A Few Chosen Men

        I have had the Osprey Rules "Chosen Men" lying around my house for a number of years now. I picked them up on the cheap at a gaming convention flea market table but never got past a quick read-through until last week. This was mostly due to the fact that I didn't have any painted 28mm Napoleonics until this past October. That has changed and I now possess enough troops to stage a tidy little skirmish. To that end I rounded up some of the usual suspects and ran a simple scenario "Take and hold the village" with the forces coming from opposite directions and the village sitting in the center of the table.

        Having a (very) limited selection of troops for the French side I gave them four ten-man Guard Chassuers squads and a Lt. Colonel to lead them. Facing these brave lads was a polyglot assortment of Prussians; one ten-man squad of Schutzen, a twenty-man platoon of Regular Line Infantry, a ten-man squadron of Dragoons and two twenty-man platoons of Landwehr, all commanded by a mounted Captain . This meant that between the two sides we would see most of the troop-types envisioned by the rules and a considerable variety of morale and drill.

 

right off I liked the alternate-unit movement,

 it gets away from the nonsense associated with I-go/U-go systems 

here we see the game a couple of turns into proceedings, 

the marching is ending and shooting is about to commence

 

the Prussian force advances; the two units closest to the camera are Landwehr, on the road are the Regular infantry who are flanked by the  Dragoons, in the far distance (and in the woods) are the Schutzen

 

the French went with one squad on each flank and two up the center

 

as they closed in on the village the French pulled in their flanking units to storm the buildings 

while holding the center units in reserve, 

the Prussians tried to use superior numbers to force the French out

 

but the French threw in the first unit from their reserve reversing the advantage

 

once more the Cottage of Carnage has attracted a big gory melee

after defeating the Regulars the French swiftly occupied the small cottage at the bottom of the screen

 

the Prussian Dragoons tried to eliminate the French reserve unit

 but Imperial Guard are just so tough that they can defeat cavalry while standing in line

 

at the end of play the French had been badly battered

 but the Prussians only had a Landwehr and a Schutzen unit left in fighting trim 

and stood little chance of driving the French out of the village

       All in all this was a pretty fun game, marred only by my lack of familiarity with the rules. The rules themselves have some issues with clarity and organization but a careful reading (and some frantic page-flipping) sorted that out well enough in the end. The only truly clunky part was melee resolution. This may have been exacerbated by the large units that I used for this test game. I am confident that greater understanding of the rules will ease gameplay. The best part is that my freshly-painted troops got a chance to "see the elephant".