One of our big ongoing projects in the gang is doing a campaign of the Great Northern War in 6mm. If you don’t know much about this conflict, I would recommend learning a bit (The Rest is History has a good free set of podcasts on the Great Northern War on their feed). Yes, it is the story of the rise of the Russian Empire and the fall of the Swedish Empire, but the swings of the war and the titanic characters are really something incredible. We’ll be planning out a small linked campaign at least through the climatic Battle of Poltava (which is somehow in the _middle_ of this damn war). As we go, we’ll do a bit more of an intro to the history too.
But for now we just did a quick test battle using our 6mm figures from Baccus.
We stated out a simple scenario using a Regimental Fire and Fury variant that we got for the 18th century from a little battle called Saladen (Salocial) in Lithuania (part of the Swedish Empire at the time). We’ve played a lot of Fire and Fury, this one adds some more combat rules (infantry squares, shock infantry, heavy cavalry) and less firepower. We think this will work for our campaign, and we generally dig the system though it is maybe not quite as streamlined as it could be.
In the battle, a small force of 1000 Swedes faced off against about 5000 Poles and Russians. Now historically, as often happened early in the war, the heavily outnumbered Swedish army swept the field. Could we replicate this on the tabletop?
To the battle!
The Swedes deployed on the hill, while the much larger Polish-Russian force deployed in the valley. The allies advanced under the fire of the Swedish guns!
As they closed in, the Swedes moved down the hill in a sweeping decisive charge!
The elite infantry and cavalry broke the first regiments of the Polish and Russian lines… but more remained!
The Russian cavalry flanked the Swedish hill, and the reserve lines committed in against the hard-pressed Swedes. Eventually, surrounded on all sides the Swedish force was utterly defeated.
We had a lot of fun, and huge thanks to carnbef, stalkerfriend, and the mysterious broheim for helping playtest this, and the mysterious broheim for painting all the Poles and doing the terrain!
We will need to do some planning to make sure battles like Narva are very exciting and winnable by the Swedes (who won many of these battles historically). I think we will get there, but we will probably have a bit of work to do! More on this to come!
-BS