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Three Blackguards and Lasalle Too
A Review and a Game of Sam Mustafa’s
Lasalle Second Edition Rules
By
Peter Hunt
The Defenders of Quatre Bras
“…Any
hussar who does not die by thirty is a blackguard..." Sadly,
Antoine-Charles-Louis, Comte de Lasalle’s famous epigram does not appear
in Sam Mustafa’s new set of Napoleonic Rules, which is about the only
thing that I can criticise them for, since they are very, very good.
Lasalle himself had already passed his self-appointed use-by date when
he fell at Wagram, but only by a mere four years and he was leading a
cavalry charge at the same time, so history has looked upon him kindly
as a man of his word.
On
the other hand, former young hussars Jeff, Tony and Bertie have
progressed well into their blackguardary, although, in their defence, I
submit that cavalry charges to lead are a lot harder to come by these
days. But, in compensation, they have well over a century of wargames
experience between them, and they have spent a fair part of that time
seeking the best Napoleonic rules to play with. So, what must these
rules contain to meet our requirements?
Above all the rules must produce the look and feel
of a Napoleonic battle. By this I mean that they must replicate all the
things we see in our mind's eye when reading Chandler or Arnold, or that
we marvelled at when we first saw Waterloo on the big screen at the age
of 14.
It must have long lines, menacing attack
columns, cavalry charging by squadrons, squares bristling with steel, 12
pounders spewing forth death, horse artillery riding up at the gallop,
smoke, confusion, and Harvey Keitel challenging you to a dual
afterwards. (Add music and bad wine to taste.) This means that we are
playing battalion level games. Games
where the basic manoeuvre unit is the brigade, like Frank Chadwick’s
“Volley and Bayonet” or Sam Mustafa’s “Blucher” might enable you to
fight Borodino in an evening, but they do not cut it for me because a
brigade is a brigade is a brigade and we don’t see them forming those
lines, columns and squares. Skirmish games are fine, because we all like
Sean Bean, but again a skirmish is a skirmish is a skirmish, and there
are only the uniforms and some of the weapons that are specifically
Napoleonic about them. Nice for an afternoon’s fun but not the joy I
really seek.
Once you have accepted a battalion scale the rest
falls into place. You need to form squares and columns so a minimum of
three and preferably four bases are necessary for a battalion to take up
the formation. A musket could be effective up to 100 or 150 metres which
is about the same as the frontage of a battalion in line, so that sets
your musket firing range: four of whatever your base widths are.
Multiply that appropriately for your artillery ranges. So that has your
ground scale set. Figure scale doesn’t really matter as that depends on
the size of your minis, my four 15mm to a base and Tony’s eight 10mm all
look fine. Perhaps one fewer for 28mm or many more for 6mm and 2mm, or
just smaller bases for them.
And if four bases represent a normal sized
battalion then five bases can represent a big one, and three a small
one.
Time scale is to your own taste, but I think that
a move representing about 15 to 20 minutes is ideal, although this
entails some mechanism so that troops out of combat can march a
kilometre, or 30-40 base widths, in that time. Such a time scale could
give you about a two-to-three-hour real time span in the 10 moves or so
that you are going to get through in a normal length game. This means
that you are not going to get through all of Borodino in a day but that
doesn’t mean that you cannot do historical games. The size is perfect
for smaller battles or a discrete part of a bigger battle: over the
years we have managed things like d‘Erlon’s Attack at Waterloo, The
Poles at Borodino,
The Redoubts at Borodino, Aspern-Essling,
Raab, Fuentes de Orono, Busaco, The Heights at Salamanca and many more
at full scale, and bigger battles by scaling down divisions as brigades,
and corps as divisions. In this manner we have successfully do things
like Wagram and Leipzig. To this list can now be added Reille’s attack
at Quatre Bras which the three blackguards played out using Lasalle 2nd
Edition. Part 2: The Rules Format
If you have seen any of Sam Mustafa’s rules the
format of “Lasalle” will not surprise you. It does look nice, with huge
print, short paragraphs, and lots of (mostly) relevant illustrations.
All this comes at a price:
it
is not cheap at $40US, and to me it seems to be a high price to pay for
a lot of white space on the page. I would prefer a smaller print size
with fewer pages with a lower price, but then I know lots of folk who
complain about the format of, say DBMM, who will love this style of
presentation: clearly “you pays your money and takes your choice”. One
thing that I do find irritating is that as well as good explanatory
diagrams the text is also peppered with rather silly little pictures of
things that are explained in the text. So, for example, next to the text
that tells you that a general within four base-widths of the enemy is
wounded if he throws a one, is a picture of a dice showing a one with
the caption “General Casualty w/in 4BW.” It is almost as if the rules
were written for people who can’t read. That is a minor point, and the
little pictures are all repeated in the rules summaries where they make
sense.
One thing that I do like is that Mr, Mustafa
includes designers notes as he goes along, (written in smaller point
italics which are perfectly readable, which shows that the large point
print is not vital to comprehension,) so you understand what his
thinking is. You do not have to agree with his thinking, but it is good
to know where he is coming from. There is also a three-page FAQ, which
explains more rules choices. The two-page index is good but not
brilliant: for example, there is no entry for “shaken,” a key unit
state, which was, predictably the only thing I needed to look up in the
index during our game.
There is no QRS but there is an eight-page
rules summary. We printed and bound that from the PDF and it is all you
need to play the game.
Where’s the Meat? But a flash format and nice presentation do not a good rule set make - what about the content? Well, as far as I’m concerned, it is worth every cent of the 40 bucks. When the original Lasalle came out in 2009 it had a small following in the Club that soon died out. It had an interesting movement comes last system but that tended to cause as many problems as it tried to solve. Opinions ranged from “meh?” to “interesting but a bit clunky,” with interesting used in the same way as when someone gives you a new drink or item of food, and you cannot immediately decide if you love it or hate it, but you cannot really be bothered to try more and make your mind up. So, when last year I read on the Honour newsletter that the franchise was getting a re-boot, (Mr. Mustafa’s word,) I was intrigued. Rather like Star Trek, the new iteration was to keep the name, and the basic characteristics of the predecessor, but was very different.
British Infantry in Line
Their “Quick Fire”
trait will mean that when firing it throws eight dice to a French line’s
six. But when they melee all will be equal. The two French columns in
front of them only generate 2 dice each, so should waste no time in a
firefight: “En avant, mes enfants!”
The
game scale of Lasalle is right in the sweet spot described above:
battalion units and proportionate ground scale, (although Mr. Mustafa
fudges here a bit, giving cannister the same range as musketry,) and
although no time scale is given in the rules themselves a two-hour
historical scenario is played over eight turns, so we get 15 minutes to
a turn. Troops can be distinguished by up to ten traits which is a
concept I agree with, so, for examples, the Brits do not need to have
all round superior characteristics, just a “rapid fire” trait that gives
the a third more firepower than a normal line, whist the French in
attack column do not count charging as a complication, and so on. So
far, so good, and it gets gooder. The key to Lasalle is its command and
skirmishing system. Before I continue to enthuse profusely here, I give
a health warning: If you like an IGOUGO system where you move everything
and shoot everything whilst your opponent sits there, and then he does
the same to you, then you will not like these rules. Save yourself $40
on the rules and save your time by reading this article no further, go
back and continue to enjoy yourself in your own way.
Both
sides start a turn with a “momentum” of a set number of orders to give,
(“pips” if you like.) These are not derived from a dice throw but from
your army size and organization, so, theoretically, you will always have
enough pips for each of your brigades to do something. Your general can
either focus himself on the “Big Picture” “Helicopter View” management
philosophy in which case he will add some more pips, (that number is
dice dependent,) or he can “walk the talk” and be “hands on” and deploy
himself to deal with a tactical situation, called an intervention.
Next you decide on the skirmishing situation
between the two sides.
I’ve just read James Arnold’s “October
Triumph” about Jena and Auerstädt, and I was struck by how the French
completely out organized and out skirmished the Prussians, and in doing
so consistently gained the initiative and impeded Prussian operations in
all sorts of ways. Most rule sets, including mine, handle skirmishing as
a totally tactical matter protecting one of your own units or harassing
an enemy unit. This might be fun in itself, but it is a case of
“bottom-up” design and often hardly worth the time and effort in working
it all out.
Lasalle, on the other hand, takes a much
bigger view. The winner of the skirmish battle gets to win the
initiative and go first, and in the basic game would get more momentum
pips so his army will have an advantage that way, or in the advanced
game, which we played, gets to target enemy units and impede them. This
all works really well. The only beef I have is how you decide the
skirmishing outcome. You throw one, two or three dice for each unit,
looking for sixes. You can break down two units completely into
skirmishers, in which case they get more dice and higher hit scores. In
our game that meant the French were throwing 66 dice! Throwing these
bucket loads in groups of 20 and 30 made what should have been an
exciting exercise a bit of a nightmare, with dice all over the place,
including, often, the floor. See below for possible solutions.
“Darling, it’s complicated, and it’s not you,
it’s me.”
Having worked out how many pips you have and who is going first you
start the turn. Orders to fire or change formation can be issued to the
whole army, orders to move and rally are issued to individual brigades,
or groups of units in the same brigade. Individual units can do all of
these things in any sequence they like if they are so ordered, but they
may only do each thing once a turn.
Orders are either simple, or complicated if they
involve units charging, interpenetrating, in difficult terrain, or which
are shaken, and they cost one pip more for each complication. So, an
order can cost between one and five pips depending on how complicated it
is. Naturally, you don’t want to blow all your pips on needlessly
complicated orders so how you structure your orders, along with how you
use your general to intervene and make your orders easier becomes very
important.
Having executed your order you can issue
another one unless the enemy has grounds to “interrupt your momentum,”
which he will have if you did anything in musketry range of him. This is
called being “near the enemy.” Thus, you can keep your momentum going on
your side whilst you are moving not close to the enemy or bombarding
him. But as soon as you get near the enemy you can expect the initiative
to pass frequently.
So,
the turn continues as both sides issue orders and the initiative passes
back and forth, until eventually one, then both of you run out of pips.
This is a truly engrossing system. Of course, what you don’t want to do
is run out of momentum before the other chap does, which will give him
the chance to do things that you cannot respond to, all the more so if
he has a skirmishing advantage and is likely to move first next turn.
So, you may be inclined to pass on the chance to interrupt his momentum
to save your own pips, or perhaps issue simpler, less complicated orders
that use less pips. It is this constant decision making that makes the
game so much fun. The Mechanics
Movement is easy and very liberal, except when you
are near the enemy when it is reduced to a snail’s pace unless you are
charging.
So, you really don’t want to be near the
enemy unless you want to charge them or are confident in your shooting.
There is no deduction for moving through bad terrain which I love: yes,
it took you twice as long to move up that hill, but it took you ten
minutes, not five minutes, of your 20-minute move.
But it is complicated.
Shooting is based on formations generating between one and eight dice
needing a base 4,5 or 6 to get a hit, and then you dice again against
the target unit’s resolution (which is usually another 4,5 or 6) to
convert the hit to a disruption, unconverted hits are lost. A normal
unit can take 6 disruptions, (some more, some less,) before being
broken, and is shaken on the last two, (some more, some less.)
I have always found saving throws to be a recipe
for tedium and an indicator of bad game design when they can be simply
incorporated into a more elegant system with one modifier. Often saving
throws are included to give the defender something to do, but in
Lasalle’s case this doesn’t apply as the it is the firer who throws to
convert hits to disruptions. Lasalle has modifiers for rifles, dense
targets, cover and shaken, so one more modifier for target resolution
wouldn’t break the system.
With
all the game time that dice throwing entails, (“… what score do I need?
Baby needs new Shoes! Luck be a Lady! Oh! Bounced off a six! That’s
cocked! On the floor! Etc.,”) I tend to think that dice throws should be
eliminated wherever they are not necessary to introduce the desired
degree of randomness. I know that others enjoy throwing dice, so each to
his own, but it is not where I get my excitement from. Tony says he is
OK with it, but then his mobile telephone has a thing for giving him
dice scores. He really needs to get out more.
Melee
involves opposed dice throws added to your unit strength with a few
modifiers. I like opposed dice throws, they are exciting, but the best
thing about the Lasalle system is the way that the effects are resolved:
depending upon the margin you will either break the opponent or there
will be a minor loss and one side will “stagger” (fall back.) There is
little attrition in melee, but if you stagger you are still near the
enemy so another firefight or another charge could ensue. This system is
clean, sensible, fast and fun. If you break an enemy you cry “huzzah!”
and can move, (even charge,) again, or remove the disruption that you
suffered.
Disruptions can be removed by rallying, this is
easier for troops with a “resilient” trait, or when you are not near the
enemy. A disruption that is not removed becomes permanent and cannot be
rallied away again. This brings us on to how you record the disruption.
Mr. Mustafa recommends using labels on the units, which I think are an
eyesore; and is cumbersome because you can remove disruptions so you
have to go back and rub out if removed or double-cross if they become
permanent; and are also unnecessary because the rules are simple and
there are not a lot of factors to remember. (Just as I think he writes
rules for people who don’t like reading rules – which can be construed
as a compliment - I sometimes think that he writes them for people who
can’t count or remember factors, but I think most wargamers are a pretty
numerate lot and can remember these things, without having to constantly
refer to a piece of paper.)
You can use the labels as a roster but that
is another anathema in Hong Kong, we gave that sort of book-keeping up
with WRG 7th Edition back in the Dark Ages. We used bead
markers, white for disruptions and red for permanent disruptions, which
were a little bit scrappy because Tony hadn’t the time to put a
receiving pin on the back of the bases to keep the beads nice and tidy.
Casualty markers would be the most elegant solution. The Game
We decided to play the “Quatre Bras” scenario
provided in the rules. Tony’s lovely 10mm figures are based on 30mm
bases so the table was 1.08m by 0.72m. Using 15mm figures on 4cm bases
it would have been 1.44m by 0.96m, still an easy size for the Club’s
tables.
This scenario represents Reille’s attack in
the afternoon of Quatre Bras using his corps of two infantry divisions
and a cavalry division. Waiting for him is Wellington with Picton’s
division and Kielmansegg’s brigade from Alten’s Division. This was a try
out for the rules so the terrain was a bit thrown together, but with
some cropping of the pictures it photographs well enough.
In
fairness to the system the size of this scenario is very crowded, and it
must be pushing the limits of the
game for one player a side. In the other scenarios one army is always
300 points and the other varies between 220 and 300, a total of between
520 and 600 points on the table. We had 800 points on the same sized
table, made up as follows:
Allies: 263 inf, 30 cav, 30 art. Total 323 in 17 battalions, two cavalry
regiments, and three batteries.
French: 360 inf, 70 cav, 50 art. Total 480 in 20 battalions, four
cavalry regiments and four artillery batteries.
The scenario suggests that this 50% points
advantage for the French might make it unbalanced, but I don’t think so:
what is missing is a bloody great hill totally absent from the scenario
map. The east-west arms of the Quatre Bras is on a ridge, it is not high
but it is quite steep. I’ve been there twice and if you are standing by
the stream at Gemioncourt you have to crane your neck back to see the
top of the ridge. The best description of the ground is in Weller where
he said that the French looking at the ground must have thought:
"Merde!
This is another Peninsular Battle. Wellington sitting behind a high
ridge with who knows what behind it. Oh well, here we bloody go again!"
(I paraphrase Weller somewhat but that's the gist.) I've always thought
it would be fun to play Quatre Bras as a "hidden scenario," set in the
Peninsula with the Spanish and Portuguese representing the differing
standards of Brit allies.
The Historical Deployments
The game only covers the battlefield from the north-south road to
the right.
From:
https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2015/08/29/battle-of-quatre-bras-16-june-1815/
So, we put the ridge notionally back in with the slope running from
the stream to the east-west road with the crest on the road edge. This
gave the Allies a strong position in melee when they were defending up
slope and it partially neutered the artillery of both sides because the
height difference deprived them out the bounce-through effect of their
bombardments.
The rules only allow for one or two universal intervention types and one
chosen intervention type for each general, but with historical
characters I think you can describe them as they were. We made Reille a
disciplinarian, which does not mean that he goes about flogging people
but that he is good at traffic control sorting out the complications of
interpenetration and difficult terrain. Wellington, in an outrageous fit
of blatant Anglo-Saxon hero worship, was charismatic, disciplinarian,
energetic and steadfast. We were not using divisional generals which was
a bit of a disappointment because Foy was wounded 15 times in his career
so would well deserve the “valiant” sobriquet.
Although we were not using divisional generals I
required the commanders to deploy their brigades by division.
I’m not sure how much they had cheated and
read up on the battle before the game, but I was pleased that their
deployments matched the historical ones. To me this is an indication
that the game is asking the right historical questions, and, assuming
that the real-life commanders were not complete dunces, both the men of
1815 and the men of 2021 came to the same answers. Jeff as Reille
deployed Foy’s Division on his left and Bachelu’s Division on his right.
Pire’s cavalry division was split with Wathier’s lancers in support of
Foy and Hubert’s Chasseurs on Bachelu’s right flank. Tony as The Duke
deployed Picton’s division to hold the ridge line, with Pack on his
right and Kempt on the left and Best behind Kempt. Kielmansegg’s
Hanoverians were placed in support of Pack and Merle’s Dutch-Belgian
cavalry moved to Kempt’s open left flank.
The Battle Opens
Merlen’s
Light Cavalry advance on Best’s left.
In the distance the smoke marks the French Horse Artillery firing.
The battle opened on the Allied left where
Merlen’s light cavalry tried to cover the exposed Allied flank. But they
lacked the necessary caution. After galling fire from a French horse
battery they charged the guns only for the French to limber up and make
good their escape. The Dutch-Belgian light horse found themselves
exposed to Hubert’s better light cavalry who promptly broke both Allied
regiments. To plug this gap Best had to put two of his Landwehr
battalions into square, where they remained for most of the rest of the
battle. Bachelu’s
infantry division on the French right now moved up over the two streams
in the area, a series of complicated moves that soaked up most of the
French momentum which meant that three battalions of Husson’s brigade
had to be left behind, (and they did no further work this day,) and on
the left Foy’s division could not move.
Bachelu’s division advances across the streams Husson’s Brigade is left behind.
When
the time came for Foy to advance Reille set himself up at Gemioncourt to
sort out the bad terrain and interpenetration complications necessary to
get Jamin’s infantry
and Walthier’s lancers left of the road and Tissot’s brigade of infantry
right of the road up and at the Allies. The British responded a bit too
enthusiastically to this, advancing the 44th Foot down the
slope where it found itself alone facing the whole of Tissot’s brigade
which had come up so quickly. After a brief firefight involving some
pretty bad shooting by the Brits, and an inconclusive melee the 44th
disengaged and scrambled back up the slope with the French not far
behind.
The 44th Alone
The East Essex Regiment suddenly find themselves facing four, not
one, French battalions, and were lucky to get out intact.
Over
on the British left the French had now cleared the streams and were
volleying the Allied line, looking for weaknesses to exploit and charge,
whilst using their voltigeurs to cramp Allied units.
This became touch and go as Campi’s brigade
started to tear apart Best’s Landwehr and lap around behind the main
Allied line. The attack on the line broke through in one place but was
quickly repulsed by reinforcements plugging the gap. The Allied
situation here was precarious, but they were holding on: the battle
would be won or lost at Quatre Bras itself.
The Allied Left
Campi’s men have destroyed one of Best’s
battalions and the others are in deep trouble, threatened by French
infantry, cavalry, and the soon to be returning French horse artillery.
They are already behind the Gordon
Highlanders who have problems of their own, with Campi’s columns to
their front and voltigeurs impeding their actions. Over below the crossroads the French had shaken out Foy’s division into two brigades wide, each with two lines of attack columns. Above them Pack’s British brigade waited in line with Kielmansegg’s Hanoverians behind. The French beat the pas de charge and the British raised their muskets to the ready…
The Storm About to Break.
Tissot on the left as we look at it and Jamin
on the right start climbing towards Quatre Bras. British fire is already
telling on Tissot’s units.
Pack’s and Kielmansegg’s brigades
await them.
The battle reached its climax after 90 minutes of
fighting. Tissot’s first units hit the 44th but one was
broken and the other staggered. At this point the British gained the
skirmishing advantage for the first time in the day due to some sterling
work by the 95th. The riflemen prevented one of the French
battalions from rallying below the crest, leaving it fragile and in
grave danger of a counterattack. This came in the form of Kielmansegg’s
fresh units advancing through the British line to attack Tissot’s
battered brigade, destroying three of his four battalions. At this point
Jamin’s men reached the heights to their left of the of the village,
destroyed a battery but then were seen off by The Royal Scots. No
Frenchmen reached the village itself.
The French lancers were moving up behind
Jamin but were just too far away. The attack had failed, and the French
withdrew to renew the attack later that day.
The Crisis Tissot’s Brigade has staggered back from the British line and now his battered battalions are being counterattacked by Kielmansegg’s Hanoverians. On the right Jamin is storming the heights, but after initial successes he will be pushed off. The End Has Come…
In game terms the French reached their “sudden death” defeat condition
by losing one third of their units on turn six of an eight turn game.
The Allies were only two units short of their sudden death, and Best’s
Landwehr on the left flank were “hung out to dry” and would not have
survived much longer. As the Duke would have said, it was a “Near Run
Thing.” After set-up it took about four hours to play, which,
considering it was our first rodeo, was not bad at all. Future games
will be a lot quicker and a lot happens in every turn, with sides having
between eight and 11 momentum pips to spend on orders of varying
complexity. We did not do the skirmishing on the first turn as the
French would go first and there was no way to place skirmish lines
because the sides were too far apart. On the following turns the
skirmishing was drawn twice, the French won it twice, and the Allies won
it once.
Re-reading the rules at home later it turned out that we had only done
four, relatively minor, things wrong. That is also very good for a first
game. I could attribute that to more than a century of wargames
experience, but I really think it is because the rules are clearly
written and the systems, although in many cases unique, are well
explained, easy to execute, and quick to learn. The game was completely
engrossing,
indeed so engrossing that several times during our
game Tony was actually distracted from his mobile telephone!
I think that we have found the “Go To” set of
rules for Napoleonic battles.
The Hubris of Blackguards
As
the consumer of any set of wargames rules I work on the basis that the
“Rules As Written” are merely the author’s opinion as to how the game is
to be played. I am free to add, deduct or change anything that I like so
that it better meets my understanding of the period and personal
preferences. For example, I only want to recreate historical battles and
have no interest in equal points match ups between historically
anachronistic armies. That happens all the times in Ancient games, but
that is no reason why Napoleonics should be so vulgar. Mr Mustafa on the
other hand has produced a 63 page “Army Maker” booklet so you can do
just that, and more power to his arm for doing it. It is probably what
many wargamers and “the market” want, so good luck to them, it’s just
not for me.
What
follows are my suggestions for producing a more historically flavoured
game. They are not criticisms of the existing systems, purely my own
preferences. And if you think that it is bit presumptuous of me to
suggests rules amendments on the strength of a bit of reading and one
reasonably alcohol fuelled game I agree entirely with you… but what is
the point in being a blackguard?
And
so, some tweaks:
And Finally: “Dice to the Southwest – Thousands of ‘em!’”
Whilst I know that to some of you the prospect of
throwing 105 dice to determine who has the skirmishing advantage is
practically Nirvana, to me it is something out of the 5th
Circle of Hell. Jeff is working on a card system that we can try, whilst
Tony, as a vet with access to lots of little plastic boxes is just
trying to sanitize the system so that the damn things don’t end up all
over the landscape.
Here’s One Allegra Made Earlier
Ms. Mathews with the Patent Dice Wrangler
The Colours Are Your Friends
If you haver enough dice and enough boxes you can just produce one
box for each side. Of course, too many dice or not a big enough box
means you can end up with cocked or layered dice.
So, you may want to use generic boxes like this with groups of 10
and 5 coloured dice. For example, if you needed 35 dice you would give
one shake for 20, and one shake counting only the white and black for
the other 15.
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