Castagnaro Day (March 1387/2025)

Last Saturday, March 29th, was a somewhat momentous occasion at my place: for the first time in 15 years, and the first time EVER at my present address, I hosted a Medieval wargame!  In fact, it was the first time in 15 years I hosted and GM'ed ANY non-Second Afghan War or North-West Frontier game.  In the interim I have helped friends run several giant AWI and WWII games at various other venues, but as any gamer knows, that's very different.

Back in the day, before I built my "Maiwand Day" terrain boards, my GM'ing covered several different periods, but a great deal of it was 14th and 15th Century Medievals, and a lot of that was Siege games, using an extensive collection of castle parts and siege engines.  That was back when my son was still a boy, and he and a few of his friends and me and their dads and a few other gaming buddies of mine had a lot of fun playing those games in the garage of our prior house.  That was also where I built -- with help from my son, both of his younger sisters, a couple of their friends and one of my grown-up gaming buddies -- the original Maiwand terrain boards and played a bunch of games on them.  That was a very busy and very exciting time in my life on all fronts: family, work, and also hobby.

On the hobby front, the Afghan terrain pretty much cornered the market on my wargaming focus.  I was so busy with work and my wife and 3 kids, what limited time I could find for hobby stuff all poured into expanding my Afghan terrain.  First with rocky hills with the key ingredient of landscaping wood-chips... then delving into making river boards using epoxy resin... then using the same methods to make modest but very useful rocky terrain and sangars and low sandy hills... then making an extensive arid road system... then building enough big wood-chip rocky hills, river boards and crop-fields, and commissioning enough Afghan villages and watermills from the legendary Chris The Model Maker, to refight the 1879 battle of Charasiab (the Afghan town whose name literally translates to "Four Watermills" in Pashto)... and so on, and so on, and -- well, you get the picture.

Whew.

Anyway, it was all good.  I did it because I wanted to, and it brought me a ton of joy, and I'm pretty sure it brought a good number of my fellow wargamers -- especially the colonial ones -- some joy as well, either here on my blog or at the various conventions I brought my terrain and accompanying games to.

The only downside, if there was one, is that my focus on the Second Afghan War and NWF campaigns largely kept me from doing anything else, hobby-wise.  One big exception was my Camerone game, which benefited from being able to work well using the same terrain boards.  But that was it.

Well, this past Fall, thanks to a friend telling me about a new green blanket at Costco, I found myself with a pair of airbrush-painted homemade terrain mattes, in temperate green.  I cleared off the big Afghan tabletop layout I'd run 2 games of my alternate history, "The Second Battle of Ali Masjid," on and covered my table with one of the new matts.  Then I pulled out my old go-to Medieval rules-set, TACTICA MEDIEVAL...

...and set up terrain and armies for the 1387 battle of Castagnaro.  Here's the Army Lists I ended up with:

On the terrain front it took me a while to nail the table down.  The process started back in late October/early November, and I didn't finish laying out the terrain to my satisfaction until some time in February -- lol.  During that time I did a lot of additional research on top of the decent amount of info I already knew about the battlefield.  I had run the Castagnaro scenario in the rulebook for my son and his buddy Will Harris back when we played lots of Medievals...

...and it remained near and dear to my heart, as a fan of Condottiere warfare in general and the English 100 Years War veteran-turned-legendary Condottiere John Hawkwood in particular.  Castagnaro is often referred to as Hawkwood's "Greatest Victory" -- in fact that is the subtitle of the Osprey Campaign book on the subject...

While the book itself is well-written, unfortunately somehow the final proofing of the main maps failed and the text boxes containing the opposing forces were transposed, so at first glance it looks like the Paduans were attacking the Veronese, instead of the other way around, which was the case...

My friend Odin Benitez was kind enough to make time to come over and help me play-test the scenario over the course of 3 different visits, which helped tremendously and in all honesty saved the day for me as GM -- thanks again, Odin!  The battle pitted Hawkwood, commanding the army of Padua, which had just completed the process of a difficult forced-march retreat back to their own territory after a failed siege of the capital of Verona, against Giovanni Ordelaffi, leading the army of Verona which had pursued the Paduans from the moment they'd pulled up stakes and headed home probably 4 or 5 days earlier.

Here's a handy link to the Wikipedia article on the battle if you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Castagnaro

Odin also created a soundtrack for the game (!!!) that he uploaded on Youtube, which you can find here: BATTLE OF CASTAGNARO SOUNDTRACK

I plan to do a follow-up post with a detailed AAR, and another post covering the next time I ran the same scenario about a month later, when I brought it to the Knights of Columbus Hall in Anaheim.  But for now all I'll say about this game is that the Paduans made some very interesting decisions and things went a little crazy and history did not repeat itself on the tabletop!  Last but far from least, I leave you with just a little over 20 pics of the happy day & the good guys who were kind enough to join me for it: