As we’d been playing For King and Parliament almost exclusively for the past few months, my regular wargaming opponent and I fancied a change. He’d spotted my fairly extensive collection of 19th Century figures, so suggested we dust them off and have a game.

Good idea, says I, so the next question became a discussion about what rules to use. I wanted something simple, with no need for protractors and laser pointers and the like, so we thought we’d give Neil Thomas’ Wargaming 19th Century Europe 1815-1878 a try.

This compact little booklet contains a wealth of information. There’s a large background section followed by six pages of rules and then large numbers of army lists, battle scenarios and historical information.

Six pages of rules sounded good to me, especially as I knew that I would need to re-base my collection to play any commercially available rules, so would only need to expend a little brain power to work out how to use my existing figures and play-test the system before making any sort of re-basing decision.

We set up a quick encounter game using as many of my Austrian and Prussian figures as possible, and set to…

The Battle

As I said, above, we used my existing figures based as is, and made loads of mistakes with the rules - despite their simplicity!

I won’t therefore do a full AAR, just a gallery of the action. Suffice to say that my brave but outnumbered Austrians were soundly beaten: the breachloaders used by the dastardly Prussians proving highly superior to my Lorenz rifles!

It was a most enjoyable game, however, with the rules proving simple yet infinitely subtle. It certainly had the feel of a 19th Century battle: very pleasing as many rulesets for the period, in my experience, are a Napoleonic battle with a bit of advanced weaponry tacked on!

I’ve now started re-basing my troops to suit the system (and many other sets as there’s nothing too outre about what’s needed) and we’ll have more of a proper game next time.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that none of the figures featured had been on the tabletop for over 20 years!