Valour & Fortitude: Quatre Bras Lite

 

Needing some Valour & Fortitude practice and having little time to spare from painting up Russians for our imminent Borodino mega game, I needed to set up and brief a game fast. So I pulled out that perennial favourite Quatre Bras!

The Allied perspective

The French perspective

The reason this was Quatre Bras 'lite' was that with our collections we are not yet able to do justice to the heterogenous nature of the Allied army. I only have 2 Dutch Belgian battalions so far but of course the Netherlands Army bore the brunt of the early French onslaught. Similarly you can't claim to be doing justice to the battle if you can't represent the Brunswick Bde. One day! So some of the Netherlands troops you will see bear a remarkable similarity to the Portuguese Army...

The teams took it in turns to set out their brigades. It didn't take the Allies long as they really only had one brigade on table! Aware of the old adage 'he who defends everything defends nothing' they favoured their right wing, leaving their left to be covered by a solitary unit of Prussian Hussars who happened to be in the vicinity and up for a fight...

The Bois de Bossu was quartered into 'Defensible Terrain' sections, with the objective in the centre touching all four. The French would have to capture at least one and have the remainder unoccupied by Allied troops to claim this objective. 

From left to right, John and David were the Allied players; Peter and Daniel were the French. 

Daniel pushed early and hard into the Bois de Bossu.

Whilst Peter set up on the southern and eastern sides of Gemioncourt Farm.

The Allied were unlucky with their reserve die rolls, but eventually a British infantry brigade marched down the Brussels road and was immediately diverted through the village and down the Charleroi road to populate the allied left flank, as Gemioncourt Farm had already fallen to the French.

Then some Allied Cavalry arrived to confront the French light cavalry who had been swanning around the Allied left rear threatening that objective. The French cavalrymen promptly retreated!

With Kellerman's Heavy Cavalry arriving on scene the French got their second wind and Daniel's assaults into the woods finally drove all the Allies out.

The French had secured the required two objectives for the win! A great scenario, albeit too dependent on reserve dice rolls, but with an unusually large amount of fighting in woods I did get confused by the difference between modifiers for numbers of dice, and the required rolls on those dice. Hence I drew up an aide memoire that clarified matters for next week's game!