A Sheer Butchery: Solferino 1859

A game about an encounter battle of gargantuan proportions in north Italy...

On a brutally hot day in June 1859, on the 24th, three armies clashed. The French, under the command of Napoleon III, the Piedmontese under Victor Emmanuel II and the Austrians under Franz Josef (the famous husband of the Empress Sisi!). A quarter of a million men. The largest battle on European soil since Waterloo. Each of them unaware of the enemy’s positions, that they all expected to be further away, the three armies were to fight an encounter battle of gargantuan proportions.
The battle took place on three fronts. In the north, between the Piedmontese and the talented Benedek’s VIIIth Corps; in the centre around the village of Solferino, place of terrible, bloody, hand to hand fighting; and in the south, on the plains of Medole and Guidizzolo, where the French would try in vain to turn the Austrians’ left wing. Broken off by a storm of a rare intensity, the battle was to end in a gigantic human tragedy. Europe had not seen as much bloodshed for more than 40 years. 30,000 dead and wounded, 10,000 missing or prisoners of war, another 40,000 sick after the battle due to the makeshift hygienic conditions and lack of provisions.

This game has already been published by the excellent (even if French too...) Vae Victis. This is a reworked and rewritten version, designed for easier play. Thanks to the topographical talents of Riccardo Rinaldi, the map is an accurate and realistic representation of the historical battlefield. The game system uses a simple table to achieve morale results for fire combat and assault, where units are tested against their morale/cohesion value. The sequence of play with defensive fire during an assault is the standard solution for 19th century battles, and here it works! The game has high replayability value with many interesting nuances, which we hope you will experience. Playing time for a game is between 3 and 5 hours. And, without spoiling anything in the game, it also plays very well solitaire.

Scale - Turn: 1 hour . Hexagon: 600 meters. Units: brigades

—description from the publisher