Leipzig 1813 day one. Napoleon's Battles. Eye candy post

I have the sense that once you a a deep veteran of napoleonic wargaming, you begin to gaze at Leipzig 1813 as the magnum opus to your endeavors. After you've collected, painted, built and gamed progressively bigger and bigger battles and campaigns there exists the shining battle on the hill.

Leipzig was the largest battle in the Napoleonic wars and had roughly half a million troops converging and fighting for control of the city. To put this in perspective The battle of the bulge (WW2) (arguably a theatre) was roughly the same. Verdun (WW1) approximately the same size.  Gettsyburg  clocked in a 1/3-1/4.  Stalingrad (WW2) and Kursk (WW2), both clock in about 2 million and are the largest battles in history. Napoleon and his opponents managed to field this monstrosity with horse drawn supplies, foot power, and a fairly recent innovation of canning. Totally bonkers. 

 

 

Also, this game is pretty bonkers for wargamers to put on. It occurs over 3 days and the map is HUGE. The OOB is something larger than huge. Delerious perhaps? 

 

 

 

 

 

15mm French Napoleonic Generals - Old Glory

As part of the "finish that lot of lead you got 7 years ago so you can finally table that force of french" project we have some generals hitting the table. These guys are a single bag of old glory lead. I was a little mystified by some of them (which is not uncommon with napoleonics I find) as they have different head gear and saddle blankets. I suspect that some might actually be ADC (aide du camps) but I wimped out and painted them all as high level officers.

Technically speaking for Napoleons Battles these are all divisional leaders as they are a single model on a 1 inch base. I almost group up some, but I realize I need a fair number of divisional leaders, and I have another bag of 'marshals' which should more than cover the higher level command.


At this point I really only need some heavy cavalry to be able to field all the necessary unit types for my french force. Unsurprisingly I have way more extra units than that to paint, but it's nice to have the choice narrowed for me.

15mm french chassuer a cheval - old glory

Gosh, multiple posts without napoleonics, I was starting to get worried too. Here we have two bags of old glory 15mm chassuer a cheval all painted up nice. The problem with these bags (in my opinion) is that you end up with too much command for most systems. 32 figs with 4 standards and 4 musicians is a bit bonkers.

I decided to go for a bit of colour and did 4 distinct unit colorations (also I had 4 command stands). Though these will be used for napoleons battles, I expect I will use them for other games, and can't say I'm a fan of basing 4 cavalry in a deep narrow base.

I'm getting terribly close to actually being able to field a coherent french force in 15mm. Zounds! It's only been like 7 or 8 years since I got my huge lot of 15mm naps.

Napoleon's Battles: Austerlitz AAR

One of the local-ish gamers, Murdock, (*only* 90-120 min away) hosted Austerlitz. We managed to line up a local gaming space and a long weekend were we could get enough people together. This was previously done many years ago, and in fact we used the same set of figs, although I understand that it's a legacy set with the original owner having since passed away.


The night before a set of players did some lite role-playing (the briefings are hilariously prejudiced against one another on the same side) and determined the plan of attack. It was largely historical, although the timing of some of the reinforcements changed.

Napoleon's Battles: First game Ru/Au vs It/Sax

Nate has gotten a fire in his belly to play some Napoleon's Battles. He has been steadily working on Austrians and Russians and, at last, we had enough troops to have a go at it (borrowing some italians and saxons as opposing forces). The scenario is that the allied Saxons and Italians are covering the retreat of the French army over a river after fierce fighting at leipzeig. The Russians and Austrians are trying to cut off this route of retreat. 

More after the cut.....