Russian Dragoons and a Great Northern War Club Campaign

Russian Great Northern War Dragoons.

Minis from Warfare Miniatures.

After the engaging attendance of our Great Northern War Holowczyn participation game at this year’s Lincon Gaming Convention, Jesper and I decided to prolong the GNW project to accommodate for a GNW Campaign for our local gaming club, Little Wars, here in Stockholm.

The Campaign Overview. Our scenarios will follow the historic march

of the Swedish army into Russia and Ukraine.

The general idea is that each player will take control of a regiment; much like one would take control of a character figure in a roleplaying scenario based board game.

Wonderful GNW artwork by Marc Grieves.

The Swedish Guard at Narva.

We then string together 6 scenarios, based on the Swedish army’s historic march 1708-1709 through western Russia, via the battles of Holowczyn, Lesnaya and ending up at the fateful battle of Poltava in the Ukraine. 

A view of the Dragoon officer. Tsar Peter greatly expanded the number of Dragoon
units in his army, as they could cover the huge Russian theatre, but at the same time dismount in and fight on foot in battle.

A game master will play the Russians in all games, while each player then controls his/hers regiment through the historic battles, hopefully gathering some victory points along the way, enabling the purchase of new skills after each game has ended.

An example of our unit cards.

Here the units points and performance will be recorded for each scenario, along with any special abilities purchased for the victory points. Mind you, if a unit is slain in battle, it looses all abilities, and has to be raised from scratch with new recruits from the Swedish homeland.

We’ll be basing the rules on Black Powder, and the skills up for purchase will be taken from the BP tool box of extra abilities, like Brave, Elite, Stubborn etc. It’s really an experiment in combining historic wargaming with some of the elements from well-produced board games like Imperial Assault from Fantasy Flight. 

Another of Marc Grieves fantastic paintings.

This is Värmlands Regemente at Narva.

After a test game (Here is an AAR from Jesper’s blog) co-player Pål suggested a fun addition to our initial idea. One of the players on the Swedish side, will take permanent control of the C-in-C role for the Swedes, and dish our orders for each regiment/player before the start of the game.

The ensign. I mounted him with a rather inconspicuous infantry sized flag,

in support of their dismounted abilities. 

This proved really fun and smooth playing, so it was added to the concept, as we now draw closer to kick off. I will be documenting each game in the campaign via our club blog, and for anyone remotely familiar with the Great Northern War, the storyline in our games is evident when viewing the scenario names below:

1) Holowczyn: Surprise attack in the dawn

2) Holowczyn: Russian reinforcements

3) Lesnaya: A Russian snare

4) Lesnaya: “Defend the train at all cost”

5) Poltava: Men, storm that redoubt!

6) Poltava: The final charge; “Gå På”.

Thank you very much for reading.

Any comments are welcome!