"Peninsular War, Ambush (Black Powder)" Topic

This was a Friday night game at NBHW back in September 2016 and featured my Portuguese troops for the first time. The scenario was produced by Ryan, another club member and featured the use of the individual commander personality options in Black Powder, the first time we had utilised these at the club.

The French force consisted of two infantry brigades and a cavalry brigade who were on a foraging expedition into the Spanish countryside.

The Allied force consisted of a combined British/Portuguese brigade, a King's German Legion brigade, a British cavalry brigade and a brigade of Spanish militia lead by a battalion of regulars. The allied force, aware of the French presence in the area decide to set a trap.

As well as these general objectives each of the brigade commanders had their own personal secret missions and personality statistics, some such as "Aggression", "Decisiveness" and "Independence" from the Black Powder rules while others just allowed scenario specific events. These secret missions made for some strange appearing commands being given during the game.

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Jabba's Wargaming

This looks great. Can I ask what size bases you use? I'm thinking of getting into 28mm Napoleonics and your unit sizes are what I was thinking of. What is the minimum table size you can get away with using small units and Black Powder?

Base sizes are those from the Shako 2 rules as most of the clubs napoleonics are based that way. The ones I use are:

Infantry: 60mm x 50mm (3 bases for standard battalion, 6 figures per base)

Light Infantry/Rifles: 60mm x 25mm (6 bases for standard battalion, 3 figures per base. Allows depiction of skirmish order better I think)

Skirmisher Base: 90mm x 25mm (to represent a battalion's deployed light company, I use 4 figures per base)

Cavalry: 80mm x 60mm (3 bases for a standard unit, 3 figures per base)

Artillery: 100mm x 75mm (we have started using 2 bases per battery, 1 gun model plus crew per base)

Brigade Commander: Single mounted figure on a base.

Division Commander: 2 mounted figures on an Infantry base.

Corps Commander: 3 mounted figures on a base, don't have one myself yet will probably use a cavalry base.

We also use 2/3 distances when playing Black Powder and this particular game was on a 6 foot square table, which to be fair is the smallest we have used but then we are blessed with available space and terrain.

For Quick Reference sheets with different distances see here
perrysheroes.free.fr/spip.php?article259

Thanks Jabba – that's very helpful.

@sixlasers
I've added a blog post on how and why I base my figures the way I do.
Jabba's Wargaming