The Return of the Flintloque

It's been a while since my last post, but now as more of my long-awaited miniatures are arriving, I've had more chances to game.

One of my new projects has been a return to the very first miniatures game I played back in grade school, Flintloque by Alternative Armies. A fantasy game set in world loosely based off of Napoleonic Europe, I've always found the cartoon-style figures appealing and the creative backstory engaging and entertaining. Since two of my three current gaming mates come from a fantasy background and I was really wanting to do something Napoleonic, so I thought this would be a good fit.

First, a bit on the figures. I've been taking a greater interest in the German armies of the period, so I knew I had to get some of the game's equivalent, the dwarves of Krautia (Prussia) and the Confederation of Finklestein (the pro-French German states). I asked my wife what force she'd like to use as her own, and she instantly fell in love with the dogs. Like the dwarves (and ogres), the dogmen fight for both the factions in the game, the Elven Ferach (French) Empire and the orc-led Grand Alliance (the Coalition). She didn't want to be on the same side as pesky orcs, so Finklestein dogs it was - and we opted to go with a unit based off the Saxon hussars. To serve as their adversaries, I opted for a group of Prussian landwehr-inspired dwarves. Upon asking my two regular gaming mates for their preferences, I also ordered Krautian dwarf jaegers and Ferach marins de la garde.

Alternative Armies offers a rather affordable in-house painting service, and since my commute is leaving me very little time to paint, I decided to take advantage of it and was very pleased with the results.

Saxhunde Dog Hussars - I had them paint some dog line infantry to use as dismounted troopers

Dog hussar officer (painted to look like my own dog)

Krautian Dwarf Landwehr - based on the Prussian Pomeranian Landwehr

Krautian Dwarf Jaegers - Uniformed as Silesian Volunteer Jaegers

Ferach Elf Sailors - Based on the Marins de la Garde Imperiale

Marin Officer

Marin sergeant

Marin drummer

The Flintloque rules have gone through several editions, and while fun, can get bogged down in charts and percentage calculations (besides a decent amount of bookkeeping....one of my least favorite things in gaming). A while ago, my wife and I played a game using the free Flintloque "Lite" rules which we enjoyed, but it definitely dragged at points.

In a search for a game with some more fast play mechanics, I stumbled across the Songs series by Ganesha Games. The series started with Songs of Blades and Heroes, a fantasy skirmish system and includes a Napoleonic variant, Songs of Drums & Shakos. Some discussions I had seen online indicated that gamers have been taking elements of those two rules sets and combing them for use with their Flintloque miniatures. While that is my ultimate goal, I first wanted to master the core mechanics, so I played a game of Drums & Shakos with my friend Chris using our Elves and dwarves as stand-ins for the Prussians and French.

We played a standard meeting engagement with 400-point forces and set up the terrain using the random scenery generator in the rules and our battlefield featured a farm house, ploughed fields, and some fencing around an intersection. Activation is determined by die-rolls, with a player rolling 1 to 3 dice and scoring and gaining an activation for each die roll that is higher than their figure's quality rating. As long as the play rolls more passes than fails on the activation roll, they may continue activating figures. In our game, Chris rolled so effectively (as he typically seems to), that he activated all of his dwarves before I had a chance of to bring any of my elves into combat. When I finally got a chance, I had one of my marins fire his musket, but missed and I proceeded to roll a double failure. Chris responded by shooting and incapacitating my NCO.

Our elves and dwarves moving into combat

Thankfully, I soon regained the initiative and pushed more elves forward to open fire, causing one dwarf to recoil. By this time, Crhis regrouped his jaegers into small groups, pushing one straight towards me and moving another around the building to threaten my flank. Unfortunately, my luck did not change as my next three attempts at firing were all misses, and two attempts resulted in the firers running out of ammunition (to be fair, a figure suffers ammo depletion with a roll of "1" on a d6....which seems a greater odds for that occurrence than there should be).

More dwarves move into the fray

A firefight erupts near that fenceline

At this point, Chris started getting a bit more aggressive and had one of his jaegers charge into combat with one of my elves at the fence, but the diminutive warrior failed to get the upper hand and was knocked down. Around the same time, the dwarf flanking force started running out of ammunition. Hoping to finish me off, he sent a few more into dwarves into hand-to-hand combat, but lost two wounded and another recoiled.

The first of several fierce close combats

My elven reinforcements coming up for the rear

A violent scrum ensues

By this point, the hour was growing late and both of our squads were nearly out of ammunition, so we called it a draw.