XVIII th. century
tricorn times

American war of Independence, nowadays as a grand skirmish scale with Sharp Practice rules. 18mm

I used to play, with battalions and regiments, that madness has been more reasonably reduced to brigades.

Twilight of the Soldier Kings rules.
All that is needed to do Prussians, Austrians and a fair bit of the Reichsarmee. Part of the Russians are waiting to be painted, one day.

30-32 minis per infantry brigade
(2 rgt of 15-16) 12-13 per cavalry. Old regiment are now representing brigades.

1757 test play of Twilight of the Soldier Kings rules (Quasi Kolin)

The rules are short (too short they could have done with more examples and a few sketches of manoeuvres) very much to the point . The idea is pretty much to depart from so many rules who, want to show bataillons and have shooting and recoils etc. I played them many times and unless you have a huge area, a lot of time, 4+ players... you never can play Leuthen. So most of the time you have an army of échantillons as they would say back then.

AAr pdf

In Twilight of the soldier King, Mr Dorell departed from this approach from a decisively top down approach, units are brigades (but you can have smaller regiments or detachments to occupy a feature.) The various characteristics and modelisation of them is very fine tuned and allows for your own meddling. I was originally appointed with the absence of command and control. But I played it and read his design notes saying the armies were arthritic. An excellent appraisal. No command or very free as in many games end up easily in something that is mid 18th century only because of tricorns. Too much, too rigid is no fun and also obviously wrong (read history please). Here you can do seemingly what you want, but initial deployment and set up is vital. My understanding is this was one of the things that differentiated Napoleonic ways and "ancient regime": they could not fast redeploy initial mistakes, if at all . You want a period game or not? This system is a bit uneasy at first as unless you move straight ahead everything needs a test. The fighting is a bit as a board game, your guys get close, meaning business then the other side tests "morale", actually a bunch of situational and unit modifiers that will end up with one fail (called morale fail- but a sort of step loss), only cavalry recoils, the rest stay in till they evaporate err rout. With a bit of luck they can disengage to shoot more etc. Anyone with a very low dice can evaporate at first contact (from the enemy). Fast and furious unless the dice are too good, meaning no losses, then it can last several turns.

The systems does not forbid a lot of things, gamey things. It leads you by using it nicely and wisely to period deployment, to keep depth, to go slow and safe with rear supports. It smells nicely of 18th century. As you will see in my game report, I did give up to traditional tricks, which ended in the loss of a wing. I started with a couple of turns of approach and deploying. Made a mistake by believing troops could do many moves if passing the action test. It was soon corrected after an email to the author who nicely answered, very fast and comprehensively,

This fight was part of an ongoing campaign I started combining battles played with Twilight of the S k and a map system plus the excellent pre game (understand - few days manoeuvering and decisions, before a possible battle-) of Glory and Honour system. This works nicely in many ways but it produced many questions which I pushed to the ones publishing it, and got no answers. It looks like the old Strategy and tactics game (which can be found on Cyber board) would be a good campaign support. Later more on this.

SET up

Done with the terrain generator of the map game, together with the cards pre game system from "Steve Balagan" site. It gave a reasonably defensive terrain to the Austrians, redoubts, one magical hidden one as per The twilight.. ruleset, Fog of war cards, Austrians behind the hills, Prussians on the side table. Space is good! lots of dummies for the Prussians preparing a flank march à la Leuthen, bluffing on the other side..

I used a lot of depth for manoeuvering.

Cards for fog of war, used in many games, associated with dummies, gets close to the problems of the real commanders. My basic infantry (30-32 figs) and cavalry (12+ figs) has 16cm front so the distance unit as per the rules is 8cm.

The oblique manoeuver moves very fast to the Austrian side, the rules needs a die roll to each Austrian general to wake up. Obviously very few do in time, ho the joy of having low grade ones. A killer here. They parachute their hidden redoubt to help but the cavalry after a resolute fight gets flanked and this is the end. The Prussian infantry had a prolonged fight to take the two redoubts, in retrospect they could have deployed a bit deeper to flank the things more, at the risk of more Austrian reaction time. I never needed to get half of the Austrians (notably the allied) out of the drawers, they would have had no impact on things.
I played the great white whale and totally lost the fight. The already deployed army did not react in time; the whole left part had no interest in the fighting if the right one. I rolled with that general, who need a 5+ (on D6) to start getting away from his Steinninger, maybe 15 times 1-3... A few mistakes too many and many great rolls on the other side. A very good game and He liked it, and will play again.