Blucher - Making a late start

Blucher campaign extensions and army packs.

Seven years after buying the rules I finally got round to an introductory game of Blucher, Sam Mustafa's grand-tactical Napoleonic game.

Many thanks to fellow club member, Simon, who organised and umpired the game. My opponent, Dave, commanded a Spanish force in defensive positions while I attacked with the French. I eventually managed to take a village in the centre of the Spanish position, but did not achieve the breakthrough I was hoping for. Simon pointed out that I should have made more use of my troops' superior skirmishing ability before rushing in.

Napoleonics are a foundational wargaming period. I've flirted with them over many years, but I'm no expert. While the tactics of column, line and square are for many the very essence of period flavour, I'm more pulled by grand-tactical games that allow one to fight whole historical battles, at least potentially.

Blucher is widely played and reviewed so it's rather late to go into detail about the rules. What I do want to write about is the use of the pre-printed unit cards and some thoughts on modelling terrain.

While the game we played employed conventional 6mm scale scenery, the armies consisted of the commercially available preprinted unit cards and I have to say that I was so engrossed in the game that I never missed or even thought about the absence of lead (or plastic) figures.

I now have all the extension sets and army packs, and these give me far more wargaming flexibility than a collection of model figures rooted in one time and place. Although I have 6mm Napoleonic armies that I was going to use, I'll now stick with the cards.

Two of the great advantages of card, tablet or block armies are their modest storage requirements and the ease with which they can be transported, and I'm thinking about scenery which meets the same criteria.

While I could create purely 2D scenery using felt, I'm currently considering slightly more realistic scenery which is nevertheless in ultra-low relief. Done properly I think it could look quite good and rather like an aerial perspective.

I already have a good collection of game mats, relatively shallow hills and roads and rivers, so that leaves urban and forest areas. For villages I'm thinking of using a template with low grey rectangles to represent houses, although I do have some Monopoly houses and hotels that could be put to use. I also have some 2mm lead buildings, but part of the aim here is to reduce weight and maintain a symbolic style. The houses would be of uniform height (no church steeples) so that unit cards could sit level on the top when villages are garrisoned. Forests would be templates covered in clump foliage, again of uniform height.