Maurice - Battle of Gross Jägerdorf

A new game with Maurice, this time the Battle of Gross Jagerdorf. The battle took place on 30th August 1757, when a powerful Russian army invading Prussia received a nose-bleeding punch from a much inferior local army and managed to pull back with relatively minor casualties and in good order, before the overwhelming Russian force could react and counterattack. As you will see in this battle review, the game's outcome was fairly similar to the historical situation.

Maurice First Blood

 

Toda I have my first taste of Maurice the set to play 'The Age of Reason' battles written by Sam Mustafa. I did really try to resist the temptation, but the pressure was overwhelming against me: the beautiful and colourful armies of the age (which I started to collect but never finished 20 years ago), the very nice painted 28mm armies owned by some of my gaming mates and frequently displayed at the club over the past months, plus the chats overheard between some of the actual gamers during our recent trip to Salute, were a too powerful combined mermaid's call to resist.

An additional attraction is that Maurice is a card driven-game, my favourite system since playing TooFatLardies rules sets. Although the game is developed in turns, in which the active player may fire (and be fired by the enemy musketry), and choose one action (march, rally, charge or bombard), the cards play an important role. Not only they put a limit to the number of orders issued to the units, but also have an important impact in the turns, as the passive player may modify with his own cards the orders of the active player.

This morning we played a historical scenario, the Battle of Chotusitz (1742) staging Prussians against Austrians. The objective of the Austrians was to take the village and defeat the Prussain army, initially heavily outnumbered but waiting for reinforcements commanded by Frederick the Great himslef arriving in the first early turns.

Bovington Museum - WWII German Material

In this second post of our visit to the Bovington Tank Museum, I will post a slection of the photos taken to the museum's German AFVs collection, one of the most impressive I have ever seen (although in fact, the whole Museum is  amazing). Hope you enjoy this photo show.

 

Beevor's D-Day

Amazon will launch next week a new edition of Beevor's D-Day work for Kindle. What's original and new is the inclusion of audio and video materials embedded in this edition, some of which Amazon claims is rare. The full information is available here. At less than US$9.0 price it seems a real bargain even if you own a hard copy of the book, as it is my case. The book is now available for pre-order. 

Back to the Trenches: Forlon Hope

In addition to sorting and editing the hundreds of photos from our recent trip to the UK, I have invested some time this long weekend in Madrid to umpire a WWI game with Through the Mud and the Blood, the period platoon level rules of the TooFatLardies factory. 

The scenario was simple: in early 1918 following a successful local attack on a German trench, the remaining elements of a British platoon have reinforced the former Hun defenses and now await the inevitable counterattack. Unfortunately for them, the German interdiction artillery fire is blocking the arrival of reinforcements. Therefore, their only hope is to make enough casualties to the Germans to make the attack stall and allow some time for the British to send new units.

Dragons Back from London (II) - Bovington WWI Material

In this first instalment, I will show the photos of the First World War collection at Bovington

Overview of Main Hall

Little Willie, Mother/Father of all tanks

(Exhausted) Dragons Back from London (I) - Some Musings and the Salute Hoard

Yes, we are back home but after three trepid days and a long delay in our outbound flight (thanks Easyjet!!!), the Spanish Salute-raiding party arrived in a relatively bad state. In addition, my desk at the office seems to have missed me soooo much on Friday, that I found a twofold  ration of daily work when I hit my chair on Monday.

So first, apologies for the lack of news, I know many other bloggers have already  published lavishly illustrated entries of their Salute adventures, but I'm no there yet. My camera memory card is about to bust, and therefore I need sometime to organize, edit and polish several hundred pics taken at Salute, Bovington, the National Army and the Imperial War Museums respectively... not to mention the expected photo avalanche when my traveling mates discharge their own memory cards in our shared Dropbox facility purporsely created for this trip

Enough excuses, and now a few comments and impressions for this first entry narrating our adventures in the "Perfidious Albion" last weekend. Over the next days I'll post some more specific entries in the blog and of course lists and lots of (hopefully) nice and mouth-watering pics of our tour around the museums.

First on the Bovington Tank Museum, I have no words in English to express my feeling, only in Spanish:

OLÉ!