Auckland Wargaming Club

The AWC’s Lasalle Napoleonic Tournament in 15mm scale is due to start soon. It has yet to be confirmed if players will get 1 or 2 Support options – but looks most likely just one for this initial competition (as many players are still busy painting their figures and learning the rules). The Tournament will be played over the course of several weeks with games occuring either at AWC meetings or at mutually agreed alternate venues.

It’s hoped to have the entrants confirmed by Sunday 23 January 2011 if possible so the competition can begin in February – so any members interested should check out the AWC Yahoo Group for more details and advise the organiser of their Army & Theatre (i.e. sub-period) for the competition. Napoleonic Gamers in the Auckland and Waikato (& similar) regions who are not AWC Members and are interested in participating may be able to do so - they should also contact the organsier through the AWC Group.

A subsequent 28mm scale Tournament is planned for the middle of the year...

The second 'Postcard' from AWC Member Ben Hill at the Derby Convention in the UK.

Can I just say two words, Wargasmic Retail! This is one of the biggest trade shows/competitions in the UK. Salute (April) and Warfare at Reading (later October) are bigger but I ain't seen nothing like this before. I would estimate 30 or 40 trade stands with everything from haystacks to 54mm plastics. Gripping Beast, Musketeer, Magister Militum, Donnington, Hasslefree, Adler, Front Rank, Baccus and many more plus a bunch of retail outlets and web shops selling all sorts of different things including figures by unit or even individuals.

AWC Member Ben Hill reports in from Oxford, UK, on the local wargaming scene there:

Herro AWC,

In March this year, my wife and I moved to Oxford in the UK. We will be here for a several years while my wife does genius things that I do not understand, similar situation to my wargaming.

I miss the AWC and its excellent members not to mention my Romans and newly painted ACW army. However, with England being the home of toy soldiers I have an excellent opportunity to buy buy buy. With that in mind, I visited the Foundry in Nottingham on July 23 for their open day with Sean (who was visiting the UK). Firstly, Nottingham has very few trees, no men in tights, no sheriff, and maid Marion had no teeth but she knew where St Mark’s road was luckily.

Below is a first attempt at an unofficial points system for the Napoleonic game - Lasalle.

Lasalle contains a number of set army lists for the main armies. They provide a great introduction. But they only reflect a fraction of possible lists. Playing the same few army lists repeatedly against each other could get dull fairly quickly.

This points system below tries to address this.

Using this points system and the excellent (and now free) Nafziger army lists, players can construct any number of armies that are consistent in size with the army lists in the Lasalle book.

I would love to say that the points system above was based on careful consideration of the relative merits of units, simulations of performance and a large number of test games. Alas no. Instead it was a rather crude attempt to back-fit the army lists in the book. What points system could generate something so that the Core Lists were all about the same points, and the Support Lists were about the same points?

FOGN (Field Of Glory: Napoleonics) is a regimental game where 1 unit is a regiment. It has small units (1200-2000 men for infantry) and large units (2000-3000 men). This means it is an in-between scale game (sort of like Principles of War), where you can change formation into things that look like column, line, square and skirmish but aren't really (and in practice you stay in one formation for most of the game in FOGN).

Periods are the "Eras" or "Level of Technology" present for wargaming. Having a Greek Army of 300 BC facing a Russian Army of 1944 AD is obviously quite a mismatch and both armies need quite different sets of rules to control how they perform. Hence we have "Periods" in which armies all operated in similar ways, or with similar weapons, and can be 'played' using a common set of rules.