White Mountain – Battle report – Beernsdorft 1622

This is a record of the play test of the current version of the White Mountain rules for block, hex and card games modeling the Thirty Years War. Simon played the Catholics and Imperials, and I played the Protestants.

This was scenario set in the Palatinate or German war phase. The Imperials and Catholics are still using the traditional Spanish tercio, and the German Protestants are using shallow battalions based on the Dutch model. Historically the Protestants got the worst of it in these encounters. This has raised questions in my mind as to why alternatives were sought to the tercio, but this is a digression.

We used the Bohemian Revolt army generator to get the starting forces and terrain layout (battle-of-beerndorft) to get the forces. Simon was superior in cavalry, but I had a distinct advantage in artillery – much good as it did me in the end. This gave the following terrain layout on a standard 13×10 hex board (this one from the Epic set of BattleLore).And here is a representation of the forces overlaid.

We tried to use all the rules available to us so far, and I think we only missed one late in the game when a regiment failed to retreat after losing combat. But I believe this is all that was missed. Virtually all of the tactics that were available to the unit types were used, including caracole, and so I think this was a fair test of the system.

The battle opened with Simon pushing his right wing straight up the Beernsdorft stream. Despite harassment from my artillery both the Martinez and Salazar kurassiers closed on the hill held by a detached shot regiment and ejected them. A strong counter attack regained the hill, supported by the Schmid kurassiers, but it was not enough. The arrival of the Imperial Schmitt tercio and the Hahn regiment of kurassiers sealed the fate of the protestant left. Battered and forced back the shot regiment collapsed and fled the field, closely followed by the Weber infantry regiment. Schmid’s kurassiers put up a stout defense, but even with the exhaustion and collapse of the imperial Salazar kurassiers Simon’s troops looked ready to roll up the protestant flank.

This action was a brutal seesaw affair with commanders lost on both sides and the gradual build up of disruption on the participating regiments. At times Simon was weighing the risks of continuing the assault and continuing to build up disruption or retreat to reform and lose this initiative. This was exactly the decision we were trying to model. In the end several (protestant – grinding teeth) regiments collapsed because they had too many disruption tokens (that is: they routed).

After realigning what was left on my protestant left flank I decided to shift the focus to the centre where I had artillery superiority. This caused some discomfort to the Imperial Soto and Mendez tercios, but only seemed to spur Simon into action. The Imperial army launched a general advance in the centre and covered the 700 metres in an alarmingly short period of time. My 24 great guns belched at the advancing papists but did little to deter them.

Conceiving a master stroke, I swept my Protestant right wing forward to envelop the exposed advancing tercios. Kaiser, Hoffman and Schwarz kurassiers caracoled against Mendez tercio, achieved the hoped for disruption and closed for the slaughter – only to be bounced at great cost. The tercios continued their inexorable march while the badly cut up Protestant horse retired.

Guns face up have been abandoned by their crews and are now silent and ready for capture.

And at that moment as I saw that virtually all my horse had gone and almost every cannon had been silenced. I conceded victory even though I still had several fresh infantry regiments. In real life I would be detailing a couple of regiments to stall the advancing Imperials and Catholics while I tried to save the rest of the Protestant army for another day.

Key test findings:

Accumulating Disruption modeling morale and cohesion. The goal was to simulate that armies of this time disintegrated from the back – that is: a regiment was more likely to be destroyed through the men fleeing rather than being slaughtered. A further goal was to simulate this without complex ‘morale’ rules requiring extra calculations and dice rolls. Finally, this mechanism was designed to allow you to manage the problem, effectively giving you choices. This seems to have been fulfilled. In attack, Simon had a choice whether to risk continuing in the push and possibly fall apart, or halt and reform and lose initiative.

Total game time was somewhere around an hour and a half. Simulated time was in the vicinity of 3 hours, allowing for a move representing roughly 20 minutes.

Overall, the basic rules capture the appropriate flavour. Another test with this base set of rules is needed, then I want to add in the extra unique flavour events such as exploding powder, misunderstood retreats, secret movement and so on.