Black Powder Dennewitz @ Adler Hobby

The guys from the Boston Trained Bands ran a test run of their Huzzah! Dennewitz scenario today at Adler Hobby. I was happy to help them test it commanding a French brigade. My infantry took a while to get motivated to close, and in the end didn't contribute much to the French effort other than shooting up one cavalry squadron.

This was a fun game with beautiful figures. It will be run on Sunday at the Huzzah! convention. Don't miss it. Plenty of photos are included below.

Dennewitz Lite - Order of Battle

I had a request to share the OB I used for my Dennewitz Lite scenario. If you'd like you can download it here. I'm not sure I'd consider this OB tuned fully yet. The allies need to have their artillery reduced a bit more and at least two of the French cavalry brigades that were removed need to be returned. If this is done I think things will be very close to balanced for a meeting engagement fight.

The only other thing that's slightly un-balancing is the Allies start on the side of the table with the defensible river & stream. This might be mitigated by having the armies fight on the battlefield from east to west instead of north to south. Either that or shift the battlefield a mile to the south so the rivers are just off the table. 

Let me know if you give it a go! I most likely will be giving this another try with the modifications I mentioned.

Dennewitz Lite & Game Day

Saturday our club held it's monthly event. Instead of the usual Friday night, this month we had a day long event with two gaming periods. This was a theme day covering the Wars of France throughout history. With the weather breaking for the first good day of the springtime here in New Hampshire we had fewer attendees than expected, but we still had four great games run and played and everyone seemed to have a good day.

My contribution was a re-play of my previously run Dennewitz game. This version was a what-if scenario using portions of each force using the hypothetical assumption that Napoleon allotted less troops to the push towards Berlin and similarly the allies were able to muster only a portion of their historical defending force. This resulted in similarly sized armies and a game I hoped would complete in under three hours.

Below are the players. On the left, the French, Dave and Ed. On the right are Bob and Kevin. Above the starting positions after each team deployed their forces during the 'night' turn.

During the opening moves the Prusso-Russian force was able to press forward into the town in the middle of the table. This key terrain was part of the scenario victory conditions. The French pressed forward with a solid line of infantry and guns to assault the town, but as the battle progressed the allies brought up more and more reinforcements while relying on the stream on their left to protect their weak flank. During the final turns a large-scale morale break in the French lines was experienced due to their prolonged close proximity of the Allied gun cannister shot, while the Allies remained steady under similar pressure. The Prussian cavalry was able to  capitalize on this morale break and seal the fate for the French. Well played by both sides. I think I will need to adjust the OB even a bit more for a fast game and while doing so further reduce the allied artillery to bring it more in line with what the French have.

Earlier in the day I played in Ed's MASSIVE 6mm Nine Year's War (1698-1697 French vs Anglo-allied army) while several others played in Earl's award winning (at Huzzah!) French & Indian war skirmish game in 28mm.

While my Dennewitz game was being run, Michael ran a medieval castle skirmish game using his own rules, "Have fun storming the castle lads". In the photo are two guests I brought, Gordon (left) and Eric (right). Some may recognize them from my Adler Hobby Thursday night posts.

More photos of the games are available on the Northern Conspiracy's photo gallery page.

Dennewitz - Third Replay

This is the third time I've run this Dennewitz game. The first time was a play test in my basement, the second was at my club's game night. Both of those playings left us a little short on time to play to completion, so this time I hosted it at our club's game day, knowing that this venue presented plenty of time to play the game to completion.

Although our club events are usually well attended, we've had a lot of Saturday events this year and I think the club much prefers our normal Friday night schedule. We originally had three games scheduled, but one game master had to cancel due to other commitments. Because of these two factors attendance was very light. I was only able to get six of the eight players my game was designed for, and that was with the game master of the other game playing as one of my players. We pressed on, and had a good time regardless. I was fortunate that our club has a lot of experienced V&B players who aren't overwhelmed by having to push a corps or more of figures at a time. Since some of the players had played the scenario before, I asked those players switch sides in order to give them a fresh view of the game.

In the photo above you can see the terrain lay out. The French deployment zone is marked in red cord. The Prussian advanced guard deployment zone is anywhere North of the river and east of the bridge, including the Town of Dennewitz. Below you can see the initial deployments for both sides. Prussian on the left and an overview showing both on the right. Of note in the Prussian photo is my new 6mm windmill that I purchased at Historicon and painted for this game. Although 6mm terrain isn't in the figure scale, it better matches the ground scale and still looks quite snappy with the figures.


After seeing this scenario twice, both sides had a good idea of how they wanted to approach the battle. The French took the initiative by pressing the western part of the battle, away from the river while contesting the Dennewitz area initially with only the Italian division and artillery. This thrust proved overwhelming to the Prussian cavalry division initially deployed in that area and the Prussian cavalry gave way falling back on upcoming infantry reserves.


As the French continued to deploy their arriving army they pressured the towns of Neder-Gohlsdorf, Wolmsdorf and Rohlbeck. On the east end of the battlefield the Prussian Landwehr made two solid attacks on Rohlbeck, but neither dislodged the Wurtemburg troops holding it. In the center the Prussians were eventually able to push the French out of Neder-Gohlsdorf after several turns of back-and-forth fighting which saw the town change hands three times in a bloody exchange that threatened to exhaust divisions on both sides. On the west, the overrun Wolmsdorf was kept in French hands for the remainder of the game.


The telling blow actually came when the Prussian 4th division (in the right-hand photo above with blue labels on their stands), after holding that flank since the opening blows of the game, finally collapsed. Until this point holding Windmill Heights had kept the Prussians in the battle. This loss put the French on the winning side of the casualties and at this point the French drew up a solid defensive position. The Prussians, while still having most of their army un-exhausted, conceded that attacking the French in this position wouldn't improve their situation and both sides opted to call the battle at this point. The result of the game was actually quite historical, with the one exception that the French attack didn't cost the players of the game nearly as much as it did in the real battle. Had the French in the game taken more casualties, the Prussians may well have counterattacked late in the battle as they did historically. This battle ended in a Minor French victory.

I'd like to thank all the Northern Conspirators who came to the game and stayed and played it to completion. I'm actually hoping that some day I can bring this game to one of the larger HMGS conventions now that I'm confident that it's well balanced and well designed and that I can host it competently. For those interested in more photos, they can be found on the Northern Conspiracy Events Galleries.

Dennewitz Photos!

I owe my friend Phil all the thanks in the world for tirelessly bringing his digital camera to all of our game nights. I forgot my camrea this past game night due to worrying about everything else I didn't want to forget for the game that I was hosting. These wonderful photos were all taken by Phil. Since I already have a fairly detailed after action report of the battle in my previous post, I'm going to just annotate these photos here. You can click on any photo to see it in full resolution of 1024 x 768.

This is a photo of the table before the game. The Prussian Advanced Guard division is waiting to be deployed, as are the initial French on-board forces. The French deployment zone is marked by the red cord on the tabletop. Not shown in my earlier post about the terrain are the flocked wooded areas and some new 15mm trees I scratch-built for the game unsing my laser and some Woodland Scenics foliage clusters.

French turn one. The on-board French (mostly the Italian division) forces have deployed along the Agger. Just arriving on the table are the first divisions of the Saxon corps.

Visible behind the ridge running eastward from Dennewitz are the forces of the Prussian Advanced Guard.



A couple of turns later, the armies are continuing to deploy and troops are starting to form up (becoming stationary in Volley & Bayonet terms). Clear battle lines are beginning to become visible. Prussian reinforcements are marching to the position of the Advanced Guard who have taken up a defensive position on the heights opposite of the Agger. Artillery fire between the Advanced Guard and the Italian division has begun but has yet to cause significant casualties on either side.

This is a close-up of the area around Dennewitz at about turn three or four. The brown pipe-cleaner markers denote troops that are stationary in Volley and Bayonet. For those unfamiliar with these rules, this is the highest state of order and represents a brigade that is formed and prepared to defend against attack through ranged or melee combat. Visible at the bottom-right of the screen are brigades of my new Saxon corps. At the very top of the screen, the Italians have sent a solitary brigade across the Agger to attempt to turn the Prussian left flank.

Late in the battle Ralph (Speedo) Gero checks to range in his artillery on the Prussian lines. Other Volley & Bayonet mailing list members visible are me (behind the soda bottle with AJ on my shirt) and Ed Mueller (left checkered shirt).

Visible at the bottom of the screen on the ends of both lines (marked with red markers) are the permanetly-disordered troops which were the result of the earlier Prussian cavalry charge on the French left flank. At the top of the screen you can see that the Prussian Advanced Guard has retreated to the reverse slope of their ridge after the French and Italian artillery had finally ranged in and started to inflict significant casaulties.

Soon after this photo was taken the game wound to a close with each army ready to fight another day of battle, but with us running out of time in the evening. Both sides did a great job of caring for their armies while deploying under fire. The first day of battle was fought to a draw.

Dennewitz After Action Report

I ran the Dennewitz scenario for my wargaming club, The Northern Conspiracy, last Friday at our monthly game night. I've been preparing for the game since my original play test in my basement which I reported earlier in this blog. Since my last update I was able to finalize the terrain for the game by flocking the forest marker felts to match the table cloth from my previous post. I also took some time and put my laser engraver to use making some 'Barker Markers' for pre-measuring a massed stand's location as well as a ZOC and angle gauge. The angle gauge we affectionately called 'hockey sticks' for obvious reasons. They have a 45-degree angle to measure obliques and fire arc as well as a 1" wide base for frontal ZOC and 1/4" wide shaft for side ZOC measuring. These were made in 2/3 scale which is what we use for 15mm games. We call this the 'hinch' scale.

This scenario was run on the full map as provided in the Road to Glory scenario that starts on page 84 of the Volley and Bayonet rulebook. I use the order of arrival and the OBs from the scenario verbatim with one exception: I added the Swedish Mormer Hussars and horse battery which is reported to have been present at the battle (see the OB here: http://napoleonistyka.atspace.com/Battle_of_Dennewitz.htm

The opening moves for the French were comprised of a cautious advance to and deployment behind the Agger from the bridge, eastward to Rohrbeck by the Italian division with the French Cavalry guarding the left flank towards Gohldorf. The following few turns were comprised of each army deploying their arriving troops in parallel lines approximately 1400 yards from each other. The allies on a line from Dennewitz, through Gohldorf and extending approximately straight beyond Gohldorf. The French lines formed up southeast of the allies. During the deployment, artillery dueling between the artillery accompanying the Italians and the artillery of the Prussian Advanced guard division proved to be ineffective on both sides.

During the final stages of a lengthy and cautious deployment on both sides, von Oppen's Prussian cavalry division charged the extreme left flank of the deploying French force routing a brigade of French cavalry, only later to be repulsed and mostly destroyed by massed artillery and infantry small arms fire. Also on the right French flank, the Italians sortied out of Rohrbeck to try to out-flank the Prussian advanced guard. Recently-arrived reinforcements were able to repulse the Italians, driving them back through Rohrbeck and across the Agger. In the center, an opportunistic charge by the Prissuan Brandenburg Dragoons routed a French infantry brigade, but the French were able to reform their ranks in their following turn.

As dark approached the Prussian advanced guard began withdrawing behind the ridge between Dennewitz and Rohrbeck to avoid receiving additional casualties from the French artillery that had finally ranged in and begun to inflict casualties, but it was obvious to both teams that significant improvements in their positions could not be made before nightfall. The game was called by mutual agreement of both teams a turn before dark. The final point difference of .5 victory points was essentially a draw. Neither team made any mistakes and both teams played very cautiously which allowed for this outcome. I think this is a very well balance scenario that John Holtz has designed, and the players in my game very much wanted the additional time to play an additional day of battle. I hope to run the scenario again on one of our game days to allow them exactly that opportunity. Both armies had areas of strength and areas of weakness in their deployments and it would have been interesting to see how the battle would have played out if the players had time to conduct another day of battle.

Unfortunately for me I forgot my camera at home. I hope to augment this post with some photos that were taken by my friend Phil, as soon as I can get them from him.

Preparing for another Dennewitz

I've spent the majority of my hobby time the past couple of weeks preparing to host another Dennewitz game. This next one will be this upcoming Friday at my club's monthly game night. When possible I like to play test my scenarios at home before subjecting the club to them. This helps me work out any kinks in the scenario and get things balanced so the game is fun for both sides, even if this means tweaking the forces or arrival times a bit. The test run of this scenario (see my previous updates below) went well. The published scenario seemed well balanced and the decisions of the players in my first game dictated the outcome, which is my preference. Since I didn't have to work on the scenario, this gave me extra time to work on other aspects of the game, starting with the pictured dedicated terrain cloth. I expect that I will be running this game a few times so I took the time to flock a felt with all the roads in place for the battle. This makes a much nicer looking tabletop but still allows be to set up the game rapidly at location away from my home.

One of the things that we as wargamers have to deal with in our games is distortion of scale. Figure scale, ground scale, time scale are all balanced to try to give a good playable game while maintaining as much historic accuracy as possible. Most gamers try to match the scale of their buildings to the figure height scale, i.e. 15mm buildings with 15mm figures. In the past I have also done this. Recently my uncle Ralph has been using 6mm buildings to represent towns in his 15mm V&B games under the assumption that these more accurately match the ground scale and have the benefit of not making towns and villages occupy an unreasonably large amount of the tabletop. Considering that Dennewitz has eight (8) towns on it's small tabletop I found that this necessitated that I adopt Ralph's philosophy and build up eight town blocks using 6mm terrain. I chose to buy my buildings from Timecast Models from the UK. I chose them because they had a good selection of Eastern European models suitable for Napoleonic battles. The top photo here shows a close-up of one of my town blocks using Timecast's walls and buildings. The buildings are removable for when the town is occupied by a stand of troops. This allows the town to occupy a minimal footprint on the game table. The photo to the right shows a wider-angle view of a couple of the towns bracing the marshy-banked river that is a central feature of the battlefield. The 6mm bridge is also a Timecast model.

I was still missing a couple of stands of Dragoons mounted on linear stands, so I also painted them up. Per the recommendations of the members of the Volley & Bayonet Yahoo group I added a light wash (made by diluting my 25mm wash) to emphasize the details of the figures. I was a bit gun-shy about using the full strength wash in fear that it would muddy the figures too much, but in the end I think I swayed the other way a bit too much and could probably have diluted it less for a stronger effect. Still it's an improvement over the non-washed figures. It also shows up a bit more in person than in photographs under incandescent light.

Landwehr Cavalry for Dennewitz

After hosting Dennewitz at my house and enjoying the scenario, I decided that I should bring the game to my club's game night in February. In order to do so I thought it would be best to try to paint up the figures that I borrowed from my friend Ed to run the first game. The Prussians have a very interesting organization in this battle. Each infantry brigade (as the Prussians call it, functionally they're the same as other army's divisions) contains three regiments of infantry including some light infantry skirmishers, a battalion of artillery, and a small regiment of cavalry. These small regiments are based in Volley & Bayonet on linear cavalry stands - something that is fairly uncommon, so I needed to paint up figures specifically for this purpose. I also didn't have any massed Landwehr cavalry yet and the scenario requires a unit of that as well. While I had the figures on the table I also painted up a mounted Landwehr officer to represent General von Lindenau, commander of the Prussian advanced guard division. Since the advanced guard division is comprised almost entirely of Landwehr, I thought an officer in a Landwehr uniform was called for.

The figures are AB miniatures. I hadn't used AB before, but they make Prussian reserve infantry in uniforms that I like, so when ordering up some of the reserve infantry figures I added in the cavalry figures I needed. The castings from AB are crisp, similar to Essex, only they're larger, about half way between Essex and Old Glory for size. I'm still quite a bit rusty painting 15mm figures, so these were painted using the same quick painting techniques I used on my Saxons. They're solid 'wargaming quality' paint jobs though - good enough for my table top games.

Dennewitz & My New Saxons

My friend George has recently revived an old tradition in our club - members hosting games on at their homes on Friday nights between club events (which are hosted at a rented hotel function room). We used to do this quite often, in fact the club held ALL of its events in people's basements for over a decade before we got big enough to warrant renting a neutral location montly. This past Friday I decided to take my turn and host a 15mm Napoleonic Volley & Bayonet game. Since I haven't hosted a Napoleonic game using the new V&B rules I chose one of the scenarios from the rulebook - Dennewitz. I liked that it utilized my new Prussian figures that I purchased from GAJO as well as my Italian and Russian figures.

The game went well and I learned a lot about the scenario hosting it for the first time. This scenario has a lot of figures in a rather small space, so maneuver takes a second priority to lines of retreat and secure flanks. Both of the latter ended up being key to the battle. The initial deployments are shown above, for those familiar with the scenario I substituted Russian figures for some of the Prussians, specifically the advanced Armeekrops which deploys on the table. I used my Oplechene figures for the Landwher and kept all the ratings, etc. the same. I chose to use the small battlefield option, but in future games I will probably use the larger battlefield, at least the additional foot of terrain on the eastern side of the battlefield. If you're looking at the tabletop and things look small, we use 2/3 scale V&B stands and rulers to allow us to fight larger battles on standard size tables.

On turn one the French immediately occupied Dennewitz, but surprisingly were pushed right back out in the Allied half of turn one by the Russian Olplechne. The marshy stream on the south side of Dennewitz made subsequent assaults on Dennewitz too difficult and the French chose instead to roll up their heavy artillery battalions and set in for a siege of the town via artillery fire from the neighboring hillside.


On the left flank, initial Russian cavalry units on the battlefield met the advancing French troops outside of Goehlsdorf. When I was reading the order of arrival for the battle and the objectives I didn't anticipate the battle lines ending up running through Goehlsdorf, but that's indeed how it developed in our game. In the next few turns both sides deployed their arriving troops along the battle line running from Dennewitz to Goehlsdorf. During the confusion of this deployment, one regiment of Prussian dragoons (a linear V&B stand) chose a target of opportunity, and charged the heavy artillery battalions that were shelling Dennewitz in the flank. A successfull melee on the first battalion was followed up by a breakthrough charge on a second battery routing both. The following turn the French countercharged the blown Prussian dragoons and annhilited them, but the Prussian players thought that one regiment of dragoons was a fair trade for two battalions of heavy artillery. Other than this exchange the next few turns consisted of scattered long-range artillery fire and further deployment of the arriving armies.

On turn five the fighting began in earnest and also came to an instant climax when a combined Saxon and Italian charge on the Prussian center faltered and resulted in the Saxon and Italian troops falling back through their own reinforcing line disordering it. The following Prussian countercharge was sucessful across the line (with the exception of one stubborn Saxon artillery battalion that held its ground firmly) in routing the repulsed Italians and Saxons en masse opening up a huge gap in the French center. The photo to the left was taken part way through the resolution of the combat on the Prussian turn.

West of Goehlsdorf, theFrench cavalry which had just arrived deployed to guard the French left flank and help support the troops occupying the town. The Russian reserve cavalry was marching to the area and Phil hoped to bottle them up before they could deploy.


The final turn saw French counter charges across the board, but the Prussians held firmly even though the constant fighting had prevented them the opportunity to go stationary. With the primary victory conditions being exhaustion of enemy divisions the Allies were clear winners with no exhausted divisions and they held the Windmill heights for a total score of -1 for the French. The French had 3 divisions exhausted (including one collapsed). The result of the battle a solid Allied victory.

This was a fun game to host. I'd like to thank everyone who came and played, especially Phil who didn't get troops onto the board until late in the game due to my unfamiliarity with the order of arrival of the troops (sorry Phil). I'd also like to specially thank my friend Ed for lending me the Prussian cavalry based on linear stands which I needed for the game.

My New Saxons

(or how to paint a corps in a weekend)

When I decided to host Dennewitz, I scanned the OB and thought to myself, 'Wow, I have everything I need for this!' Then the day I sent out the invitatinos for the game I realized that there was one glaring exception to my assumption. I didn't have any Saxons....and there's a whole CORPS of them in this OB. Lucky for me I had the weekend free and the Saxons used French uniforms so I happened to have some unpainted figures that would be appropriate in my 'dead lead' box. I decided to try my hand at some 'speed painting' using a black primer technique and see if I could paint up a few units. The flags are from warflag.com printed on plain paper. There are two figure conversions in these units, but until I can get better close-up photos I'm going to leave them a secret.

To my surprise by Saturday evening I had painted up two brigades of infantry and four mounted Generals. Sunday I only had part of the day to paint but I was able to finish the artillerists, and artillery for four battalions of artillery, a brigade of cheveauleger cavalry as well as getting a start on the final two brigades of infantry. Monday night I was able to finish up the last of the infantry and base everything up. They won't win any contests, but I got it all done and still had plenty of time to set up the tabletop and label the troops for the game the following weekend.



Sorry for the poor quality photos, it's very windy here in New Hampshire in the winter and frightfully cold. Setting up my photo setup outside to get proper light is nigh impossible unless we get a very rare warm day, and I really wanted to include the Saxons in this post since I painted them for the battle.