Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre

 So, Friday Night was Vassal Night. (Yes, this is a very delayed entry I’m afraid, blame my ever-hectic social schedule. Actually, don’t)

I have always been a bit ambivalent about Vassal. It’s a boon to those gamers lacking real life opponents and pretty much a Godsend during the Covid lockdowns, and some of its modules – presumably those that model the more popular games – work extremely well. In fact, in a real-time game, I have found that most of the modules I have tried have been reasonably clear and intuitive. I always found the PBEM version much less satisfying – having to step through an opponent’s log file and watch their moves and hope they didn’t make any mistakes before starting your own log file and hoping you don’t make any mistakes just felt like a chore. This was amplified to the nth power for multiplayer games…all of a sudden you had three or four other player turns to step through to get round to your own and the whole thing became an almighty pain…

Anyhoo. It was nice just to be doing a bit of real-time gaming online or otherwise. Our Vassal game on this occasion was another stab, after some years, at Compass Games’ No Peace Without Spain!, one of those games with an exclamation mark in the title (The only other example in my collection being the WWII ETO game Unconditional Surrender!)! As the title indicates the game is all about the War of the Spanish Succession with one player as the Bourbons (France, Spain, Bavaria and, initially, Savoy) and the other as the anti_Bourbon Alliance (Britain, the United Provinces, the Empire, latterly Savoy, Portugal and potentially Hapsburg Spain).

Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre-ing. That's never a real horse.

The game is card-driven; after an initial drawing of Event cards that introduce random events that can benefit either party, the meat of the game is the alternate play of cards with numerical values of 1-3. The values represent points that can be used to activate armies to move or make siege attempts, to rally troops demoralised by earlier defeat or to bring up to full strength corps that have suffered losses. Battles are pretty much uncomplicated dice-fests: half a die for each half-strength corps, one die for each full-strength corps and a number of dice for each engaged general equal to their Tactical Rating, with each die hitting on a roll of 5 or 6.

The stately pace of early eighteenth century warfare is enforced by a very simple rule. No army can move into an enemy-controlled space unless they are moving out of a friendly-controlled one. The only way to control a fortress space is to capture the fortress; so, as every space in the UP and Spanish Netherlands is a fortress space, the only way one of the armies can move forward is by taking in siege every space along the way. A turn represents a year and each side has only five cards to play during that time, so given the strength of the fortresses it is unlikely that more than one major fortress will fall to either side during the course of a year.

One nice touch is that a sufficiently overwhelming victory results in a Famous Victory marker being placed in the space, and this has beneficial results for the siege die rolls of the victorious player in adjacent spaces for the rest of the year. They say it was a shocking sight, and all that.

The game mostly does the job. There is a strong element of luck in the sense that if one side happens to draw a hand of 3-strength cards while the other has all 1-strength the former is going to have many more actions available and therefore a very strong advantage, while the absence of die-roll modifiers means that the results of most battles tend to be largely fortuitous – having Marlborough and Eugene in the lineup is a significant advantage but not one that cannot be overturned just by having a slightly larger French army.

We managed to play the years 1702 and 1703, during which, as the Allies, I managed to defeat the French outside Antwerp and reduce the city, at some loss. This gain was balanced in Germany by the loss of Coblenz to superior French forces and the fall of Linz to the Bavarians, posing a direct threat to Vienna, the fall of which would end the game with an automatic Bourbon Victory. At this point I am not sure how likely it is that I will be able to reproduce Marlborough’s famous march to the Danube, and of course even if I do it will be obvious to the Bourbon player so unlikely to have quite the same impact it did in real life. And of course if I get a load of 1-strength cards and the Bourbons get a stack of 3’s Vienna is probably toast.

Marlborough looking good in Antwerp.

Vienna not looking very safe though.

One thing that soured me slightly against Compass Games was their follow-up game of the Nine Years War (what at school we used to call the War of the League of Augsburg, 1688-1697, a dress rehearsal for the WSS). It’s good for such a little-covered war to get any outing at all, but the game was published with a virtually identical system, and a virtually identical map, to this one. I have never played it but I feel instinctively that it might have been a scenario in this one as opposed to a separate game, so I doubt it is a game I will ever feel the need to own.

The decision to play the game led me to some idle reading around the period, which led me to reading about the folk song referenced in the title. Apparently it was a tune that had its origin in a false report of the death of Marlborough at the bloody Battle of Malplaquet in 1709 and I was vaguely aware from my Napoleonic readings that Le Petit Caporal was fond of humming it. I never knew it provided the tune for ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, so you learn something new every day.