Quatre Bras Demonstration Game Is Go

As a halfway house come tester, Lee wanted to put on a demo game. His excuse reason is that we will have already painted the figures and we need to test the rules for larger games. Given that Waterloo will not be a display game in so much as it wont be taken to cons I can see the attraction and have thrown my lot in with it. The Joy of Six 2014 is the target con, what better convention than one just for 6mm? I think we should look at taking it to one of the others as well, possibly Partizan just because....

Looking at the battle from the east. The Allies to the right and the French to the left.

So wanting to do it right and following the advice from last months Miniature Wargames we have started at the top and are working our way down. Lee has bought enough boards to just about do the battlefield twice (well we need a lot more for Waterloo) and we have gone for a six foot deep battlefield and five feet wide. Lee has drawn the map out on the boards and we spent time checking it against maps and also placing bases to represent the troops for the battle.

We moved a few bits about to make it easier to construct the boards and in a couple of cases to make it easier to fight in a couple of places. The laying out of the bases really brought home how this is constrained the terrain is, we have talked about making it 6x6 but that would only help if we made the centre wider which  would take away from the actual battle too much. So we plan to do a few test games before all the terrain is fully made.

As you see it above is the rough locations of the villages and farms (villages will be larger) and are not the buildings that will be used as we have yet to decide on what buildings and how they will be deplicted. The woods are about right for size but we need to add more to the total though what we have in stock may well be enough. The hills are yet to be made and for the practice games may well be just cloth or such like. Lee also needs to add the stream and the two ponds *you can see the larger one between the nearest buildings and the woods straight up from it. 

Just looking at the board and taking into account of the pond shows just how limited the French avenues of attack are. At the start of the battle the French outnumber the Allies quite a lot but by the end of the battle it's fairly even. It's how we play those early turns that will probably make or break the game and that is the part that will get the most play in the prep stages.

Timeline is looking good. We have the basic battlefield planned, we know what we still need to paint to get the game ready (for now we have plenty of choice of substitute units), the rules look to be ready for the challenge and we have lots of time before we need to start filling in the terrain as permanent pieces. Indeed I think we have a bigger risk of having it ready to early than having to rush it at the end.

The only other risk is that Lee will suddenly decide to start making the boards for Ligny seeing as he has a few spare. I can only hope he does not book a demo game for that before I can stop him ;-)