Strategy & Tactics #256

Marlborough’s Battles (MBat) is a wargame of intermediate complexity, designed by Richard H. Berg, covering two of the Duke’s great victories in the War of the Spanish Succession: Ramillies, a massive cavalry clash, and Malplaquet, a huge infantry battle. The period in which Marlborough fought was a transition between the musket-and-pike era and the more fluid, if still massed, tactics that emerged with Frederick the Great. The key transitional mechanic was the invention of the socket bayonet, which allowed gun-armed infantry to use their weapon for shock as well as fire combat. The battles fought in the War of the Spanish Succession were the first major engagements in which that innovation was used, and the commanders hadn’t yet learned to appreciate its value. Warfare in that era was therefore mostly still formalized, rigid and stolid.