Hungary’s last battles: Szőreg and Temesvár, 1849

For the last couple of years we have been fighting our way through all the major battles of the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-1849. I put a lot of effort into creating the scenarios: many, many hours of tracking down and translating Austrian and Hungarian sources, nailing down orders of battle, working out the detailed sequence of events, examining various historical maps to reproduce the terrain accurately.

One result of all this dedicated effort can be an excessively nerdy love of the tiny gems of detail discovered along the way. The risk that follows is that scenarios can be excessively adorned with special rules that delight us as scenario writers but just throw up to much radar clutter for our poor players' brains to cope with.

This month we fought the last two battles in the Hungary 1848-1849 series: Szőreg and Temesvár. I think that in these cases I got the balance right, including enough of the unique circumstances to make the games distinctive and memorable for the players, but mostly without complicating them so much as to cause brain pain (though see below).

The situation by late July/August 1849 was that both of Hungary's field armies were in full retreat toward the southeast of the country, trying to link up near the fortress of Temesvár (still Austrian-held and under siege). The one under Görgei that had escaped from Komorn/Komarom had been forced to take a circuitous route around behind the invading Russians and was approaching Arad, not far from Temesvár. However, Görgei would not get to fight another battle, because Dembinski commanding the other army would fail to meet him.

'The disastrous Dembinski' with Hungary's southern army had been occupying a large entrenched camp at Szeged on the west bank of the River Tisza. As Haynau's Austro-Russian columns approached, Dembinski was fearful of being surrounded, so he abandoned the camp without a fight and fell back to the east bank of the river. He then allowed the Austrians to establish a bridgehead in front of him, again with barely a fight. When the Austrians broke out from their bridgehead, the battle of Szőreg ensued.

Historically, Szőreg was a rearguard action by one Hungarian corps while the anxious Dembinski again retreated pre-emptively with most of his army to avoid the threat of being outflanked. In our game we allowed the Hungarians the option to have more of their troops turn and fight to try to give the Austrians a bloody nose. A distinctive feature of the battle was a massive dike, built to contain the Tisza's seasonal flooding, that the Hungarians had embrasured for 50 guns. In the game this produced a real ding-dong see-saw fight as the outnumbered Hungarians repeatedly kicked the assaulting Austrians back over the dike until being finally overwhelmed. A characterful game with options for both sides, fast and fun to play. There was one instance of special rule brain pain. I had written a 'flank threat' rule whereby if the Hungarians did commit troops to battle that historically avoided it, they risked conceding victory points to the Austrians, representing being outflanked and cut off post-battle. This did confuse the players a little, not enough to spoil the game, but enough that I needed to re-write it to make it clearer. The playtest also showed that the victory conditions generally needed amending and re-calibrating.

Szőreg was thus a productive playtest and an entertaining game. Fittingly, though, the best entertainment was provided by this week's game, the culmination of the campaign: the climactic battle of Temesvár (now Timisoara in Romania).

Temesvár happened a few days after Szőreg. By now, after so many retreats and defeats, the Hungarian army was thoroughly demoralized, so I rated all its infantry Fragile. Historically they ran away with barely a fight, covered by their cavalry and artillery. The rout was sparked by 10,000 scythe-armed levies, units who provided the game with some special flavour. The battle happened because Dembinski - who was poised to retreat and avoid battle yet again - was suddenly replaced by General Bem, who felt the army needed to fight and win a battle now if it was not to disintegrate. As the Austro-Russians approached, he pushed toward them to defend the line of the River Nyarad, but could not withstand what was now a very efficient and formidable Allied military machine.

Our game upset history. The Allies start the game outnumbered because half their force has yet to turn up. We had a relatively new player commanding the Austrian right who ventured what proved to be a fatal foray with part of his force. In a contest of Austrian quality against Hungarian quantity, the sheer numbers of Hungarians overwhelmed an isolated Austrian brigade. This early success magnified as the game went on and resulted in the Austrian gun line on the right becoming exposed and eventually overrun, and their line of communications cut. When the Austro-Russian left arrived, it did grind remorselessly forward and had the game gone on another turn or two, could well have crushed the Hungarian right and centre; but the valiant scythemen had detained an Austrian brigade almost all game, and this and other delays held off the Austrians long enough for Hungary to claim victory.

Although the scoreboard showed an emphatic Hungarian win, the game was closer than the score suggested, and given that the Hungarians were well handled as against some Allied tactical errors, the scenario seemed nicely balanced. The players all enjoyed it, even the defeated Allies - in fact elated would not be too strong a word - and keen to swap sides and refight it soon, so we have scheduled a rematch for August.

Meanwhile both scenarios are now available in the BBB Yahoo group files.

Thus we have now fought through the entire campaign. As I have done a lot more research along the way, I do need to go back and polish some details of the scenarios. When I've done that, I expect we will do final playtesting by fighting through the whole lot again in a concentrated period, as a linked campaign, before I publish them as a BBB campaign scenario book together with some suitable historical background information etc.