This evening our little group got together for our first run through of the rules "Twilight of the Sun King". I picked the battle of Lazzara out of the scenario book I had purchased for our first battle. The troops are Kevin's Seven Years War figures filling in for French and Austrian.
First off let me say that after reading the rules several times and then also having Nic Dorrell (rules author) send me a rather detailed sequence of play we still screwed up the first 3 turns. Things rapidly fell apart and we stopped playing. We had a good discussion walking through a turn and the mechanics became more natural. After that we reset the table and started over from turn 1. Things flowed a whole lot better the second time around.
This is the start of the game. The Austrians are on the left and French on the right. Essentially the cavalry on both wings with the infantry and artillery in the center.
These two photos are from our failed first attempt this evening.
After resetting and starting again the cavalry on both flanks took off crashing into each other. Both centers held back for a turn or two.
Cavalry is brittle in this set with them only really taking 2 morale hits before they removed from play. The French had a string of bad die rolls upon their first contacts with the Austrians.
The morale on the French starts to pile up.
More Austrian cavalry waiting to charge.
The French cavalry fell back a few times.
The French cavalry on their right wing lined up and ready to charge.
The French center starts to move.
The cavalry continues to crash into each other. The Austrians finally lose a melee or two
Gaps in the French cavalry line.
The French and Austrian infantry finally close and a bloody melee takes place.
The center was a death trap. The Austrians piled up the support to keep themselves engaged with the French. But the French cavalry lost two more units creating a hole for the Austrian cavalry to swing around and face the infantry.
The Austrian left starts to fall apart but not before the French right fails it's Wing Commander morale roll and that sides collapses. After that we called the game.
Despite our initial screw up with the game we all ended up enjoying the rules. On our second time around we played through 7 turns before the French Right collapsed from excessive losses. There are a few modifiers that I need to get some clarification on but overall we had fun. In fact we are going to run another game on the 25th.
Not familiar with these rules, but curious what caused the confusion and reset?
ReplyDeleteThe system uses a unique turn sequence and there are no fire or melee sequences. Everything is rolled up into a morale roll for the unit. It starts off with Player A goes first. Player B fires his/her artillery at player A. Once that is done player A then rolls morale for any units that are under fire(if in range), in melee or under bombardment and applies those results. The last step in the sequence is Player A moving his units. We had this sequence out of order and was not applying the morale in the correct way.
DeleteGreat looking game Victor.
ReplyDeleteGood stuff, glad you enjoyed! I had the advantage of Nick in person for our first multiplayer game so that helped tremendously! Also a few solo play thru's had meant I'd identified the areas I was wooly on...
ReplyDeleteI reckon they're a cracking set of rules and very give me the feel for LoA & WSS era warfare that I want, in a way I want to replicate it :)
Nathan
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ReplyDeleteThe rules sound really interesting and certainly produce a really good looking game which seems to have plenty of tension and excitement.
ReplyDelete