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Showing posts from March, 2013

Bordurian raiders strike at King Ivan's rearguard

During his desperate march through the snow and the night back toward Klow, King Ivan left a small rear guard at the small town of Orehovo.  This was a wise move in the circumstances, as his force was flagging and increasingly disordered and would surely have been destroyed by a well organized rear attack.  Orehovo had modest fortifications constructed by the Bordurians to protect the bridge leading to Klow, defenses that dated back to the before their campaigns against King Karel II (before 1645).   With a fort and a bridge at its back (to the east), Orehovo was an ideal place to block pursuit and it was in fact the last place where Ivan could reasonably hope to do so with the men at his disposal.  Ivan’s rear guard was quite small, consisting of a squadron of huszjar light cavalry (Syldavian hussars, rather good men but there weren’t many of them), a substantial battalion of militia infantry typically used as light infantry (the steadier of the two

Crossing the Spree River, south of Potsdam

La Belle Dame Sans Merci I'm going to admit in public here to a sort of dalliance with an old flame.   You probably know who I'm talking about; she is sophisticated and elegant  and also maddeningly  complicated and always out of reach, an infamous femme fatale...  That's right, Napoleonics.  She showed up in town unexpectedly and after one little flourish of a pelisse I found the King's Shilling in my hand, for the second time!  Soon I was painting up a few units to fill out armies I had more or less put aside ten years ago.   Is this a mid life crisis? ; )   In the 1990's, Napoleonics were my consuming interest.     I painted quite a lot of figures and tried a few different rules sets and even a campaign or two before the flame cooled (or was it my eyesight declining?) and I moved on.  I returned to wargames after a walkabout and have been very happily working on early to mid Horse and Musket (NYW to SYW) ever since.  However, on a whim b ack in the fall, I res