First Black Powder Game

Been a few weeks since I've posted; the usual doldrums plus non-gaming-related reading (though Lord Darcy does bring up some interesting imagiNation possibilities!). The chess club at work is going well; with a few staff joining in we usually have around 15 participants. I'm pretty hopeless at chess, and we have some really good players in the group both young and old. I prefer to teach the newer ones

Played a short-notice round of Black Powder at Das Krieg Haus. I've read Black Powder several times and am fairly familiar with the rules (7th Son's Youtube channel is an excellent teacher) but this was the first time I've gotten to play it, as the club generally prefers General de Brigade and, lately, member Mark Ritchie's Firelock.

Marko, one of our youngest and newest members, brought some 3mm French, Austrian and Prussian minis for an 1814 (6th Coalition) game. His intent was to have a loose campaign (well, operation), but instead we put together a fairly random table for a demo game without real objectives.

The board, with felt features and some very nice buildings.

Some infantry and artillery minis.

I was a little surprised to find that each base would represent a battalion or battery, as BP has much to do with formations. In practice, though, we found it easy to denote and remind each other what formations we were using. The guns had two bases per battery (see above pic) - one deployed, one limbered. Each player had about four brigades to work with, and there were some named generals, including Napoleon, on the field. We were not careful about command ranges, except with Napoleon's free reroll - he was way over on the right, so any command rerolls on the left would take a penalty!

My side of the board - in hindsight dangerously exposed, particularly my guns which I've put on the road for speed. The Prussian infantry is poised to cross the river at the village, upper left. My intent is to effectively refuse this flank while all our cavalry...

... rush over to the upper right and roll up the Austrian left flank.

This plan crumbled in the first turn, as a) the Allies got first turn and b) the Prussians rolled low enough on their activations to get multiple moves. Even at one-third scale to the moves (meaning 4" for infantry and guns, 6" for cavalry), I was already in trouble as the enemy was now close to my (still-limbered) guns.

On our first turn the French cavalry did get multiple moves of their own, and my partner Jim started nibbling at Marko's Austrians.

His at upper right are attacking Marko's cavalry,
mine are at center hoping to support next turn.

Closeup, after eliminating a unit.

I rolled boxcars to advance my guns - a Blunder! Used a reroll and this time I got snake eyes - three moves. Unfortunately, I had chosen to move as far as I could, rather than declaring, say, two moves and deploy for the third.

The head of my artillery column, up against
a brigade of sharpshooting Jager.

One battery (the second in column) managed to deploy
and fire on the Prussians just offscreen to left - to no avail.

Above: Turn Two, engaged with Jager, who accurately inflicted disorder on most of those infantry columns. My leading gun battery inadvertently charged a Jager unit - and beat it! Shades of Ramsay at Fuentes De Onoro. Unfortunately that was my only success.

Closeup of the result, with colored puffs to denote casualties.
My units have nearly all failed to make contact.

While on my left, the Prussians are heading for my back line.

Meanwhile, a bloody mess on the French right:

As can be seen by the puffball casualty markers.

Jim and Marko were trading a LOT of punches, leaving me and Mark on the left to discuss future games. Mark has run 50 games this year (!) and aspires to more in the next. We discussed using his rules to perhaps run a VBCW game. I lean towards using his 15mms, since he has plenty of interwar and WWI minis and terrain while my 28s and the club's modern 25-28 terrain are limited. There would be quite a bit of proxying, but it should still work if we can build something that looks like pastoral English countryside.

Allied Turn Three: the Prussians are way too close, I have gotta get outta here:

But the dice desert me and I can't get that far away.

End game after three turns: Basically the same as Waterloo
with directions reversed, though the Austrians are somewhat
worse off than Wellington.

Two major mistakes - putting my guns out on a limb and (related) underestimating how fast units can move in Black Powder. It can be a swingy game if you're not careful. My guns never got into action and ended up being targets, when I was going to use them to hold off the Prussians. To be fair, the game only lasted three turns, but still. Jim's half on the right was doing somewhat better, but I was not helping at all and he would have gotten pincered in another turn or two by the Prussians.

I have let Bony down. Like Grouchy if he got to the field but still effed up.

Not too bad an intro to the rules, even if it wasn't really traditional. 3mm does let you pack in lots of troops, at least. Well done to Marko, who GMed his first game for us and was confident at it.

Jim and I started in cataloging the club's book collection. He is planning a website for the club to get us more visibility. I also took with me a couple small boardgames about the Arab-Israeli wars and a 3d-printed Skyhawk which I hope to paint in Israeli colors:

Next weekend are two games I look forward to - the annual Limeys and Slimeys Regatta, and Pete Panzeri's 80th-anniversary Battle of the Bulge operational game. See you then.

Battle for Cuzco Well

Today at Das Krieg Haus we played more Tactical Combat, this time a Spanish-American War game. This was an 1898 USMC assault on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to seize a water supply that just happens to be next to a blockhouse. I was on the Spanish side.

Just the lower story - you'll see why in a bit.

Between them, Mark's versatile rules, Jim's enthusiasm for DBA, and Oriskany Jim's spectacles have revitalized the club. There are games almost weekly now, and the club is pivoting towards a more generalist set up, with "bring-your-own" battles on multiple tables. For example, in between turns Jim was demoing DBA:

Lots of armies, each with its own ready-to-go sheet and background.

That same Alexandrian-Indian matchup I still can't get the hang of.

Also: DBA on a hex board!

But the main attraction was over what is now "Gitmo."

View from the West, with a beach on the southern edge.

Three platoons of Spanish troops (15-20 strong), one of loyal Cubans, two machine guns, five snipers and five sentries hold the well, blockhouse and environs. Four platoons of US Marines, a squad of Cuban insurgents, two machine guns and a command element were out to take them. The HQ also had wig-wag signallers who could call in gunfire from a US Navy ship.

Specifically, this guy.

As usual, I had analysis paralysis and wasn't too sure when my team nominated me for command. We ended up putting one platoon into the church in the southeast, one into the blockhouse, one into the farm complex in the northwest, and one (hidden) in the farm complex to the west - this last to slow up the largest concentration of Americans. The snipers were scattered, mostly in trees. The Americans came in from the north and west:

Most of the game was spent rolling firing dice. I controlled the "stopgap" platoon on the western flank, where they were outnumbered 2-1, and held off the onslaught for about four turns.

Some of my poor bastards enfiladed
by a Colt machine gun.

The Spanish got the worst of it, but were winning on points for most of the game owing to holding the objectives - as long as we kept the well and blockhouse (worth 15 points) we could take up to 14 more casualties than the Americans but still be on top.

The problem was the damn signaller.

He could successfully signal his ship, once a turn, on a 5 or less on a D20.

Once signalled, the ship could hit its target again, on a 5 or less on a D20.

So, a 1/16 chance of a direct hit. Scatter would be at least 10cm, far enough to miss the block house.

He hit that blockhouse three times in six turns.

On turn four, I started targeting the signallers with our one remaining sniper (hit on 8 or less). It took three turns to wipe out the team, but by that time, the blockhouse was on fire and empty, save for an unmanned Maxim. (See first photo.)

At this point, we could only hope to keep the Marines from just walking on to the objective, and what remained of the blockhouse largely blocked LOS to what remained of our force. By turn 10, it was clear that no matter what we did, he could put men on the objectives by turn 12, end of game. We conceded.

The end result - some seventy casualties on each side. Since the game did technically come down to the last turn, this was still a pretty balanced scenario. Tactical Combat is a lethal game, and another aspect that kept us going was that there are no morale rules (had there been, the game might have been over a LOT quicker).

A few more pictures:

Mark will run another game tomorrow, this one Napoleonic. I hope to be there. Until next time,

More Bits and Pieces

 Found some of my unbased Zulus. Many are missing shields - anyone know if the Zulu, or any African spear-armed natives, ever fought without shields? They may be in another box somewhere, but I still haven't got any plastic glue...!

Enough for an internal skirmish here.

48 Sikhs - a bit bigger than a TSATF company.
Will probably count as a battalion.

Had an extremely successful, but chaotic and tiring, skygazing program this week. I was going to have a paint-and-take, but my coworkers and boss said kids couldn't do it, and in the event it was too crowded to do more than some basic coloring and pasting anyway.

The Apollo astronauts are 3D-printed, approx 54mm, in silver. A rough drybrush of white, which one of my interns is learning below, makes them a dirty white as in photos from the lunar surface. During the actual program, which I hope to do with the teens at some point, all that's required is a gold faceplate, blue-grey gloves and boots, and blue or red stripes and hose-connectors. Which in theory should take minutes for even kids to paint (I like to tell them, "if you can write with a pencil you can paint with a brush."), but in practice will take half an hour or more. I'll hold them aside as an alternate activity for my Wednesday gaming group.

Still more Mutiny

The same day Bob Cordery posted on his blog about the concept of "button boxes," I received another unexpected box of Mutiny figures.

As he describes it (I hope I'm getting this right), a button box exercise serves two purposes; to organize a collection (as with the collections of most wargamers), and to provide busywork at need (whether to relieve boredom, or because you have students to keep busy). As a librarian who often does crafting, I can confirm that that this is totally a thing in more institutions than just schools.

And now I have another box of assorted minis to sort.

(Huh. Does a-sorted literally mean UNsorted? I never thought of that before!)

Let's see what we've got.

Three camels with cargo boxes (in which, I suspect, the
half-musketeers are intended to sit), and a palanquin.
Have never heard of this sort of troop.

A gun, a handful of British officers and a scenic base.
The colour is of the 78th Highlanders (Ross-shire Buffs).

Eighty assorted "badmashes" and sepoys.
A quarter are in full uniform so can be loyal in a pinch. 

Some of the latter are wearing shorts - did this occur
 among loyal units, for example when unsupplied,
or were they expected to have full-length trousers?
Those with trousers also have satchels,
presumably for ammunition or supplies.

A handful of Company cavalry.

This army is burgeoning - at this point I've got something over 350 troops (over 90% infantry) and no idea what to do with them. Will have to talk to the club, because I know someone else in it has a Mutiny collection; perhaps we can work up something.

Up the Whatsit Valley

 Having watched Sgt Guinness' campaign for a while, I'm seriously thinking about running one of my own set in the Northwest Frontier. Since I'll be doing it solo, my best bet is to use Charles S. Grant's classic Programmed Wargames Scenarios. The obvious scenarios are from the final chapter, Reconnaissance in Strength, in which a Blue "player" force marches upcountry against a programmed Red force. My first thought, given the Great-Game-gone-hot feel of my Wofun collection, was to have an Afghan force in the center of a valley, with Russians and British both coming at him from opposite ends. After they meet in the middle, having between them vanquished the locals, they would have one big fight to settle who holds the entire pass.

The catch is that Red force needs nine infantry units, four cavalry and two gun batteries, while Blue has five infantry, three cavalry and two batteries. The artillery provided in the "complete" set is actually very ample for all three, no problem there. But for the rest:

Afghans - four infantry units, one and a half cavalry units.

Indian Army - three infantry units, two cavalry units.

Russians - three infantry units, three and a half cavalry units.

These are on the order of 15-20 infantry or 8-10 cavalry apiece. To field the appropriate numbers, I'd need to break them down into half-units. Easy enough, and there are options for that in both The Sword and the Flame and The Men Who Would be Kings, but it might still seem a little small. Perhaps the scenarios can be modified. I also needn't stick quite to the suggested proportions - a Russian army with lots of cavalry seems appropriate! One issue is that Blue ends the series with not only his "standard" force, but the survivors from previous scenarios, thus having to be larger. Of course we could just have a standard campaign, with two of these allied against the other. Russians and their Afghan allies invading the Raj?

Another possibility is Bob Cordery's Bundock and Bayonet, in which companies are represented by five figures. That would work alright.

On the other hand, I'm reading the "Gordon Expedition" chapter of Mike Snook's Into the Jaws of Death right now, and I have plenty of River War minis... this "scenario-string" would work just fine for that, too, with some fiddling with the numbers since in TSATF the natives should always significantly outnumber the Europeans. Perhaps simply doubling Blue's assigned assets?

Thoughts and suggestions welcomed.

My Colonial Collection, Part Six: The Mutiny

How do I get myself into these things?

More sidetracking on the hobbyist's road, bought on the spur of the moment from a fellow on Facebook's Colonial Wargaming group. This time, the Indian Mutiny of 1857 - though with a little fiddling I suppose I might get an 1840s Sikh skirmish in there too. These are mixed 28mms and painted. Very nice figures and paintjob, with only a few minor repairs to make so far.

Not sure how I'll store them. My method with soft plastics - just bunging them into toolboxes - won't work. Will lay them in bubble wrap until I find some foam packing.

Two Indian officers - possibly mutineer commanders

Twenty-three Sikhs, including two officers, musician and two colours

Sixteen Gurkhas

Sixteen 64th Regiment (Second Staffordshire)

Fifteen 84th Regt (York and Lancaster, including two standards.

Sixteen First Madras Fusiliers, including two standards.

Sixteen 93rd Highlanders, including two cased colours.

Three dozen assorted Company European troops.

Twelve 92nd Highlanders, officer and gun.

Fourteen Pathans. I was just writing the other day that
I haven't got any Pathans yet...

Elephant on scenic base. The umbrella has come off.

Thirty rebel sepoys, in the later lack of uniform.
Also a gun crew and Scottish piper.

Assorted civilians. The two at front right could be Kim
and his lama.

Two wagons with bullocks to pull them.

Most units, like the previous lot, are too small for standard The Sword and the Flame, but I'll figure something out. There's one collector of this period already in the local club - perhaps we can get together and run a game. There's a little damage from shipping - in particular, I'll have to reattach standard bearers to their standards - but overall a nice haul. Not enough mutineers for a real battle, but some of the uniformed loyal Sepoys could stand in. A skirmish campaign might also work.