nights each show.  This time was no exception and I used my 40mm Prussian and Austrian armies use Twilight of the Soldier Kings by Nicholas Dorell (More Information).

Mr. Dorell has come up with an interesting product idea in that he writes up small scenario packs of battles and sells them for a few dollars.  I have picked up this idea and doe the same for my D-Day to Berlin rules.  My most recent being the Relief of Bastogne (More Information).

One of his most recent scenarios was for the Battle of Lobositz which happened to be the first battle of the Seven Years War.  One interesting aspect of this battle was that the Austrians made if very difficult for Frederick to get at the bulk of their army as they deployed this wing behind a swampy stream.  Now this posed a dilemma for a wargame because this part of the army did not take part in the battle.  Well very little.

In his scenario he came up with a clever ide to cover this but at the same time eventually let the gamer get these troops “stuck in” as the British like to say.  Any unit other than those Croats on Lobositz hill wanted to activate they first had to make a pre-activation roll (my term).  They needed to roll an 11 or better on 2d6.  Now that is pretty difficult even by my standards however you added +1 to your die roll for every completed game turn.  In my game I opted to start the battle after the Prussian cavalry was routed in the fog in front of the Austrian army.  So my game started on game turn 4.  This meant that at the start of my game this pre-activation roll would be 7 or better (11-4).  This worked well and players slowly got the Austrians into combat.  I should note that an Austrian would automatically be activated if it was fired on, attacked or came with a certain distance of a Prussian unit.

NOTE:  I know it isn’t often I comment on other sets of rules on my game website but I truly like this game.  The combat system is such a radical change from what we usually play.  It is all about your opponent making a morale check when you attack him.

I was very excited to play this game as I had recently acquired a 3D printer and decided to replace all of my lead 40mm cavalry with resin.  Every mounted soldier you see in the pictures are resin.  Files are produced my Madox (More Information).

The game was a great success and I really enjoyed myself.


A slide show of the game

 

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