Drums and Shakos Large Battle (Second Battle)

Saturday evening I made it in time to join my colleagues in another DSLB battle at the Colorado Springs Gamers Association (CSGA) club meeting.  Bernie and Lamont were kind enough to fit me in and put me in command of the British Right Flank and Reserve Brigades.

Bernie and Lamont working it out.

First of all we had a blast.  I have to apologize to them for my interrupting questions because that same morning Matt and I played for our first time and I had questions about many of the rules.  Bernie and Lamont play in 25mm and those figures looked fantastic.  They were based for Napoleon's Battles but it was no problem for a good DSLB battle.

British getting it on!

As I mentioned in the last blog I learned so much from both battles.  In this battle they used all of the troop attributes and have created some pretty nice spreadsheets that are used to build your forces statistics, labels, etc.  I really liked the attributes of Strong, Elan, etc., all familiar to me from SDS.

At this point we still control the slopes.

Some of the rules that became clear were things like:  Using the Combat Dice table and NOT using the Combat (C) value for the number of combat dice.  Sure it is stated in the rules but that doesn't mean that a man my age saw it.  haha.  Another rule was once an Elan unit gets a Dis which they cannot recover they cease being élan and other special rules around fighting squares with infantry or cavalry, etc.  Matt and I had an old Quick Reference sheet and some of the typos were corrected in this new one.  Bernie and Lamont had the new one and made things clearer for me.

Aggressively advancing the Rifles

The very important Proximity rule now makes sense.  It is very important to keep your spacings.  There are some good reasons that make perfect sense for the Proximity.  One of them being that cramming units together could force multiple targets, which would be an advantage for a defender.  Another is that it helps when you form from column to line.  In other rule sets we are crammed in there and are forced to slide other units to make room for a battalion or regiment to form a line.  We like this rule.

On the Russian Flank it was a swirl of action and bad rolls

There were other situations that came up which took Bernie, Lamont and I just a few moments to look it up in the rules and come up with a ruling.  It was the same with Matt.  Matt and I have played wargames together for many years.  Our motto is to never let rules slow down your game.  Don't argue, just keep it moving and we will figure it out later if it's that complicated.  Bernie and Lamont were no different, we figured it out and kept on rolling.

At the top there were some pesky Dragoon waiting to pounce!

So I stuck a few action pictures of Bernie and Lamont's beautiful figures,  It was a great battle but I had a deadline of 10pm and had an hour drive back to Denver to get home so we called it.  At the end we took some time to go over the rules and discussed the scheduling of the next battle.

A swirling battle of Cossacks and other Russian Cavalry

So thanks Bernie and Lamont for a very good battle.  I always enjoy coming down to Colorado Springs and seeing all of you.  I should make it next week.

Dan