Another Lust Playtest: Swedes versus Habsburg/Imperialists
/Another chance to playtest the latest iteration of the forthcoming Lust for Glory rules for wargaming the late 17th/early eighteenth century period. Today’s encounter would just about fall into that bracket, with a Thirty Years’ War clash between the Swedes and the Habsburg/Imperialists.
Playing the Swedes, I saw I had an overlap on the left flank, so my plan would be to send a combined force of cavalry and infantry forward to defeat anything they encountered there (I assumed it would be only the enemy horse that would initially advance) whilst holding my line elsewhere.
My assumption proved to be correct, and soon my shock cavalry, supported by an infantry command, were facing off against John’s lighter, “shooting” horse. This was just what I wanted, and I was sure that soon my cavalry would just ride over the effete Imperialist donkey-wallopers, leaving them and my infantry in prime position to roll up the enemy flank.
Meanwhile, on the right, the enemy horse had come forward: some rather tasty looking cuirassier types, but leavened with some dragoons and lights. My artillery had scored a lucky hit on one of the cuirassier units, so I reckoned my shock cavalry could successfully have a go there as well…but as a secondary, distraction effort.
Back to the left where, unfortunately, I was discovering that the cards I had borrowed from Si were not happy about being so casually passed around, and decided to punish me accordingly: my brilliant plan, designed to pit five lethal fighting units against three units of horse with pistols, foundered on one of the worst runs of cards I’ve ever seen.
With a gradually unfolding disaster occuring on the left, I really needed a huge success on the right to balance the books…but that didn’t happen either!
Those tasty looking cuirassier types proved to be exceedingly tasty indeed - celebrity chef levels of taste in fact - and soon I was facing defeat there as well: including the Imperialists managing to sneak their light horse around my flank and into the Swedish camp!
This proved too much for the Swedes to bear, and my army promptly turned tail and fled: a brilliantly executed strategy (if I say so myself) ruined by the fact that my troops proved (with the help of the cards) unable to fight their way out of a wet, nay soaking, paper bag!
As a footnote, one of the reasons for playing this particular encounter (barely in the earliest period of Lust territory) was to see how it differed from playing the same game but using the more contemporary For King & Parliament - Eastern Front variant rules.
Well first impressions are that using FK&P would have been more dynamic to play. Lust seems to substitute playing vast numbers of attack cards (in some instances in FK&P, you can be playing ten attack cards in one combat!) with a duller, more serious adjustment of “to hit” factors that have to be considered (“up one for disorder, down two if using dash” etc). This is not necessarily a bad thing but, by golly, it’s quite fun to smash down ten consecutive cards eagerly looking for those Eights or Nines. I was going to make a comparison between ‘buckets of dice’ and a simple 2D6 roll, but then I’ve never found throwing buckets of dice much fun, whereas throwing down multiple cards I do find very amusing!
A great game, despite the result, but my conclusion so far is that Lust looks like being a more restrained, serious game than the madness that is often FK&P. This is not necessarily a bad thing - warfare in the Age of Reason and all that - but it looks like being an important differentiator between the two systems.
