Dominion Of Malborough And Peter The Great

I bought another of the Dominion series yesterday. 'Dominion Of Malborough And Peter The Great' covers the War Of Spanish Succession and Great Northern War (as you'd expect). It's the same format as the other Dominion games, offering five minute battles with 4-6 units on each side. Like the other more recent books it has the rules and then, in lieu of formal army lists, it has setups for some 24 battles of the period, from Sedgemoor in 1685 to Sherrifmuir in 1715. So a pretty short time period.

Troop types are pretty much what you'd expect from other rules in the series, but there is the inclusion of Ga Pa Infantry for the Swedes, who sit between the volley-firing Line Infantry and the various pure melee types.

The rules continue to use the idea of a combat being rolled in sequence based on the troop types, and period flavour is built in by a series of modifiers, with certain units getting bonuses against other types. In addition it includes a rule that foot that start in an army's front line are more resistant to cavalry charges as they are considered 'in position'.

A lot of the scenarios make use of Unreliable troops to reflect such things as flank-marchers who may or may not turn up. I like this idea. A lot of front-line artillery is unreliable; it may get in a bombardment or may simply have no effect on the battle.

Anyway I had a few minutes at lunchtime and set up a couple of the Great Northern War scenarios.

The first was Holoczyn, fought in 1708 in which the Swedes forced a river-crossing against entrenched Russian troops and drove them off. I used stones to mark the various traits; elite, disciplined/entrenched or unreliable.

In my refight the Swedes swept to an fairly easy victory, smashing the Russian centre.

I then tried the 1709 Battle of Poltava. This makes a lot of use of unreliable troops to bulk out the Russian army, making it larger than the measly for units the Swedes get. The entire Russian front-line is unreliable to reflect the redoubts; the Swedes may just pass through them with little disruption (as was the plan) or may get bogged down.

In my refight they got serious bogged down as the redoubts put up an epic defence. The Swedes had little success anywhere and were swiftly and ignominiously defeated.

As with the other sets in the series they aren't necessarily a set of rules for stand-alone games, but will do for a campaign of some kind.

And on that note I should point out that I had a very profitable session yesterday where I worked out the framework of a simple ECW campaign designed for use with Dominion Of Pike & Shot. If I get chance I'll run it through this weekend.