"Horse, Foot and Guns...slow!?" Topic

I just played a small game of HFG (four corps each of 1805 Russians vs French) and found it to be quite fast moving and fluid.

There was another thread somewhere wherein a number of people mentioned that HFG was very slow to play. I'm just wondering what table size was used for those games?

Barker suggests a table only three scale miles deep…which translates to only two tabletop feet which of course is unusually narrow. The defender's setup area is half that; the attacker sets up 12cm from his table edge. After about ten minutes of play we were already exchanging artillery fire.

Are other players using a four or five foot deep table? Or do larger battles with more corps (as in all of Austerlitz rather than only four corps as we played) really slow things down?

I've played a fair bit of HFG and other DBA variants. How on earth anyone can complain aout these games being slow is beyond me.

Well, yes, if you start marching on at opposite ends of a 16 foot table…

My game took forever as we were using a 1:1 scale model of the Danube valley…

How did you fit it on the table?

Now that's what I call a wargames table.

If anyone wants to play a DBx varient for the period for the SYW, Napolionic threw to the ACW we play a home grown version that in my opinion has vast improvements in the game mechanics.

link

We call it DBK after the one of the rule tweakers. You will need to have a copy of DBM (and familiarity with the game) to play this rule set.

We think it's great and I would love to hear feed back on what others think. Currently we are working on campaign
rules that so far have been a blast!

Gary

It was great until some twit built a new highway right on my III Corps deployment area….

Compared to the original HFG, which was essentially a nineteenth century DBA, the current version is a bloated monster, especially the endless list of combat modifiers and incomprehensible qualifiying text. Yes, I am sure it plays reasonably fast if you've learned the rules in minute detail and played several test games, but that isn't what I look for in a set of fast play rules. The original version let us play Waterlo/Wavre as a paired battle in an hour and a half on a table 2' wide–that is fast playing.

Martin