Battles

The Battle of Bad Sausagehausen

One of my first forays into the ruleset of Piquet.  I'd heard a lot of different things about it.   It was mostly the steep price that put me off...but what a fool I was!   After playing this little affair, I quickly ran out and bought myself a set.   Naturally I have a few thoughts on the subject, but I put them over in my Rules page.

Anyway, back to Bad Sausagehausen.   The events I've described, well, the results were there.   For example, we didn't roll on the "Officers' Dysentery and Diarrhea Table" to discover that the entire French staff were ill.   Piquet doesn't have any such nonsense in it.   (This isn't Advanced Squad Leader thankfully!)

But, since every single one of my officers were rated "abysmal", and this was the French Army of 1809, something had to explain it.   (Other than the infernal spreadsheet we used to randomly design the Army)   As the designer notes in Piquet say, it's a "suspense novel, not a mathematical treatise."   I couldn't agree more.

Similarly, the poor Austrian couldn't find the "deployment" card to allow him to move his reinforcing columns into the Class IV town.   Naturally, a broken axle on an officer's carriage was the reason.   Nor could he find the same card before the French found two sequential "cavalry move in open" cards and annihilated the road columns.    And the poor siting of the Austrian battery?   Ok, well, that was player error.   (In my opinion only; Alex, my esteemed opponent in this game, has an understandably different viewpoint.   Read his comments in my Guestbook).

The battle went pretty much as planned for the French.   Actually it went better.   The cavalry performed heroically!   And well it should - they had the only "eager" unit in the whole army.   The rest were almost all "battle weary".   The Austrians had a much better rested force.   The Jagers' fire from Bad Sausagehausen was appallingly deadly.

The battle was essentially won by the French having a good plan, and sticking to it.  Of course, some bad Austrian luck at crucial moments certainly played a role in the French victory!

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