Kolin, June 18, 1757. A case study

The battle of Kolin- Anonymous

Amongst the Frederician battles, Kolin was the one that most intrigued me; the reasons are manifolds: the first battle lost by the Old Fritz, the endless anedottics –“Rouges, do you want to live forever!”- amongst the others, the beautiful Clash of Arms boardgame (Never played once: I am too old to read 50 pages of rules and 12 of tables. Nevertheless a real pleasure for the eyes and the historical commentary by Christopher Duffy alone well deserves the price):

It is a battle which, in my opinion is not to easy to simulate: no sensible player will hammer his army to the pulp in frontal attacks at “cold steel”, given the Prussian performance. However, when one reads Duffy, the feeling is that of a battle more balanced than it can appear at a glance: moreover it allows for the most aggressive hot-headed players of any Wargame Groups to go wild with the real possibility to perform even better then the King of Prussia…

“Her Majesty, do you want to take those guns single-handed?”

To better enjoy the pleasure of playing Kolin, I decided to playtest it with three different rulesets, whose grain is different within the overall operational picture: that is, no tactical battalion commander decision, rather Corps/Division commander choices. Accordingly I choose:

1) DBHx: the Humberside 1500-1900 variant for DBA v2.2. which has a nice scenario for Kolin. Some notes on the terrain scale: the suggested map size for the scenario is 54”x 30”, presumably with 60mm frontages. Since I want to use my regimental bases for V&B full-size with 3” frontage bases, the scaled size of the map is 67”x 37” or 170 cm x 94 cm. 

2) Maurice: Kolin is one of the scenarios provided in the Rulebook. There is a very interesting discussion about the scale and scenario design and the suggested map is 40BW times 30BW. With a base-width of 1.5” (each V&B bases represents indeed two Maurice bases) we have 60”x 45” or roughly 150 cm x 115 cm. By measuring the distance between Blinka and Radowesnitz on the scenario map (27BW) and those given by Duffy e.g. in “Frederick the Great - A Military Life”,  we may arrive at a terrain scale of roughly 1:3520.

3) Volley&Bayonet: a very nice scenario was provided by Christian Rogge on the V&B Yahoo Group. The scale of V&B is 1”=100 yards or 1:3540. The map is 90’’x54’’ or 228 cm x 137 cm, bigger than those of the previous ruleset.

The first thing we notice is that despite the fact that Maurice and V&B have the same terrain scale, the different way they represents the units makes for two differently-sized maps; as far as DBHx is concerned, one can argue that the scale is roughly 1:3500 with a troop scaling similar to that of Maurice.  In this sense V&B has a “finer” grain than both DBHx and Maurice.

The idea which is at the basis of my posts and which I want to explore in the next posts  is to see how the three different sets of rules give the feeling of the same battle for those like me leaves the niceties of formal drill to somebody else….

The Prussian I/15 Regiment at Kolin. The “niceties of formal drill”…..