Black Powder

I went around to my Mate's place last night and we started a game of Black Powder. It has been around a year plus since we last played a game of BP, so we decided to learn the rules again.

 After cleaning the gaming table a bit we deployed our troops, both sides are from his collection of 15mm French and Prussians.

 This is the set up for the game - we are playing three brigades per side for this game.

My French

His Prussians

As you can see the scenery is nothing special at all for this game - we places a couple of buildings on a whim. Once we know what we are doing with the rules we will add extra scenery for our next game.

 After one turn each we ran out of time for the evening, so we will take up the game again next time I go around to my Mate's place.

Black Powder Napoleonics

Today I am showing the 15/18mm British army I am making for Black Powder games.

Due to lack of space and money I have done something close to heresy for some wargamers - one base represents the whole unit, not a number of bases representing the unit.

An infantry corp with support. Four infantry bases represent a brigade.

One base of infantry (three figures) represents a whole Battalion, a base of cavalry (two figures) represents a whole regiment and one gun and crew is a battery.

 At the moment the majority of my figures are Eureka Miniatures, with some AB and CGM thrown in to fill the gaps in the Eureka range. I am also trying to get some Battle Honors British generals so that I can complete my command bases.

 By painting some extra units I can swap out a few units to totally reconfigure my army to represent an different Corp.

 For my Brigade command bases I am using Colonel figures with a standard. I know Brigades didn't have standards, but I wanted to add them as a bit of pomp and pageantry.

 I had to make some changes to the rules to accommodate my thinking - counters are placed next to a unit to indicate formations, and I need to use a record sheet to record morale and casualties, but this works ok.

 I still need to finish off my command, artillery and cavalry units, but I am able to field an army a lot cheaper than I could if I used the basing conventions in the Black Powder rule book, especially if I made my army in 28mm!

My Friend and I have played a number of Black Powder games, including this minimalistic approach and it works great. Being able to field a force larger than a brigade allows for tactics, defense in depth and even a reserve force is a vast improvement on Brigade level games, and we can field the armies in a smaller area.

 For the cost involved it is also feasible to build a number of armies cheaply. I am contemplating making a Bavarian and a Russian army, and I think I will put together a French army so that I always have the forces at hand to play a game.