The inspiration for this project was the book, ‘The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo’ by Russell F. Weigley which argued that the period 1618 to 1815 was a distinct period of military history, where empires and countries were engaged in a quest to make warfare decisive, a process that had largely succeeded by the time of the early campaigns of Napoleon. It has two attractions, firstly technological change over this period was incremental, all of the major weapons used in the conflicts were in existence at the start of the period, although they all saw steady inprovement over the following years. The second attraction was that there are numerous campaigns and battles in a wide variety of settings from major continental clashes right through to small colonial actions, so plenty of variety to draw on.

The second source of inspiration for this project is the work of Dr Paddy Griffiths, formerly at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst who wrote extensively on the use of wargaming in the study of history. In particular, a couple of articles in Wargamers Newsletter in August 1975 (No.161), January 1976 (no.166) and April 1976 (No.169) on the subject of ‘The Sprawling Napoleonic Strategic Game’. He returned to this theme in his book ‘Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun’ in 1980 which included his latest version of the rules for this game. His aim was to play at a ground scale that merged the battlefield with the campaign, used simple rules and blocks instead of figures. He used a ground scale of 1: 10,000 (1mm equals 10m) which gave some context to the battlefield by incorporating the pre-battle manoeuvering, use of pickets and patrols to gain information and the importance of the approach march to the battlefield.

My aim is to use Paddy’s wargaming concept and to combine it with Weigley’s period concept, so as to fight a selection of interesting major battles spanning the period to gain an understanding of how tactics and armies evolved over time. It is planned to fight both field battles, sieges and amphibious operations.

The period spans at least four major wargaming periods (Renaissance, War of Spanish Succession, Seven Years War and Napoleonic,) so the battles will be fought using 2mm blocks which have been 3D printed both to keep the costs down and also to allow a number of different block types to represent different weapons and formations. The files to print the blocks have been taken from the Forward March range (https://forwardmarchstudios.com/) which allows for aa wide variety of block designs and have been printed by a UK printer.

Landscape as an important factor in warfare

The recent trend in wargaming towards more abstract tabletops, incorporating squares, hexes and few terrain features, such as in the Portable Wargame has minimised the role of landscape. However, the idea of landscape deserves greater importance so the battles will be fought on a large-scale maps, just as in the days of Kreigspiel. The Ferraris maps of Belgium which were created in 1775 are all available online at both https://www.kbr.be/en/the-ferraris-map/ and at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Full_size_Ferraris_maps_of_Belgium_with_levels_corrected which provides a wide range of terrain from coastal plains such as Flanders, to hilly areas such as the Ardennes and a number of actual battlefield sites such as Louvain, Ramillies and Waterloo. The original maps were created at 1: 11,520 scale and the images are sufficiently detailed that they can be rescaled to 1: 10,000, 5,000 or even 2,500 without image loss and then printed out at home in A0 sheets (1.2m x 850cm)(just under 4’ x 3’)(4x4 A4 sheets). The Club has 4’ by 8’ tables so several sheets can be used together. This will allow the playing of large scale battles, for instance the battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny could be combined on one table or the battles of Waterloo and Wavre

The sheets will be covered with 3D printed houses, woodland, trees and terrain items to enhance the look of the game. This means that a battlefield, or at least parts of it can be printed out in three different sizes, depending on the size of the armies involved, whether flanking moves are needed, or if greater detail for an important event is required. Similarly, fortresses can be depicted in great detail and populated with fortifications (https://www.paperterrain.com/), ravelins and covered ways, 3D printed buildings and feature buildings, port facilities and ships. (http://www.rodlangton.com/napoleonic/frame.htm)

Wargames rules

As regards rules, a simple set for fighting large scale battles was needed, combined with the ability to use the same rules at a variety of different scales. The Pike and Shot Society’s Twilight of the Sun King was considered as it is based on a simple playing mechanism of Steve Thomas’ developed back in 1995 and it has a number of different variants to depict the entire period. However in the end, I settled on DBA variants from the Wargames Research Group: De Bellis Renationis (1618-1700) and Horse, Foot Guns (1700-1815) as my other players were more familiar with the rule concepts contained in these rules. As always with rule sets, which ones you end up using are determined by finding other players prepared to try them out.

Orders of Battle will be taken from sources such as George Nafziger, (Nafziger Collection)(Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) Digital Library) put into an Excel spreadsheet, have the factors added from the rules and then transferred to PowerPoint to create the bases. From this the bases needed for a particular battle can be printed out onto heavy photographic paper. The 3D printed blocks are attached to the bases with a temporary glue and the bases act as unit identifiers, containing the unit labels, while the spreadsheet contains the rule’s unit characteristics and records casualties for campaigns. The beauty of this system is that this temporary basing should allow battles to be set up relatively quickly from a stock of coloured blocks without the need for a large number of armies as used in traditional wargames.

Planned battles

Battle of the Dunes 1600
Breitenfeltd 1631
Lutzen 1632
Nordlingen 1634
Ramilliies 1706
Rossbach 1757
Kolin 1757
Waterloo and Wavre 1815 (Hoping to have a 210th anniversary joint battle in June 2025)