British Grenadier! at Historicon

My good friend Byron took a bunch of wonderful photos at Historicon and sent them to me to include on the Northern Conspiracy's photo gallery pages. When Byron stopped by the British Grenadier! game I was playing I asked him to snap a couple extra shots so I could use them here on my Blog. My thanks to him for taking these great photos.

The game I played was a 25mm battle of Bunker Hill game hosted by our southern neighbours, the Boston Trained Bands wargaming club based in Malden, MA. Richard Claydon and his assistant GMs from the Trained Bands were excellent hosts and ran a very good game with beautiful terrain. To facilitate quick learning of the rules, and a fast-paced game some of the British Grenadier rules were used in a modified form. The most major change I noticed was the players were allowed to move their units as they liked instead of having to issue and adhere to written orders. This sped up play and made for a fun convention game. The other major change was to allow casualties to take effect immediately rather than waiting for 3 levels of disorder. This helped the game come to a conclusion in the time allotted.

My opinion? I liked a lot of things about British Grenadier! The rules definitely have an 'old school' feel in some ways, but also have some modern components. Played 'by the book' home in a club environment, rather than a convention environment, I think they'll be quite fun for smaller battles where the difference in morale and quality of the two armies is as important as the size of the forces. British Grenadier! has the unique quality that it can be used for battles where smaller forces of British Regulars took on large forces of American rebel militia.

I purchased the rules and both scenario books. The scenario books are quite informative and the scenarios run the gamut from small to large battles both in the north and the south. Even if you're not going to play all of the scenarios in them they still seem quite a good value for the money. I'm looking forward to playing some of my own British Grenadier! games in our club as well as meeting up with the Boston Trained Bands for some future games.

More of Byron's photos of this game can be found on the Northern Conspiracy galleries. Richard Claydon has also posted some more photos of the same game over on the British Grenadier forums on the General de Brigade site. Also of interest to at least one of my subscribers are photos Byron took of a First Carlist War game that his good friend Mark Stevens ran at Historicon.