SoM NNL Replay: standings after 11 days

National Negro League

Pos.	Team	Record	Win %	GB	Triple slash	ERA
1	Chicago American Giants	6-5	.545	-	249/284/348	4.15
2	St. Louis Stars	5-7	.417	1.5	299/349/496	4.73
3	Kansas City Monarchs	4-7	.364	2	277/328/386	3.87

Eastern Colored League

Pos.	Team	Record	Win %	GB	Triple slash	ERA
1	New York Lincoln Giants	7-5	.583	-	324/373/553	5.89
1	Homestead Grays	7-5	.583	-	330/390/500	6.28
3	Hilldale Daisies	6-6	.500	1	282/351/400	5.40

Batting Leaders so far (AVG/OBP/SLG), min. 30 PA, AVG 350 and/or OBP 400

HRs only mentioned if 3+, RBIs only if 15+

1. Chino Smith (HOM) 482/500/821, 4 HR, 15 RBI
2. Jud Wilson (KC) 477/549/795
3. John Beckwith (LIN) 431/482/706, 4 HR, 18 RBI
4. Oscar Charleston (LIN) 417/482/854, 5 HR
5. Home Run Johnson (STL) 412/459/618
6. Biz Mackey (HIL) 396/444/542
7. Willie Wells (HIL) 392/458/667, 3 HR
8. Mule Suttles (LIN) 392/436/843, 6 HR
9. Cool Papa Bell (STL) 382/414/636, 3 HR, 15 RBI
10. Turkey Stearnes (CHI) 380/392/640, 3 HR
11. Rap Dixon (LIN) 370/396/435
12. Louis Santop (KC) 362/375/383
13. Bonnie Serrell (CHI) 351/342/514
14. Quincy Trouppe (STL) 316/409/632

Pitching Leaders so far (ERA, IP, W-L, Sv), min. 5 IP, ERA below 3

1. Max Manning (LIN) 0.41 (22.0 IP), 2-0
2. Martin Dihigo (CHI) 1.00 (19.0 IP), 0-0
3. Harry Salmon (KC) 1.04 (8.2 IP), 0-1, 3 Sv
4. Andy Cooper (CHI) 1.42 (19.0 IP), 3-0
5. John Donaldson (LIN) 1.88 (24.0 IP), 2-1
6. T William (HOM) 2.65 (17.0 IP), 3-0

Slow Mo Piquet Game 2: all the dice rolls...

This post has the blow-by-blow, dice roll level detail from the rules perspective of Slo-Mo Piquet game 2. A quick narrative with a few photos is here. 
To be continued with a part two post.

Turn 1, phase 1

Roll 1: Prussians 9, Empire 12 for 1:2 pips

I won't jother mentioning that Prussia doesn't act before any Empire troops enter long fire range of the Wunsch Frei troops.

Empire: turn a dud and a Cav Move

Roll 2: 3:11 for 2:6 pips

Empire
move the Dragoons to just outside fire range, turn two duds, turn heroic moment, and the most appropriate Inf Move in Open to bring up the Grenadiers

Prussia is inactive

Roll 3: 4:4, turn 1 ends

Turn 2, phase 1

Roll 1: 16:13, 2:1 pips

Prussia inactive

Empire turns elite reload

Roll 2: 12:5, 5:2 pips
Empire turns another reload and a cav move

Roll 3: 15:15, turn 2 ends

Turn 3, phase 1

Roll 1: 9:17, 2:6 pips
Empire turn deployment, Cav move and use the it. Draw fire from the skirmishers in the woods: D10 up2 firing at flank, up3 at col. of route for D20+3 vs D6, 14:4, 3 stands (for skirmishers, this means OOC, DO, and lose a morale chip), and the Prussian guard can act now.
Empire then turn Maneuvre. Both units form line.
Prussians turn two useless cards.

Roll 2: 6:20, 2:10 pips (only 12 pips left in initiative)
Empire turn and use inf move, turn two empty cards and officer check. Cav try to rally from DO, D20 d3 (DO, rally, point blank range): D8vsD8, 6:1 ok
Then turn 4 useless cards.
Prussians turn move III/IV and reload.

picture: reformed cav face Wunsch

Phase 2, roll 1: 3:20, 5:12 pips
Prussians turn and use reload, turn another one, fire D10 up1 (point blank) 11:5 for another DO and chip lost, and reload again.
Turn inf move, march out the Salmuth bataillon.
Try to wake Willemey Grenadiers (fail) and HQ (fail).
Turn maneuvre and form line with Salmuth, turn another (now useless) maneuvre.

Empire turn a useless card, then heroic moment for Elites reload - but the Grenadiers field of fire is blocked by the Ansbach Dragoons... turn a melee and a musket reload for no use.

Roll 2: Prussians get the last 3 pips of the phase, turn 3 useless cards.

Phase 3, roll 1: 11:1, 8:2 pips
Empire turn a dud, then Officer Check. Rally the Dragoons D20 d1 DO, d1 rally, d1 point blank D8:D8 8:3.
Turn a dud, then inf move.
Turn and use cav move to retreat thr Dragoons out of the way of the Grenadiers.
Turn a dud.

Prussians turn two duds.

Roll 2: 3:11, 2:6 pips
Prussians turn 3 duds, then inf move to bring the Fusiliers forward to protect their bridge exit, then try to wake HQ again and succeed.
Empire turn two duds.

Roll 3 for two remaining pips: go to Empire who turn 2 dress lines.

Phase 4, roll 1: 1:5 for 1:3 pips
Prussians try to assemble Willemey (fail) and Hoffmann fusiliers (success), turn a dud.
Empire turn cav move.

Roll 2: 3:13 for 2:8 pips
Prussia turn heroic moment for (dud) cav move for no use.
Turn inf move to march out Hoffmann, fail to wake Willemey again, fail to wake the Dragoons.
Turn another inf move.
Empire maneuver and move the Dragoons towards Salmuth. Catch skirmish fire from the woods D10 up2 flank, 4:6 for no effect.

Roll 3 for 6 remaining pips, 7:9 for 2 Prussian pips marching out Hoffmann and failing to wake Willemey again.

Roll 4 for 4 pips: 5:6 for 1 Prussian pip waking the Dragoons.

Roll 5 for 3 pips: 14:17, 1:2 pips
Prussians turn two cards with no current use.
Empire turn cav move and charge into Salmuth. I will let the fusileers fire at short range, D10 up1 for 1st fire, 7:5 for 1 stand loss.
Prussians turn musket reload.

... photos cav charge, Plettenberg in town

Phase 5, roll 1: 14:17, 1:2 pips.
Prussians reload and fire the Wunsch free bat. D10 vs D6, 5:3 for no effect.
Empire turn a dud.

Roll 2: 20:17, 2:1 pips
Empire turn reload and end the turn.

Turn 4
Empire main body becomes available to march on the table as one corps.

Phase 1, roll 1: 19:8, 8:3 pips
Empire turn a dud and Inf move.
Grenadiers attack the Frei bat in the woods.
Main body marches on the field, led by Kurpfalz guards and the Cuirassiers.
Two more duds, then turn cav melee. Dragoons at D8 up1 charging, d1 -1 stand, Salmuth at D8 flat, 2:5, 1 stand cav lost and rout.
Prussians turn two duds and cav move.

Roll 2: 3:3, turn ends

Turn 5, phase 1, roll 1: 16:9, 5:2 pips
Empire turn a dud and a cav move for the routing dragoons, then turn two more duds.
Prussians turn two duds.

Roll 2: 16:8, 6:2 pips.
Empire turn two duds, then inf move, and move their main column.
Then remember to fire their Grenadiers at Wunsch: D10 up 1 1st fire, up 1 point blank, d1 for II light woods. 7:3, 1 stand loss.
Turn one dud.
Prussians turn inf move and bring Hoffmann into the line.

Roll 3 for 5 pips: 8:11, 1:2 pips
Prussians try to wake Willemey, still fail. Then try Burgsdorf, get up immediately.
Empire dress lines.

Roll 4 for 2 pips: 10:17
Prussians turn two duds.

Phase 2, roll 1: 5:10, 1:4 pips
Prussians turn maneuver, form Hoffmann into line.
Turn officer check for no action, then inf move
Empire dress lines.

Roll 2: 19:18, Empire turn a dud.

Roll 3: 20:7, 9:4 pips
Empire turn cav move and rout the Dragoons. Move the Cuirassiers towards the left flank, going ooc.
Turn dud, then officer check. Rallying the Dragoons at D20 d2 formation, d1 ooc, d1 for losses, up 2 for distance to enemy makes it D10 vs D8, 7:2 success. Then move staff forward.
Turn inf move, bring on more troops, starting with the on board Kurpfalz guard.
Prussians try to wake Willemey again, this time it works.
Turn a dud and a reload, reload the Frei bataillon.

Roll 4 for the last pip: 19:3
Empire bring up 1/Kurmainz.

Phase 3, roll 1: 11:2, 6:3 pips
Empire attack Wunsch Freibat in the woods, being on 2/Kurmainz, then turn a dud.
Then a heroic moment for musket reload, and reload the Grenadiers for a fire attack up 1 (next).
Prussians reload Salmuth, replace one opportunity pip, and fire Wunsch at the Grenadiers D10 d1 for stand loss, up1 point blank, D10 vs D6 6:3 for an OOC result.

Roll 2: 10:0, 2:0 pips
Empire Grenadiers fire at Wunsch D10 up1 for heroic moment, up1 point blank, d2 target cover, d2 target formation D6 vs D6, 6:6 for no effect.
Then dress lines.

Roll 3: 12:19, 2:5 pips
Prussians reload Wunsch and fire them at the Grenadiers again, D10 vs D6 1:6 no effect.
turn a dud and a heroic moment for melee resolution (bad news for the Grenadiers?)

Roll 4 for two pips: 6:13, 0:2 pips
Prussians: Wunsch melees the Grenadiers at D8 up1 heroic, up1 charging, d1 stand diff, no up1 for terrain cover for the Frei troops charging the Grenadiers in front of them, d2 skirmishers = D6 vs D8, d1 for opponents terrain (they don't get the bonus but somehow the advantage should tell) = D6, 4:3 for a close Prussian victory disordering the Grenadiers.
... do 1 more thing

then Empire do their two pips forgotten from the previous phase

Slow Mo Piquet Game 2: preparations

Here are some setup notes for a second attempt at Piquet SYW with the Grünewald flats. 

1. House rules unchanged from the first game version (plus learnings) here

2. Playing field with very special Ankerstein town wall (see this post)

Battle field with Ankerstein town wall. Wunsch Frei troops visible in the small woods bottom right. Empire will enter from the right.

3. Scenario: Empire vanguard is pursuing retreating Prussians and trying to forge ahead, bypassing the town as fast as possible. They are not aware that a Prussian rearguard was in the town for one night and will run into them as they march by the town.
Prussians need to slow down or stop the Empire troops, Empire need to exit as many units as possible on the short table end by the town.

4. OOB

Prussian garrison

Pickets in the woods outside of town:

• 10 - 8 - 6 II/Wunsch Frei Infantry
• 2 bases of Wunsch Jägers (I'll have to come up with a simple house rule that turns these guys into s simple speed bump without full unit capabilities)

guard unit on duty (start game in the town gate, start moving when enemy is within 20" or first shots are fired):

• 10 - 8 - 6 I/Salmuth

rest of the garrison (start inside town, roll a d6= 5 or 6 to wake up and show up at the gate as soon as the Salmuth guard start moving)

• 12 - 8 - 8 Willemey Grenadiere - elite
• 12 - 8 - 8 Burgsdorf Grenadiere - elite
• 10 - 8 - 6 II/Hoffmann
• ×  - 6 - 6 Malachovsky Hussars
• ×  - 8 - 6 Plettenberg Dragoons
• average rear guard staff (rolled D20 = 10, +3 from army list)

Empire vanguard

advance guard

• 10 - 8 - 6 combined Grenadiers (mostly Kurmainz) - new unit, elite
• × - 8 - 6 Ansbach Dragoons - new unit

main body of vanguard

• 10 - 8 - 6 II/Kurpfalz Garde zu Fuß (1st rate inf stats, but treat as elite for reload)
• 10 - 6 - 6 IR Kurmainz (4 bataillons) (2nd rate inf)
• 10 - 6 - 6 I/Hohenlohe (2nd rate inf)
• × - 10 - 6 Hohenzollern Cuirassiers
• average staff (no large base yet) (rolled D20 = 18, -3 from army list)

5. Army Characterization Cards

Prussia: 7 units +2 elites divided by 3 just about makes the minimum of 3 cards

They draw (from the 34 card deck) 6, Movement Effect Infantry, Movement Effect Artillery. They remove the useless latter card for  Movement Effect Cavalry, discard that for a 10 for a total of

• 16 morale chips
• one extra Inf Move in Open card
• 4 opportunity pips (independent of cards drawn)

Reichsarmee: 9 units + 1 elite, divided by 4 is below the minimum of 3 cards.

They draw 10, Infantry Combat Effect, Cavalry Movement Effect for

• 10 morale chips
• one extra Musket Reload Card
• one extra Cavalry Move card
• 2 opportunity pips

I won't bother replacing the Artillery cards with Dress Lines, it doesn't matter whether I skip or replace them.

Anker: GK NF 14 city wall by Falk Gundel

I'll try to combine two modelling hobbies of mine by using an Ankerstein building as a backdrop for a miniatures tabletop game. 

When I made plans for projects with GK-NF 16, and a kind of "last hurrah" round of GK-NF 14 projects, I saw the Falk Gundel "city fortification" model from this CVA archive entry I immediately thought this might be a great backdrop for a tabletop miniatures game. 

It was great fun to build, and looks fantastic. 

As always, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Vire from inside town. On the right you can see I used some stones from 16A to show a bit of city wall.

This was the most fun part to build - nice timber framing over the large city gate, and a small stairs leading up from the building on the right to the walkway over the small gate.

The whole ensemble with a renaissance facade building on the right, a small tower and the city gates in the middle and a large tower in the background. 

View from the outside

The covered walkway above the city gates

I built this fortification in a corner of my gaming table, as a backdrop for my next game of Piquet.

Empty gaming table awaiting the deployment of troops. Actually, one Prussian bataillon of the Wunsch Frei regiment and its Jäger company are already deployed in the woods in the bottom right corner.

By the way, combining Anker and flats is not a new idea, of course. See for example this old magazine with a picture on page 2. Nice.

Anker: Set 16 storage

The newly added set 14A means I have to revise my storage because some of the boxes as used before for GK-NF 14 can't hold all the stones anymore.

So here's how I will sort stones into the original boyes for easy access during building with GK-NF 16:

White blocks - red blocks - blue roof blocks - columns and special roof parts, arches, small red/white blocks, red and white #19

The two small boxes from 4 and &A, and the large boxes with roof parts, are only filled to below box height for easy stacking. So here's how these go to the shelf:

Workbench: Skirmishers

A few quick snapshots showing some innovations on my workbench.

The first is that I started working on a few units which will be meant to be used as skirmishers. I'll base them on the same size bases as regular units so they can fight in closed order, too. But I will use only three minis per base, and try to use the additional space for more varied arrangement of the minis. I also tried to mix more and more different poses to show a unit keeping up low intensity skirmishing fire.

Currently being painted: Wunsch Freibatallion and Jägers. 

For the Wunsch Frei infantry I'll base one batallion, plus two optional stands of Jägers, for skirmishing and one batallion with the regular four minis per base for use in line formation.

I will do the same with two batallions of my first Croat grenzers for the Austrian army.

The tricky thing for unist mixing many poses is to find a balanced arrangement of the minis across bases, and still to place the officers, NCOs etc. in the right place. So for these kinds of units I decided to fix the arrangement before I even start cleaning up the minis for basecoating, and therefore have a number of units arranged on the table waiting to be taken up:

Blanks waiting to be cleaned and basecoated before painting. The firts two ranks are from different units where parts are already further advanced in the production line.

This mini arrangement is even more important for the mixed Grenadier batallions combined from the different Grenadier companies of the Austrian and Reichsarmee units. Sometimes, these even have to make sure people with the right type of uniform and Grenadier hat are in the right place (one of the first mixed Grenadier units I already painted contains the Ernestinisch Sachsen infantry, even mixing different hats, and different uniforms, within individual companies coming from one batallion...).

In addition I'm running out of storage / display space for the table top ready flats, so I have banned some individually based 30 years war troops to card board boxes and will start to use the new space for tabletop minis:

Newly freed up shelf space waiting for tabletop troops. Top row: Reichsarmee infantry and Prussian cavalry (right most minis are individually painted representaties of all Cuirassier regiments, already shown here). Bottom row: 30YW infantry on the march, now in card board boxes, Next to that, Wallensteins carriage and, in front, an experiment to use 6mm minis for a 1:1 scale representation of the central company of  prussian infantry batallion.

Anker: GK-NF 16 Teaser Building - Church

In the Richter plan books, the first building in a new set is the teaser for which one of the pictures is already shown on the back page of the previous set. In best marketing fashion, these are usually very attractive buildings.

In case of GK-NF 16, this is the big Parish Church. I hads really been looking forward to this one while doing a few "farewell" projects with the GK-NF 14 set. 

One thing that always makes me curious is which new stone shapes are in a new set, and when they will be used for the first time. Here is the first new shape used when building the church:

First new stone from box 14A, and it is a new shape: a red stone 26

In addition to a few more stones from the new box 14A (new and old shapes), the next picture also illustrates a nice functional use of one of the tiny 1/4 x 1/4 x 1 stones #79. I appreciate it when these stones are used where they are really needed to provide the right kind of spacing (as in this case), not just as sugar coating for putting small pieces in random decorative positions on ledges, roofs etc.

Green circles: stone 79 is needed for its size, to make the distances match underneath the roof of the side. Orange circles mark another new stone shape from box 14A, the small triangular #218, and the first stone #4 taken from the new box because all others have already been used - note that 14A does add lots of new stone shapes, new roof angles etc, but also adds quite a few standards like #4, 15 and 17.

Another thing I like to document (maybe I can use it in future ad hoc building projects) is the way the layers carrying the roof are held by the building walls. Here's the last walls-only layer before the first wooden beams are laid down:

And here's a walk around the finished building. As always, you can click on all pictures to see a larger copy.

Front with entries to the tower and the main building

Tower and the building side with the (one) aisle, with a much lower and rather flat roof.

Complete view of the church with the apse. Oh, and mnd the roof ont he tower with the new, steep roof angle with different thickness side stones for each layer, made to fit building proportions with a lowest layer from the less steep, older stone shapes.

It will be fun to see the church building plans grow even more in larger Ankerstein boxes, maybe with symmetric pairs of aisles and larger choirs and apses.

The final touch