Battle of Spielstadt

A 3x3ish Experiment

As much as I love the Dominion series, sometimes I want a little more. Specifically, I want more variety of scenarios. Dominion essentially has one scenario - a pitched battle.

I'm toying with the idea of adapting One Hour Wargame scenarios to Dominion. I noticed that OHW scenario maps are on a 3x3 grid. Why not try a 3x3-style game? I created a 5x5 grid (to include reserve and flank areas). I winged it with the rules; they are a mishmash of Dominion, the Portable Wargame, and MicroBattle.

Background

The kingdoms of Redgrave and Bluderia are once again at war.

Note: These kingdoms are from imagi-nations I created a couple of decades ago. They participated in a number of campaigns on my old blog.

Bluderia's Marshal Heinrich von Sturmwald outmaneuvers the Redgravians. He descends upon the lightly defended town of Spielstadt, held by General Wilhelm von Falkenstein.

Note: This is scenario 21 - Twin Objectives from OHW.

Set Up

Falkenstein (red army) has 2 infantry brigades and a cavalry brigade guarding the town of Spielstadt. In addition, a brigade of light infantry defends a wooded hill.

Sturmwald's vanguard consists of a brigade each of infantry and cavalry. He has 3 more infantry brigades and an artillery regiment in reserve.

The Battle

The Bluderian vanguard advances. The Redgravian defenders sally out and attack. The Bluderian cavalry (right) forces its counterpart to retreat. In the center, the infantry brigades grind each other down. On the left, the Bluderian infantry and Redgravian lights fight to a stalemate.

Notes: 

• I adapted a retreat rule, like the Portable Wargame. Otherwise, the unit is eliminated.
• When a vacancy opened on an army's baseline, I moved a unit onto the battlefield from the reserve area.

The Bluderian cavalry pursue but a counterattack routs them.

Bluderia's artillery forces the enemy cavalry to retreat again. Redgrave's lights also get destroyed.

Another fight for the town. Bluderia loses a brigade while Redgrave temporarily retreats.

Finally, the guns destroy the cavalry. Bluderia's infantry brigades close in on the town.

A bloody assault wipes out the defenders. Bluderia can take the town.

Victory for Bluderia!

NOTES

• Game time was about 12 minutes. Not as fast as Dominion but not bad.
• The OHW scenario has a 15 turn time limit. Given that this is a quick-play scenario, I should have reduced the number of turns. I just did not know by how much so I played the game out to its conclusion. It went 6 turns. Perhaps I should have had a 5 turn limit?
• Instead of automatic defeat when down to 1 unit, I rolled morale to see if Redgrave's last defenders would keep fighting. They did, but could not hold out.
• The units are out-of-scale on the map compared to OHW. Each square would equate to 12" on a OHW board, but OHW units should be 4"-6" wide. I briefly thought about halving the size of the units, but I don't want to put in the effort. Besides, I think it worked fine to have units in the reserve area.