More Grande Armee

Grande Armee does Aspern-Essling. Aspern in foreground. Notice the carefully disguised gaming paraphenalia.

Grande Armee seems to be a favorite choice for grand tactical Napoleonics among some of our Napoleonic 15mm supporters. After the Waterloo game, there was a game scheduled for Dec. 12th. This time: Aspern-Essling 1809. This was the first time Kai got out his 15mm Austrians, who clashed that Saturday against Will's French. I arrived late, not expecting to play, but eventually wound up commanding the troops around Aspern.

Multi-brigade clash. This one's gonna hurt.

Chris at GAJO has prepared many metal 3" x 3" bases to which he attaches identification labels. The nice thing about GA is that you can use other basing to fill in the brigade bases as you wish for visual effect.

Austrian and French brigades clash before Aspern. Dave plots French destruction in the background, to no avail.

The Austrian artillery seemed to be everywhere. I made some successful assaults with my cav brigades, really focusing on combined-arms attacks, but I could never quite catch theose yellow guns. Meanwhile my strength was being steadily sapped.

The Dead Zone.

Another item I like about GA is the concept of reorganization. Dead Brigades are assumed to have pulled back to reorganize if possible. Sometimes they don't which means the brigade really was destroyed as a unit. Those which do return are placed in a corps' rear areas with lesser strength than they started with. In this game, attrition was taking a terrible toll.

After several turns of attrition, the lines reform. The French still hold Aspern.

After several exciting turns, the Austrians and the French beat each other to death around Aspern. I had reached the point of having no possible offensive options. The Austrians were in the same boat to my front. Action continued around Essling until both sides had to pull back and catch their breath. By that time we had to quit the game. So the results were similar to the actual conflict.