Plancenoit - Commands & Colors(sic)

Goya, Tony and I got together yesterday to play the C&CN Plancenoit scenario. Tony supplied the battle-boards, scenery and most of the French troops while Goya provided a host of S-Range Prussians and a superb lunch. I brought along a smattering of Hinton Hunt units to make up the gaps in the OOB for both sides.

As host Goya gallantly offered to Umpire, a position he most ably fulfilled by keeping a tight rein on the dice and chipping in occasionally with handy advice for the Prussian C-in-C. To help get us in the mood he flipped an ‘Iron Will’ token to decide ends, Tony won the toss and to my surprise chose to play the Prussians which of course meant I got the French and all those Guard units.

Here is my account of this great French victory (written from our Brussels HQ):

Initial positions from behind the French right flank (looking a bit sparse for
the French who had fewer units but lots of Guard ones).

And the same from the Prussian left flank (there were a lot of Prussians).

My own unit of Young Guard about to occupy the Churchyard which they
kept possession of for the whole game.

Blucher and Gneisenau calmly survey the battlefield. "Vorwarts" seems like
a good idea!

Unable to attend in person, Wellington sent his tree however this ended up on
the French side - a bad omen?

By playing a rather nifty Tactical Card I was able to quickly occupy (and keep)
all but one of the town hexes which gave Tony something of a headache and
me 2 VP's.

The Prussian tried to push around my right flank (via the woods in the
foreground) but were thwarted by my artillery.

Tony had more success on his own right flank by pushing forward his infantry
and cavalry (great to see Goya's S-Range cavalry in action again).

As you can see my infantry are in a bit of a pickle - 4 red tokens and they're
off. Eventually though by counter attacking with my own cavalry the Prussians
were halted and then thrown back.

The 2nd Silesian Landwehr gave a good account of themselves in this their
first scrape (the front rank was made up of S-Range figures from Goya's
collection as I'm still painting the command group).

There's something wrong with the rules however as these Prussian infantry
somehow managed to blow away the 2nd Guard Grenadiers - still can't believe
that happened!

And more amazingly the 1st Silesian Landwehr managed this dice roll to
obliterate a French unit. Perhaps not so surprising when you think of their
track record.

However, despite these isolated successes the French were never in danger of
being ejected from Plancenoit and in the end it was a pretty convincing win
for the French.

It was an interesting game that sparked a fair bit of debate during our coffee, biscuit and cake debriefing session. Goya felt that the game was somewhat stacked against the Prussians while I think possibly Tony and I thought we’d need to play another game before deciding on that. It’s a scenario that perhaps we should revisit in the future.