RULES OF THE GAME: BUILDINGS AS BLOCKING TERRAIN

French Napoleonic battalion columns moving through lanes between buildings.

 

Greetings fellow shut-ins (soon-to-be-emerging)!  In this post, dear readers, we meander into a new subject area: "Rules of the Game." Although I've got complete rules sets in the content pages of this blog, in these posts I'll offer some single-subject items for your consideration: things that either are embedded in my rules somewhere or that I just happen to have used in my games, which should present novel approaches to conventional subjects.  In this post, I present another way to handle the often vexed issue of towns/buildings on the game table. Here it is, in summary:  

 

Instead of allowing units to occupy buildings, treat them as "null" terrain.  In other words, the footprint of each building is a forbidden terrain zone, like water features (ponds, lakes) in most rules: you cannot occupy or move through them.  Additionally, buildings also block line of sight and fire. In short, units fight and move between buildings, not in them.

 

BUILDINGS GROUPED TO CREATE AN IN-TOWN FIGHT

Buildings arranged with internal spaces and lanes: The Prussians are about to advance through the lanes after several turns of close quarters fighting in the town. The French are setting up on the far side of the town having just been repulsed.  The placement of the buildings in the middle of the table also made this key terrain. This arrangement allowed for doing the actual back and forth town fighting as opposed abstracting it by bouncing off of units in buildings. 

 

The key to using buildings in either of the ways mentioned in this post is how you spot them.  Different arrangements can produce different effects. In terms of grouping buildings to replicate a town,  you will need to think about how your units are based and the kinds of spaces needed to allow units to operate (or how you would like the spaces to limit how they would operate). In short, you need to ensure that your units can actually fit between the buildings. For towns, I generally want buildings with individually small footprints that collectively can create an overall layout.  It doesn't necessarily take many buildings or a large area to get a good effect. The above example is a set of buildings that were placed in the middle of the table in order to replicate in-town fighting, with the secondary effect of creating different lanes with different entry/exit points for getting in and out of the town.  The pictures are taken from the Somewhere in Saxony , 1813 Game Report--where  you can go if you want to get a more detailed description of the game flow. As usual, in this post you may clix pix for BIG PIX.

The French advance into the town first.

The Prussians line advancing to contest the town.

Hard to see, but this was a close-range firefight between a French Line and a Prussian Reserve infantry battalion in the town. Eventually, the French would get the worse of this and pull back.

View of the firefight from the Prussian side (seen just to the left of the building).

Both sides had supports behind the town and fed units in to the town fighting--which  replicates how how town fighting was actually managed.

 

BUILDINGS PLACED SINGLY TO SHAPE THE BATTLEFIELD

In this example, taken from the Battle of Dybbol, buildings are spotted singly down the line to replicate the influence of small towns that defined the Danish front line.  

They also defined the battlefield into "lanes" of action. Here you see a Prussian command straddling two lanes as it approaches the Danish line, which has solidified and incorporated the buildings as anchor points. 

Ultimately, the Prussians had to overcome the units at these anchor points in order to break through the Danish line and gain freedom of maneuver.  Alternately, the Danes prioritized maintaining these key points in order to maintain the integrity of their defense. In other words, despite the buildings being "null" they still produced the same effect as if they had been conventionally occupied (without any of the fuss of special building fighting rules). 

 

So, dear reader, I offer this approach for your consideration. I invite you keep an open mind and give it a try. It is a dead-simple thing to implement and can deliver a new dimension to game play. 

Excelsior!