This is a guest blog post written by Bruce Pettipas of his two Vauban's Wars games he ran at Fall-In 2024. This was the first time that I heard of the rules being run at a Convention in final form! Needless to see I was excited to see them in action! (Note: Bruce mentions he ran a game at a convention in 2023 too)
Bruce (or a friend?) made an outstanding fortress model which was stunning in 25mm.
Daniel Loych took the following three photos when he arrived at the table! Wowsers!!!
He only had a four-hour time slot and all new players to the rules!
Little Wars TV showed the game in one of their Fall-In Convention reports.
The Siege Games
This part is in Bruce's own words:
"I ran A Project of Wild Audacity: Louisbourg 1745 twice at this year’s Fall-In Convention in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The game was based on the 1745 siege of the French fortress of Louisbourg, in Cape Breton, Canada by an amateur army of New England citizen-soldiers. Louisbourg was the only proper Vauban-style fortress in North America at the time, yet through Yankee ingenuity and a rather miraculous string of good luck, the New Englanders captured it after a siege of six weeks. For the siege rules, I used Vauban’s Wars, of course!
Louisbourg has always had a special fascination for me, because I had ancestors inside the walls during both sieges and visited the site many times as a child. I have always found the 1745 siege more interesting than the 1758 siege, because James Wolfe was present at the 1758 siege, the British army outnumbered the French by 3 to 1, and they were very well-supplied and equipped, so of course the British were going to win. In 1745 victory for the besiegers was anything but assured, and the skepticism surrounding the venture was best expressed by Benjamin Franklin, who coined a phrase when he said to his brother “fortified towns are tough nuts to crack, and our teeth are not accustomed to the work.”
I could write pages about the history of the actual siege, but my purpose is to tell you how the games played out using Vauban’s Wars, not to give a history lesson. A friend of mine had scratch-built a model of about half of the fortress of Louisbourg in 28mm a number of years ago, and we had played the 1758 siege using some home-grown rules. I acquired the model from him, and for years was looking for a reasonably fast play set of siege rules that were easy to learn, and that would allow me to put the game on at a convention.
Vauban’s Wars seemed to fit the bill, and I ran the game a few times for our local gaming club. I then put it on to much acclaim at Hot Lead, a gaming convention in Stratford, Ontario, in 2023. Because it went well, I decided to put it on a Fall In, my favourite of the HMGS conventions, this year.
First, of course, I had to figure out the Orders of Battle for the siege, and determine the strength of the fortress walls, the food supply, the powder supply, etc. The orders of battle were easy, as the siege is well-attested to. The New Englanders had nine regiments present, each of 400-500 men, so a perfect size for Vauban’s Wars. Information on the siege train is also plentiful. The New Englanders brought with them 10 22-pounders, kindly provided by the colony of New York, as well as 10 18-pounders, a variety of mortars, and a number of lighter guns. At the beginning of the siege they captured a French outer work that contained 28 42-pounders, that they brought out to use and to replace some of the guns they brought with them, whose barrels burst with appalling frequency. I ignored the lighter guns, and gave the New Englanders 3 batteries of Siege Guns and 2 batteries of Heavy guns on table, and a fourth battery of Siege Guns off-table, as historically they were able to swivel three or four guns from the captured French fortification around in their embrasures to point at Louisbourg (the French had built a battery in a perfect position to bombard their own fortress!).
This departs from the rules a bit, as the number of Siege Guns you can have is supposed to be based on the number of bastions. However, I was basing this on actual history, so the New Englanders probably got more guns than the rules allow. I also doubled the ranges for Breaching Fire. This was partly due to 1) the scale of the model of the fortress is such that longer ranges make sense, 2) historically, the guns in the captured Royal Battery did bring down the gate and breach the walls of Louisbourg from across the harbour, and 3) this is a convention game, so I wanted to move things along quickly.
I also doubled the range for musketry, as given the size of my model and the width of the ditch, troops on the wall would not be able to shoot at troops in the parallel on the lip of the covered way, which historically they did. Also, that would align musket ranges with the rules I used for the Assault, Regimental Fire and Fury.
Siege Morale Points for both sides, as well as Powder Supply and Food Supply for the garrison, were based on the charts from the rulebook, and made sense for the scenario.
(Edit: He also setup the first parallel 18 inches away from the fortress. Normally, they would be 24" to 36" away. This is a really good idea to reduce the time it takes to build the parallels and saps from the first parallel to the second parallel, which is normally around 18" from the fort.)
The French defenders had Fortress Guns in the two bastions represented on the table, the Dauphin Bastion and the King’s Bastion. I put more cannon models in these bastions than the one gun model that is supposed to represent the fortress guns, but this was purely for look. I treated them as being just the one gun model allowed. They also had two batteries of Heavy Guns, that they could place where needed. The French had one unit representing the battalion of 500-600 compagnies franches de la marine soldiers who were there, and four units of town militia, representing 300-400 men each. They also had a unit of Swiss mercenaries. These were the 150 men of the Regiment de Karrer, and because they were only 150 men, I represented them with a two-stand unit, instead of the normal four stands.
I gave the curtain walls, gates and bastions a uniform strength of only 40 points. Partly this was to speed along the breaching in a convention game, but partially also because the walls of Louisbourg were held together by mortar made from Nova Scotia sand, which is altogether unsuited for the role.
I gave the French two one-stand units of Mi’kmaq, France’s First Nations Allies in Atlantic Canada. I treated them as Crack Light Infantry. They were based outside of the fortress and could only be used in Trench Raids. They did not cost the French any Siege Morale Points when destroyed, but they could not be rebuilt on a Leadership card.
In building the Siege Decks for each side, which is a game mechanic I love, I gave the New Englanders three Siege Drags On cards in addition to the 11 mandatory cards. This was because they didn’t know what they were doing, historically. On Turn 3 (the beginning of June), a British Army Engineer arrived from Nova Scotia to set things on a more professional basis, so I let them swap out one Siege Drags On card each turn for a better card. On Turn 6 Summer arrived, so they could swap out another Siege Drags On card. The French had one Siege Drags on card and one Command Indecision Card, as Louisbourg’s governor at the time was only acting until the official new governor arrived from France, and the acting Governor didn’t know what he was doing.
I also made sure to stock up on anything I might need based on things that could happen in the game. A friend used his 3D printer to make me trenches and gun positions and zig-zags, as well as tents for the New England camp. I collected ladders for the storm, fires if any were set, blue pellets to use for rainwater to flood the trenches, gallows for hanging any spies that were caught, powder smoke for both guns and muskets to show they had fired, booklets with Quick Reference Charts for each player (in red duotangs for the New Englanders and white for the French), trench filling sections, piles of rubble to indicate a breach, markers to indicate hits on the town, walls, guns, sappers and infantry, etc. One thing that was useful was a chart I made showing the different die types, so a player could easily see what type of die they would be rolling after doing all the ups and downs. With all that prep work done, I was ready for the game.
FIRST GAME
I had three New England players and two French. I gave each player a very brief bio of the historical character they were playing, with a bit of humour so they could relate. It turned out that the player who played one of the New England brigadiers in the second game was distantly related to him! I explained the rules to them somewhat at the beginning, but told them that for the most part I would teach them the rules of sieges as we went along. Since the real-life New Englanders learned on-the-job, I thought this was fair. Most of my opening introduction was explaining how each side could win, and that I expected them to kill my great-great-great-granduncle, who was in charge of one of the militia units there.
The players picked up the rules VERY quickly. They were reminding me of things I had forgotten as the game went on! The Mi’kmaw raids were highly successful at first, and the New Englanders took a lot of hits on sappers and guns from trench raids. Fire from the fortress also did a lot of hits on the New England guns, and Suzette, the sexy French spy, convinced a number of stands to desert. In fact, desertion was not a big problem during the siege, as the New Englanders had nowhere to go. However, over a third of their troops did end up in the hospital, either through sickness or malingering, so I decided that was the same as deserting.
The New Englanders got their licks in, too. Eventually they killed the two stands of Mi’kmaq trench raiders. With the Mi’kmaq dead, the French started sending out militia on their raids, as they had so few regulars, and the militia were not up to the task. The New Englanders also concentrated more fire on the Fortress guns than I thought they would, at the cost of fewer shots at the walls. They grasped the concept of Ricochet Fire very quickly and caused a lot of damage to the French Fortress Guns in the Dauphin Bastion. They also rained mortar shells down on the town.
There were a number of tied initiative rolls, so there were a number of turns where not much happened. Heavy rains ended one turn, and the New England Spy managed to urinate (contaminate food) in the town’s Food Supply a couple of times. A Critical Hit also burned up some of the food, so things were looking bad for the French. Also, Suzette was captured and hanged, though she was replaced by a Spy who was even better. (Besieger's Espionage Card below)
The New Englanders got their batteries and parallels up to the lip of the covered way. This was a catch 22, as they had to put infantry in the parallels to defend the batteries against Trench Raids, but this made them easy targets for the French guns. The Sappers dug into the ditch and filled in part of it. Casualties mounted, and at one point it seemed that half the New England force was at the Rally Point in their camp, waiting to be recovered. But they then had a string of good rolls and restored all their lost Unit Integrity.
I used Regimental Fire and Fury for the Assault, which meant a quick recalculation for me of how many stands of troops each side would have to lose before it hit its break point. I made it easier to scale the wall in the sections of the ditch that were filled in. Even then, the combat for the walls was intense. On the last throw of the dice, the small Swiss Regiment de Karrer threw itself at Moulton’s 3rd Massachusetts, which had just mounted the wall. The Swiss were better troops, and if they had eliminated ONE stand of the New Englanders in melee, they would have won the game. However, the Massachusetts boys fired at them as they came in and rolled their best possible result, eliminating the Swiss entirely. The French reached their breakpoint and surrendered.
The players had a great time, and you couldn’t ask for a closer or more exciting finish!
SECOND GAME
In the second game that I ran the next night, the New Englanders didn’t have much luck. French fire was quite effective, causing them lots of casualties. Severe rains flooded their trenches and gun emplacements, and it took a few rounds before the sappers could clean things up and get the guns back in action. They did set fire to the town, but it didn’t spread. The Relief Army random event came up (it is not widely known that there was in fact a Relief Army on its way to Louisbourg. The French and their Native allies were besieging a British fort in Nova Scotia while the new Englanders were besieging Louisbourg. When they heard what was going on in Cape Breton, they raised the siege of Annapolis Royal and marched to Louisbourg’s succour. However, while crossing the Northumberland Strait in commandeered fishing boats and birchbark canoes, they were intercepted by a New England privateer. The New Englander only had four-pounders, but that was four pounds heavier than anything the French had, and their force was scattered). Anyway, the knowledge that the Relief Army was on its way forced the New Englanders to attack the walls before they were ready, and they were decisively defeated.
It was quite a different game, but both sets of players really enjoyed themselves. A fortress looks good on the table, and a siege is a different kind of game. Vauban’s Wars are really easy to learn and are full of flavour. They cover everything you can think of for a siege. Our group has even used them for the siege of Delhi during the Indian Mutiny!
I hope this gives you some idea of how the games went and gives the reader an interest in trying a siege with Vauban’s Wars yourself."
Postscript
"None
of the players had the rules or had ever played them before. Daniel (who is on
the FB group) had been thinking about buying them but wanted to try them out
first.
All the players learned them really quickly, as I said, and were happy with trying a siege. I explained that if this wasn’t a 4-hour convention game, the rules would allow you to play a siege to completion without an Assault, and in fact that nearly happened anyway! If the New Englanders had either breached the wall on that last turn, or lost one more stand to French fire, we would have finished in just over 3 hours."
Daniel later wrote on the FB group page. "... it was a great game! By far the most exciting siege rules I’ve ever played. It came down to a razor edge."
Link to the FaceBook Group: Vauban's Wars Wargaming Rules | Facebook
Link to Vauban's Rules.
Have a great day!
Eric Burgess
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