The Loose Association of Wargamers

This game was fought just after Christmas with LAW Members: Mark, Paul, Simon, Norman, Me & Jordan (my lad)
We met up at my place about 10:30 first dice were thrown about 11:30. The battle was fought over two historical days with night time movements and casualty replacements. Austrians (Me, Simon, Paul) had to capture both villages AND THE GRANARY. The French (Jordan, Mark, Norman)had to hold the villages AND THE GRANARY and destroy 26 Austrian units . The French had to rely on the arrival of reinforcements across a rather dodgy bridge. The French had two troops of Engineers to protect and strengthen the bridge. The Austrians had a troop of vey creative Engineers to try and destroy the bridge with the use of barges full of stone, felled logs and best of a mill on a barge. The rest was history so they say.

The opening scene. With Simons Austrians advancing on Aspern, the French advanced units preparing the villages for defence and the French cavalry in the centre. The head of the French column just starting to cross the bridge with Napoleon in the lead. Austrian Engineers can be seen preparing a barge to float down the river and the French Engineers taking a well earned rest.



These pictures are out of sequence, but 'hay ho' this is early on the second day and you can see the 'mill on a raft' (I know ??) floating towards the bridge. In the distance on the right you can see a barge that has just floated off in the wrong direction, its one of those 'anything but a 1 tests' and incredibly the AWSOME! 'bridge destroying' mill on a raft did exactly the same (the Austrians were using a novice dice thrower)

Here you can see the French Engineers, in a boat with hand pikes protecting the bridge.

Paul as Rosenburg moving his Reserve Cavalry over onto his Left Flank.



Peeler doing some fingering !!

Normans (Lannes) well ordered French Right Flank

This is the crazy story of the day. The scene shows an Austrian barge smashing through and destroying the bridge, HOWEVER! this was at the end of the game, literally just after the last French unit in a long reinforcing column passed over the bridge, go figure ! just toooooo late.



The final scene, the Austrians captured both villages and Garrisoned them, BUT! they never took the Granary !! and the French Destroyed 26 Austrian units and won the game.







A great game well fought, the game had lots of high octane moments and the final victory was a nail biter. The game finished around 6pm we then went into Scarborough for a few sherbets and a good curry.

Looks and sounds like an excellent gaming experience.

A quick question here - my experience of DB-Whatever (DBA, as it happens) is that the playing area is deliberately small, and that a key tactic is keeping all of the units in your army more or less within touching distance. The DBN variant seems a lot more "spread out" for want of a better term. Is that the case?

Hi Baron, using 15mm figures, the battleboard for this battle was 4 foot by 3 foot and it was a big Napoleonic battle. The Waterloo battleboard for 15mm is only 5 foot by 4 foot. So with DBN 'big historical battles are fought on small tables' .
DBN may appear to be a bit more 'spread out' as oppose to DBA because almost every unit can fire...maybe ?

I think its also because of appropriate scenario design. So in Ancients you tend to have "line up in the middle and fight" type battles (gross oversimplication I know). Whereas the Napoleonic scenarios - all based on real battles tend to model a variety of objectives that need to be achieved by tasking separate divisions/corps. It would be lovely to have a single formation and advance with it for 1 CAP (no difference to DBA there) but you aren't going to be able to achieve the victory conditions.

Bottom line on force size in DBN is that it’s infinitely expandable.
The basic opposes game calls for 12-element forces.
The expanded 24-element opposed game uses a larger playing area.
Historical scenarios use the appropriate orbats and table size.

The issue with larger games of DBN is one of command and control.
With the CinC rolling a single D6 for command points, sub-commanders are required to control larger forces.
They’re bought from the points list like any other unit: 1 point for a poor Sub-Commander (-1 CAP), 2 points for regular, 3 points for a good officer (+1 CAP).

Thanks for the explanations, gents - most useful.