Valour & Fortitude

We played a game on Valour & Fortitude on Thursday evening. This is not a set I've played much, but I think I picked most of it up OK. It's pretty simple and, whilst it shares some DNA with Black Powder, seems a much more sensible game.

Anyway, we played a Seven Years War action with Caesar and I commanding a French force defensing a village against an attack from a Austrian-Hanoverian alliance under Peter and Stuart

Here's the French force. Figures are 10mm.

Some of the enemy - these Hanoverians are 10mm 3D prints, rescaled from 6mm figures.

Peter massed a lot of Austrian cavalry in the gap between some wood, threatening our left flank.

On the French right my infantry managed to shoot up some of teh advancing Hanoverians. We sent in cavalry to finish them off.

Caesar joined in as well on the other flank.

The Hanoverian cavalry counter-attacked and I had to commit my small light cavalry brigade to delay them. Needless to say they were quickly routed. But it gave my other cavalry brigade time to reform.

Caesar was under pressure from Peter's Austrian cavalry on the left flank.

On our right my cavalry was suffering badly at the hands of their Hanoverian opposite numbers. In the centre we were looking at pushing our second-rank forwards before the enemy bayonets went for our shaky front-line.

My cavalry disintegrated.

An overview of the game and players (plus one guest teenager waiting for a lift home).

With the cavalry gone on my right the flanks of my infantry were vulnerable. I refused my flank and managed to hold off the first charges.

The infantry finally clashed in the centre and things got bloody for both sides.

But Peter's Austrians were now sweeping across our left. The French simply didn't have enough troops left to cover everything.

Caesar had brought his own cavalry across to try and hold up the Hanoverians, and they did have some success. But my foot fell apart at about the same time and that was most of our army gone. 

We'd run out of time by this stage and teh French still held the objective, but the Austro-Hanoverians had racked up plenty of kudos for breaking French brigades, so could claim a convincing win.

The game rattled along very nicely although we still had to look up a few things. Once units start taking hits then can collapse quite quickly, and brigades can crumble through the loss of a single unit as well, so this is a brutal game all things considered.