The 365 Days' Campaign Ends at Waterloo

So ended 2015, with a New Year's Eve game of Waterloo, and what a magnificent way to end it! As Colin was briefly visiting UK from Indonesia we laid on this game specially for him.

This was the same scenario we used back in October for our display game at the Oxfordshire military museum. We didn't have Ben's bespoke Waterloo armies available this time, so Napoleon's nephew's 1870 army stood in for the French, and their 1870 opponents for the Prussians, while Wellington's Anglo-Dutch were a mix of Crimea British and ACW Union troops, lightly garnished with Dutch flags. But we did have Colin's beautiful handcrafted buildings. The game looked good, the mass effect was right, and it really didn't matter that we were using the wrong figures.

I'll spare you the blow-by-blow account, though I may put it in Flickr in the form of a full series of fully captioned photos at some point. The French plan was a limited attack in the centre to seize and hold La Haye Sainte, while left hooking past Hougoumont to get in the Allied rear and avoid fighting the Prussians as long as possible. This was achieved efficiently, and then the Guard was fed in to storm Hougoumont after it had been pummelled by massed artillery. The Allied defence was seriously undermined by Chasse's Dutch-Belgian division, ensconced in Braine l'Alleud on the extreme right corner, getting a series of disastrous movement rolls which meant it disintegrated and fled without firing a shot. The French steamroller was therefore able to rumble over the Allied right flank with relative ease and take Mont St.Jean with a turn to spare.

 Situation on Turn 3, annotated 

to show how it turned out

The French didn't have it all their own way. Colin (as Wellington) mounted a successful counterattack to retake La Haye, but was then booted out again. My Prussians raced across the table and had not one but two bites at capturing Plancenoit, with a fair chance of kicking the French garrison out, but the dice didn't favour me. So in the end we Allies were thumped, the French holding all 4 Objectives. I'm actually quite glad because that means of the four times we've fought this scenario it has produced one Allied win, one French win, and two draws - perfectly balanced. You can find the scenario in Flickr and in the files of the BBB Yahoo group.

My final tally of games I've played in 2015:

Games played to conclusion - 34.
Won - 16.
Drawn - 7.
Lost - 11.

This was not only a fine year's wargaming, jampacked with funtastic games. It was also the first full year since the publication of  "Bloody Big BATTLES!" and "Bloody Big European Battles!" in late 2014. We have a thriving, enthusiastic, growing community of BBB players, now well over 300 on the BBB Yahoo group. Many wonderful battle reports have been posted by BBB players on blogs and forums around the world. BBB players are creating their own exciting scenarios, as well as encouraging the BBB team to produce more ourselves. As well as the 25 published in BBB and BBEB, I calculate that there are now another 28 in the BBB Yahoo group files, and another dozen or so kicking around in playable but not yet publishable form, with more being added all the time.

And of course we are now planning our own dedicated BBB convention, in the form of the BBB "Bash Day" to be held in Oxford on Sunday 10 April - something which was not in my thoughts even six months ago, and is entirely due to the enthusiasm of BBB players.

So let me say a big thank you to everyone who has supported the BBB project by your positive feedback, by reading and commenting on this blog, by writing reports and reviews, or by contributing to the group. It's tremendously motivating and rewarding to see that so many people are getting so much pleasure from BBB. Here's to a Happy New Year, and I wish you all happy gaming in 2016!