The idea

On May 13th 1811, while beginning to lay siege to Badajoz, Beresford received news that a French relief force of some 25,000 men, led by Marshal Soult, were on their way from Seville. Beresford marched south with 32,000 British, Portuguese and Spanish troops, and on May 15th reached the small town of Albuera. The forces would clash in a bitter, bloody fight...

The idea for the Albuera project rose from another project -that of Russo-Swedish war of 1808 where Sweden lost Finland to Russia. Gemigabok members have been toying with the idea of doing refights of several 1808 battles and instead of doing them as just one offs what would be grander than playing these refights on the exact dates of the battles during the 200th anniversary in 2008?

Albuera project was started because we needed to have a testing ground for the ideas we had for the 1808 project. Since we already had been collecting armies for Peninsular War it was easy to decide that the test battle would be from Peninsular War. Initially considered Talavera was deemed too large for the first project hence we decided on Albuera. Additional criteria was the involvement of all the three nationalities, French, Spanish and Anglo Portuguese. Also the opposing forces were roughly of the same size.