Replicating my last year’s “start of November”, I spent the weekend in Tampere – a few hours drive away. This time I brought my spouse with me and we also spent the night in the city. While the hotels were quite full due to the NHL games in town, we found a pretty nice place to stay. Hitpoint is a family-friendly gaming event but has very little in terms of wargaming. However, that really wasn’t an issue to me – it was another chance to meet people and spend two full days on my project 🙂
Time flies when you’re having fun! The first day, Saturday, went by quickly. I focused first on getting one of my key scenarios documented well. It was quite a chore but by Sunday it was a wrap… Of course, I was setting it up at the same time but missed a few things here and there. On Sunday I set it up again and started playing. People stopped by every so often, so at times the progress was slow. Then add all those small documentation updates or clarifications!
One change I am so far very happy about is the black and white British landing chart. It looks good and works well vs. all previous versions.
I also updated some of the game details on the website. Fort Carillon is not a simple game even if I am constantly trying to streamline it. I wanted to add a note about the complexity – in BGG terms (scope up to 5.00) – and ultimately decided to give it 3.5/5. Although I am constantly surprised how slow most games play unless you’re really experienced with it, I don’t think my game is medium complexity. I want to give it a notch higher rating to make sure anyone (some day) buying it doesn’t expect a light game.
Ok, what about the game itself? I am a bit too tired to write a full story now, so I’ll just add a couple of random pictures.
In this scenario – tentatively named as “Montcalm’s Plan” – there will one hard-coded version and another one giving full flexibility for players to set up the French defenses as they see fit. The foundation is that Governor-General Vaudreuil had released more troops to Montcalm earlier and scrapped his own pet project to attack through the Mohawk River Valley. I might even define the British landing hexes to make it easy to just get going and not worry about the strategy too much.
The British army is mostly landing on the western side of Lake George and is preparing to launch an assault against the French line in the morning. Artillery was brought in, but some of them were interdicted by French cannons firing up to a thousand yards/meters away (5 hexes).
I also sent all three artillery castles forward to smash some of the defensive earthworks and that resulted in quite an artillery battle between the gun rafts and the dozen heavy pieces defending the area. The first attempt replicating Bradstreet’s battoemen’s landing forward of the main army ended up miserably as they were repulsed and sent back to recuperate.
I even ended up bringing back a rule I had deleted as part of the effort to streamline everything. This is the “Interdict” rule (counter is outdated) which has the special purpose to prevent sneaking boats one by one past the enemy. Lots of casualties were suffered by both sides, so I was quite happy about the end result. I just wonder how good that wooden “armor” was on those artillery castles…
Below is the result of the aggressive initial moves by the British player. While the casualties were at an acceptable level, a lot of the troops were repulsed and basically had to re-embark their boats and leave the map to return at the start of the following turn (phase).
And finally, I was preparing for an all-out attack against the French but literally ran out of time as my wife picked me up for the return journey home. Oh well, I am quite happy about the results of this weekend – lots of clarifications and new data for the scenario!
