"Adventures in Estremadura" Topic

In coming up with a scenario for the Gentlemen Wargamers' annual May "Tax Season is Over!" game, it occurred to me that it would fall very near to the 208th anniversary of the Battle of Albuera. I found, among my battle cloths, one that had very much the correct arrangement of streams and roads (the other geographical items, like hills, woods and villages are added as needed for each game) but, unfortunately, the spacing didn't fit the ground scale for the full Order of Battle. I ended up reducing the forces by 25%, while keeping them proportional (even though we easily had enough figures available to do the whole thing), in order to fit the available terrain. The alternative would have been to make a new cloth, but that didn't seem practical. The result was still pretty good:

You can see the rest of the pictures in a Flickr album, here:

link

Click on an individual photo to go into Slideshow mode and see the descriptive captions below each one.

Enjoy,

Jeff

Outstanding looking game! Thanks for sharing.

Rick

Nice looking game, why don't you post AARs on your War Artisan's website any more?

I probably should. They're more time-consuming than just captioning the photos, so it's mainly a matter of temporal allocation. When family and work demands on my time lighten up a bit (as I anticipate will happen in the coming year) I will definitely go back to AARs, but I may do one sooner if I run across a scenario with a particularly compelling narrative.

Instead of doing PDF photo essays, you could just fill the AAR page with links to the FlickR albums. They are fine AARs in their own right, and it would help get around FlickR, which is continually making it harder to get to the "collections" page.

- Ix

Another great looking game.

Your timing couldn't be better. Since last week I've been reviewing my own Napoleonic collection and contemplating ways to play with it. All week I've been looking at other people's Napoleonic AARs.

- Ix

I found, among my battle cloths, one that had very much the correct arrangement of streams and roads […]

Wait… how many of these do you have?

- Ix

They are fine AARs in their own right

Thank you. They're adequate, I think, to serve as a general reminder to the participants of wargame glories past (which is actually their original and still primary purpose). The longer form pdf gives me a chance to go deeper into the players' reasoning and interactions (and screwups) which is, to me, the most interesting part. In the short captions I can only hit the highlights.

Wait… how many of these do you have?

Six . . . four land and two naval (which I haven't used since I made my two sets of Sea-o-Morphic ocean tiles). The one I used in this game was originally for the Battle of Brandy Station.

Beautiful looking game!! :)

Another excellent 'Napoleonic Command' game. Thanks for posting.