Bloody Big Battles! - First Impressions

 Quick summary: you should be buying it right now.

A few weeks ago I fortuitously stumbled upon several references to Mr. Chris Pringle’s titular book. All of them reported excellent things about the game, which of course piqued my interest. The main aspects which enticed me were:

-           Replay of historical engagements in their entirety

-           No bathtubbing – historical OOBs are what they are

-           No scale distortions – scenario maps are 100% based on historical maps

-           Quick, abstract rules

So in the next few days I started perusing the author’s excellent blog and was pleased to discover that his wargaming preferences resonate a lot with mine. I was sold: I ordered the book via North Star military figures (impeccable service!) and a few days later I started studying it obsessively as I always do 😊

The rulebook in all its glory. A coffee table book is it not - which I confess is a plus for this grognard.

My first impressions are nothing short of enthusiastic. A few highlights:

-           BBB uses the most elegant/realistic/functional incarnation of the dreaded ‘roll to move’ mechanic found e.g. in many of Mr. Rick Priestley’s games. I’ve always found this type of mechanism somewhat irritating in its typical Warmaster, Blitzkrieg Commander, Black Powder, etc etc implementations. In said games, even elite units do sometimes sit totally idle for whole turns in a row, hypothetically modelling friction. While the premises and goals are similar, in my opinion BBB does this a lot better by making movement roll results both more nuanced AND more reasonable. Excellent!

-           The basic mechanisms seem to be broad and abstract (in a good sense: read this) enough to cover the 19^th century in its entirety even if they are mostly targeted at its second half. Me - I’d happily play any Napoleonic battle with just them, but perhaps I’m just an unrefined simpleton. Further characterization of units is optionally provided by a few special ‘add-on’ rules which totally make sense on paper. These give BBB some more ‘chrome’ with respect to, say, Pub Battles – a game with very similar premises but an even broader-brush approach (for the record, I like both).

-           Scenarios are outstanding. Maps are totally accurate and (to the best of my knowledge) OOBs are too. Objectives provide an easy win/lose metric but (most importantly) seem to allow for a multitude of viable battle plans. Reading these scenarios makes me want to play them *now*!

Are there any weak points? Well, given how much I like this game so far I wouldn’t call them ‘weak’, but possibly ‘less strong’. The following are

-           As with 99 rulesets out of 100, I think one extra round of proofreading/streamlining/chart rewrite could have served the game better. I had to write down an extended turn sequence summary in order to wrap my head around how silenced/low ammo/evade moves interacted – only to discover that it was done before in exactly the same way (link). The rules also state that generals are ‘reactivated’ after becoming casualties in previous turns, but I couldn’t find any further explanation beyond this. [Note – the author answered this question here].

-           In contrast to several other rulesets, BBB handles defensive fire in a way that I might describe as ‘retroactive’ – that is, you don’t stop moving units when they come under fire, but rather complete their moves only to later check if they could have come under fire at some point. I really can’t understand the merit of doing this as opposed to the more traditional method of just shouting ‘gotcha!’ while the opponent is moving units, and it seems I’m not alone in thinking this (link).

All scenarios are real battles based on historical maps, dates and OOBs. No bathtubbing whatsoever. If you like games that give you like 12 riflemen shooting at a barn and call it 'Waterloo', this is not for you.

-           If you are reading this blog you might know I’m obsessed with ground scales, and BBB is definitely better than your average miniature ruleset in this regard. In fact, I think it’s in the 99^th percentile of ‘ground-scale accuracy’. For example, at Froeschwiller (where 12” = 2000m), 1000 infantrymen occupy a frontage of 1” = 167m, which is a very reasonable estimate of the frontage they would have covered If they were all deployed in triple line. Of course the rules do not assume all bases to be formed in triple line all the time, the rigid frontage of a base representing more a ‘maximum width’ rather than an accurate depiction. But I think that’s the best you can do given the physical limitations of playing with rigid miniatures/bases/blocks and the like. Also, the estimate ‘maximum width = fully linear formation’ is both convincing and fully… in line (ahem) with period manuals. However, whereas this seems very convincing for infantry, I’m more sceptical about cavalry. BBB assumes the same number of men for infantry and cavalry bases on the same frontage, which means that cavalry frontages are most probably significantly underestimated, and concentration of mounted forces made artificially easier. Moreover, while ground/troop scales vary across scenarios, bases always occupy 1” on the table, and this unavoidably creates distortions. At Langensalza for instance, the Hanoverian side has 7-bases units representing 3500 infantrymen on a 7” frontage. Given the scenario map, 7” represent a frontage of 1050m for 3500 men, which seems excessive. All in all, I think these scale discrepancies are due to the practical limitation involved with using figures, and they can be easily amended when playing with blocks on maps! Hooray for the blocks! 😊 In fact, the excellent blog you can find here describes how to play BBB with blocks on a kriegsspiel map, almost exactly as I would do.

...did I mention that scenario maps are really based on historical maps?

My plan is to play a solo test run of BBB using my microblocks on an A3-sized map. Is that a sensible plan? We’ll see!