General D'Armee: First Test Game

There is a good bit of interest in at the club in the General D'Armee ruleset, which was written by David Brown.  I've read the rule book and really like a lot of the concepts and so have set up a small solitaire test game to learn the mechanics.  It a division sized engagement pitting relatively equal French and Austrian forces against one another.

The Austrian force consists of 2, 4 battalion infantry brigades and a 3 squadron bridge of Heavy Calvary (that's the only calvary for the Austrians that are painted up).  I'm putting the Austrians on the offensive early on.

Against them are a similar sized pair of French infantry battalions.  The calvary brigade has 2 heavy on one light calvary.  Both sides have a pair of artillery batteries.

The Austrians are have initiated a charge and so have moved to the required 3 inch distance and we'll leave it there as I need to re-read the charge mechanics.

I'm going to hold off any detailed comments about mechanics until I've played a few rounds at home and then with someone at the club live.  I'm likely doing a lot wrong now.  By the way, that's not a criticism of the rules presentation and writing style - they are clearly written and have good illustrations.

First impressions are very positive, especially the command control /  aid d'camp system.  It's an elegant form of command friction which introduces command risk but also doesn't totally throw the game if ones luck is really bad for a turn.  I like it a lot.

The ruleset does use D6's exclusively but there are a lot of different types of die roles so I'm working up a standard which is:

Large National Color Dice for command rolls / ADC's allocations
French: Blue
Austrians: White
British: Red
Prussians: Black
Russians: Green

(not a lot of creativity in the above color selections)

Vegas Style Dice for combat rolls

Small grey dice for combat die - for some action in addition to rolling a pair of D6's a unit can roll pool additional combat dice which can inflict incremental casualties.  It's an elegant way to influence the probabilities but still use the same type of dice.  It did take me a few re-reads to grasp the concept.

Small green for casualties - Units can take 12+ causalities before breaking and start to have negative modifiers upon reaching 4 and 8 casualties.  I may go with tracking casualties on a player force reference card and just denoting units that have the -1 or -2 modifier with a wound figure of simple marker.  A pair of dice can work for now but will become unwieldy in a large game.

Results so far are very encouraging.