Valour & Fortitude

Yesterday evening some of us gave the 'Valour & Fortitude' Napoleonics rules from Perry Miniatures a go. These are a set originally designed for fighting big demo games, and are, to some extent, simplified from Black Powder, although they have a character all their own.

They can be downloaded from the Perry Miniatures website HERE

We set up a simple encounter between the Russians and the French, with each side having two infantry brigades, a heavy cavalry brigade and a light cavalry brigade. Objectives were the hills to the right of this picture and the village and wood in the left-centre.

Black Powder players would recognise some of the unit setup - each unit has a number of dice for firing (French infantry have 3, for example), melee combat (4 for the French infantry) and a Tenacity value (4 for French foot) which represents how many hits they can take before things go pear-shaped. Hits are normally scored on a 4+; there are combat adjustments both to the number of dice rolled and the roll to hit. A unit which takes hits equal to its Tenacity is shaken. Excess hits cause a morale test; for each hot roll a D6 and you need a 4+ not to rout. This morale test is brutal; once things go badly for a unit, it will rout. This then causes a test for the whole brigade, with the possibility of units taking a hit each (which can trigger more routs if they're badly damaged enough).

Anyway, Stuart and I went wild with the French from the start; the Russians had occupied the village, whilst we had our heavy cavalry in the centre being shot at by Russian heavy artillery. So to save them from the gunnery, we attacked the village ...

More on that later ...

Meanwhile on the other flank, Brian was advancing masses of Russians against my French infantry on their hill. I forgot to put my troops into line, where they shoot better, and suffered for it.

Back to the village. The French managed to maintain the attack - thanks in part to another feature of the game; event cards - and ...

... routed the Russian foot, taking the village! With cavalry. 

That said, the Russian heavies thundered past their infantry and rolled over the top of my foot on the hills. Something of a disaster, really.

Not pictured was the collapse of our light cavalry on the other flank - they were wrong-footed by the Russian lights after a bad command roll. Yes, there's a small bit of command friction built into the game. Unlike Black Powder where you roll for activations, Valour & Fortitude has a much simpler system; on a turn a side can activate one brigade for free, assuming it's in range of the army commander. Each other brigade must roll a D6 - on a '1' they don't act this turn; inertia, loss of orders or simple confusion stops them. They can shoot, but do nothing else. It's simple, effective and annoying, but does the job.

Anyway, we reached the time limit with the Russians ahead. The rules recommend simply playing until you reach a set time, and then that's the end of the game. Perfect for a club meeting.

As you can tell, I enjoyed these rules. There's a lot of combat factors to take into account but Gary, who ran the game for us, had put them all onto a useful QRS and by about halfway through we were all pretty much running our own shooting and combat, despite three of us never having read the rules prior to play.

In terms of complexity they sit nicely between Neil Thomas's 'Simplicity in Practice' and 'Black Powder'. I found them as entertaining as the latter but with much cleaner mechanisms. The rules are still being refined and updated based on player feedback, and I believe that versions are planned for other periods (although officially only ones for which Perry Miniatures do figures). I liked them.

Thanks to Gary for organising the game and to both him and Caesar for providing the figures. Also to Stuart for putting up with my insane 'Charge the village' plan and to Brian for showing me how to actually use heavy cavalry.