Dave's Franco-Prussian birthday party

 Dave Whaley is the soul of BBB. It was he who started the whole BBB journey back in 2009 with "Chris, I'd like to do some Franco-Prussian War games".

Fifteen years on and Dave and I are both a bit older and we have indeed done some FPW games. Last weekend he hosted a birthday party with half a dozen of us. We celebrated his birthday in suitable style with two FPW games from the BBB rulebook, one for the imperial phase of the war (Froeschwiller) and one for the republican phase (Loigny/Poupry), punctuated by a non-FPW-themed curry. Herewith a few captioned photos from the games, then reflections as usual.

French in their "position magnifique" await the German onslaught. The bastion of Froeschwiller itself left edge of pic, facing Woerth at the top. An outpost in Elsasshausen (centre of pic) is backed up by Pelle's 2nd Division of MacMahon's 1st Corps. Figures are 10mm Pendraken from Dave's collection.

View looking south. From the left, Germans of Von Kirchbach's V Korps advance around Woerth. Facing them, the French line the heights in front of Froeschwiller and beyond. Bottom right, the Bavarian 7th Brigade files through Langensulzbach to work its way around the French left flank.

Virgin soldiers! Dave didn't have enough Germans, so his were reinforced by Phil's newly painted troops (the ones with the green tufty bases), being blooded in their first ever on-table outing. Lovely work!

Ably commanded by Crispin, the Bavarians had a good war. Here we see both brigades of the Bavarian 4th Division, having smashed through the zouaves of the French 2nd Bde of 1st Div, catch a brigade of 7th Corps in column of march before it can deploy. This was hurled back and eventually wiped out.

Things didn't go so well for me and Phil on the German centre and left. The German gun line plays a crucial role in this battle. I made the mistake of deploying my guns immediately, which meant they were too far back to be truly effective, so I had to limber them up again and redeploy further forward. That cost us a couple of turns when they should have been firing. That plus some duff rolls when they did fire meant we didn't blast away the French quickly enough. Nevertheless, we still stormed Froeschwiller in time to earn the bonus point for taking it early. But we'd therefore had to leave ourselves a bit weak (and been a bit unlucky) on our left, where Mark's audacious Turcos actually sortied across the River Sauer to deny us a victory point there. This is a scenario where casualties matter as well, so we were trying to kill off French units. The above pic shows a sadly diminished 2-base unit, outnumbered by Germans to its front and enfiladed by Bavarians who've just captured Froeschwiller. The French should have been dead meat. Phil's pink dice for this last roll of the game sum up his day.

Congratulations to Mark and Matt on their victory. We could have beaten them, if only we'd been smarter and luckier. Many real generals could say the same.

On to Loigny, then! Exchanging the poorly commanded but excellent troops of the empire for the better-led raw levies of the republic. This pic shows the massed French forces before we deployed them. Again, Dave's 10mm Pendraken.

View of the eastern half of the table (the French right). I took the part of the French C-in-C, d'Aurelle de Paladines, seen here with 15th Corps as it arrives from the SE corner of the battlefield halfway through the game. Poupry, with its white objective counter, is the village upper centre. From the top right, Hessians and Holsteiners race towards Poupry and the town of Artenay (right edge) - not an objective, but a good place to harass the French from.

Meanwhile, Matt on the French left, as Chanzy commanding 16th Corps, had been doing a great job. He killed off a Bavarian advance guard brigade on day 1 and maintained that advantage on day 2. Here we are looking west across the western half of the battlefield. Chanzy's troops have arrived from left edge of pic and worked their way around the Bavarian right: the troops in the wood to the left and the three groups on the far hill are all French. The beleaguered Bavarians have formed a crochet around Loigny (lower right), where their artillery is losing the firefight. Despite a bold counterattack in the centre by one of Mark's German brigades (out of pic, below bottom edge), Matt's well-handled advance was inexorable and the Bavarians were driven out of Loigny - one objective taken by the French. (Incidentally, in reality the high ground is much less pronounced than these polystyrene cliffs suggest and the gentle slopes are very gentle. See my report of my battlefield tour here.)

And on the right, I managed to get a toehold in Poupry before the Germans could get there, and they never managed to winkle me out. Here we see the Foreign Legion fending off green-jacketed German jaegers. As the French held two of the three objectives, that made it a French win. Hurrah!

Reflections:

There are your guns! As I've remarked before, in 19th-century battles putting your guns in the right place is often critical. My early miscalculation cost us at Froeschwiller.

The scenario option worked. For Froeschwiller, Dave used the scenario option that adds an objective: the Germans have to prevent the French from advancing across the Sauer. This added spice to the last couple of turns as Mark's Turcos tried (with eventual success) to dance around Crispin's left flank.

Same scenario, very different games. Loigny is one of our most-played scenarios. It's easy to set up and there's plenty of movement. Its last outing was in December - report here. That was very different, as both sides converged on the Lumeau objective in the centre, whereas this time all the action was on the flanks. It's a great example of the replay value of historical scenarios that let players explore different plans to see how battles could have gone differently.

I do like 10mm. I'm a committed 6mm adherent as I have built up so many 6mm armies over the decades that it would be a massive task to start again in 10mm. However, I'm very happy to play with Dave's and Phil's 10mm armies. At that scale, you still get the mass effect so the game looks a bit like a battle rather than "a few blokes taking a flag for a walk". But it is also easier to distinguish the uniforms and tell the units apart. Another reason I went with 6mm years ago was that I wanted armies for which figures didn't exist and it was easy to proxy 6mm with a paint job. Nowadays that's no longer such a problem as there's much more choice of figures (and you can still do a lot to 10mm with a paint job). Recommended.

Happy Birthday Dave! It was a great day and a great way to celebrate a good man's birthday. The good news is, the man himself had such a good time, he's already planning a repeat for next year!