Custom terrain enhances historical battles: Beaugency

For a long time I took a rather basic functional approach to my wargames terrain. In the past decade or so that has changed and I now consider attractive terrain to be an important ingredient of the High Quality Gaming Experience. As I am primarily interested in recreating actual historical battles on the tabletop, the apogee of attractive terrain is to have terrain that has been created solely for the purpose of fighting one specific battle: custom terrain.

This wintry landscape is Beaugency (Franco-Prussian War).

The arrows and annotations reveal a glorious victory for the nascent Reich.

I have been made very conscious of this since publication of BBB by the efforts of wonderfully creative and artistic BBB players around the globe. A recent example would be Andy Fuller's Langensalza in 2mm. Franz Decker has likewise done Langensalza in the same scale, as well as Coulmiers and Montebello.Vincent Tsao painted a fine custom battlemat for his anniversary refight of Waterloo and another for Shiloh. Above all, I was stunned by the beautiful bespoke set-ups people created for our inaugural BBB Bash Day back in April - see the full photo-AARs:
Two Marshals blog;
Wargaming Addict blog.
(Not custom terrain, but I want to include it in this blog post simply because it's too gorgeous not to mention: David Raybin and friends in Nashville with their 28mm game of Mars-la-Tour.)

These have inspired some similar efforts among our group. To the battlemats we made for Bash Day - my Solferino and Wilderness ones, and Crispin's Loire Valley FPW campaign - we have added the Spotsylvania mat, used twice already and a third outing planned.


And now Crispin has done Beaugency (1870) for us. This is one of the Franco-Prussian War scenarios in the BBB rulebook. The plan is to run it as a participation game at Colours 2016 in Newbury, and probably also at Warfare 2016 in Reading. Crispin wanted a practice game beforehand and we were happy to oblige. As you can see from the photo above, he's done a really nice job. It was a pleasure to fight across his custom terrain, not to mention the fact that it took two minutes to set up rather than the usual 20. The rest of this post is an AAR of the game.

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Beaugency offers a great contrast of armies. The highly competent Germans have to attack the French who are much more numerous but generally of very poor quality. Troop quality really matters, because in this scenario there are two night intervals when the armies can regroup, and the better troops have a big advantage in doing so. That extra German staying power made a big difference towards the end of our game.

It did start badly for us Germans though. (I was one of the three German players; there were three French players too.) Nigel's supposedly passive French 21st Corps surged out of the Foret de Marchenoir to preempt any advance by Dave W's Hessians. In our centre, Crispin's Bavarians strode boldly forward in the open against superior massed French firepower. My Holsteiners on the left ground forward and occupied Beaugency but it was slow work.

Thus by mid-game things looked rather bad for the German cause. Dave W was just about hanging on, but certainly wasn't going to get anywhere near Marchenoir, one of the two possible victory routes. The cunning French had shifted their artillery and set up a formidable gun line astride the other victory route south from Beaugency, so my force was rather stalled in the town. Crispin's Bavarians had been largely annihilated, and the French responsible were now swinging round to threaten my flank.

At this crucial time I managed a high reinforcement roll which brought our X Korps on earlier than expected. We decided to commit these in the centre to protect my flank and in due course work round the end of the French gun line.

The dismaying large numbers of French now began to diminish as German quality began to tell. Our own gun line was sensibly set up at last and nothing could stand before it. Raw French units rapidly became Spent, and once Spent were much less able to resist. Our IX and X Korps units joined up, advanced in coordinated fashion, and eliminated the French brigade by brigade.

Even so, this took time, a commodity which was rapidly running out. The last four turns got more and more tense. With one turn to go, we finally got four brigades/divisions in position to assault the French line and get close enough to the road exit to claim at least a draw and possibly victory. My 17th Division guns on our left had won an artillery duel and driven off some French guns, which helped to give us a chance. Of our four units, one refused to move but three assaulted. Of the three, one was halted by French fire but the other two went in. They not only went in, they both won the combat by a large enough margin to smash through and exploit beyond. Thus on the final turn, by dint of a little skill and a lot of luck, we were able to convert defeat into victory.

This was a tremendously exciting game, a classic nailbiter: bags of manoeuvre, bloody fighting between two very different armies, and with the decision going down to the very last dice of the night. The French had a good plan and executed it well. They can count themselves unfortunate that I was able to summon the German reinforcements early. Had they arrived any later, we would have struggled to achieve even a draw, and I think a French win would have been the result. C'est la guerre!

Adding this fortunate victory to the year's tally, and not counting the odd playtest or tutorial game in between, gives us:

Played: 21
Won: 10
Drawn: 4
Lost: 7