First Game for 2021

 On New Year’s Day Nick and I played a game to try out “Under the Lily Banners” rules.

We played a scenario “A Knock at the Door” one of three from the 4Play wargaming scenarios booklet “The Baby Wore Red” the  Battle of Walcourt August 27th 1689. The scenario sees four Anglo/Dutch battalions and a field gun formed outside the walled town of Walcourt, while three small German units deployed within the town. The walls of the town were in poor repair and not rated as fortifications, merely hard cover. Opposing the Anglo/Dutch was a French force of eight battalions.

Both commanders were rated as plodders that made activation of our units difficult.

The initial deployment, French on the left, the English in the distance

The French deployment 

Walcourt and its defenders

Both of us rolled badly to activate our units (a situation that would plague me for the whole game), but after a couple of turns our lead units managed to shuffle into range of each other. The first fire did minor damage to both our units.

But next move the French plodder plodded slightly better than the English plodder and the French managed to bring the fire of two battalions to bear against one. The English suffered heavy losses and became shaken.

The English battalion was able to recover and I was able to bring more units into the line and the fire fight continued.

Meanwhile the French right wing advanced against the town.

The positions at the height of the action, about the time we broke for lunch

Soon the French numbers began to tell (assisted by my inability to roll well enough for activation to move more that one unit a turn) and the extreme right English battalion routed.

Then the French had their turn of running away, with two units routing and one retreating (sadly I have no pictures of that) but it didn’t take long for the rot set in and a second English unit took to its heals, then a third was destroyed on a combat.

Around the same time the French broke into the town.

Entry to the town was the key victory condition fir the French...not that it really mattered since three-quarters of my army was in rout or destroyed. 

The table at the conclusion of the game

So how did the rules work out? Pretty good. We made a few errors, but they worked really well and captured the feel of the age. All in all a good way to spend a few hours on a hot summer’s day.