Yesterday, Adrian and I put on his scenario for the Battle of Vauchamps 1814 during which the French allegedly suffered 800 casualties and the Prussians 18,000. Balanced info on the subject was rather hard to come by as the tone of the text in the H&C 1814 book leans somewhat towards the French perspective
The scenario was a divisional sized game in which the French were pushing east to roll back a Prussian/Russian advance. We had a pretty packed table most of the day and were ably assisted by Bob Thornton who is really getting to know the rules pretty well now.
My
Crusade for understanding of R2E seems to have taken a few steps forward with many people coming back to the table several times to watch the rapid pace of progress and comment favourably on the game play.
Despite the armies starting over 6 feet apart on a 12 feet long table, there was action on Turn 2 when Prussian Landwehr cavalry charged an advancing French column and were sent packing in short order. By Turn 3 The Prussian Guard Cuirassiers were cutting through French Cuirassiers, by T6 there was NO CAVALRY left on the table as they had hacked each other to pieces leaving the French columns to assault Vauchamp. We had just begun this activity which was shaping up well for Marmont when we pullled stumps at 1600. Bearing in mind there were three of us and we all had 'business' to do at the show on several trips around as well as talk to the public we got very far on with the scenario which I think perhaps had 4-6 turns left in it.
Feedback was good, the MW review was mentioned a couple of times (and a couple of times more by Stuart Parkin!!!). I did have a sneaky suspicion that the guy who interrogated me for 20 minutes on cameras, rule writing, my outlook on wargames etc towards the end of the day was in fact Bruce Macfarlane but he drifted away as mysteriously as he had arrived.... a puzzle to rival the Mary Celeste
When I asked him why he didn't push his point of view about rules (he was unhappy with ALL Napoleonic rules he'd ever played) he cryptically said.. 'No point, nobody ever listens to me anyway'... hmmm maybe....