Edinburgh Wargames Journal

Issue 18  - January 2008

Periods featured so far in this Issue  :  Second World War (20mm), Second World War Naval (1/2400),

Conquistadors (28mm), Wild West (28mm), Spanish Civil War (20mm) & Seven Years War (28mm).

Happy New Year to you all, and may all your die rolls be lucky ones in 2008 (unless you're playing against me of course)!.

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Seven Years War  (Die Kriegskunst) 28mm

I really haven't been having much luck with my camera lately - a severe case of operator error. My apologies for the washed-out look of some of these pictures. Anyway, this game was all about testing out a scenario Dougie Trail concocted for our forthcoming Die Kriegskunst rules. In the rules the scenario will be presented in two forms - as a small game suitable for playing through in a normal club evening, and a larger affair, for those with lots of lead and time on their hands. The battle was were refighting was Moys (1757), where the Austrians launched a surprise attack on an isolated Prussian corps just outside Gorlitz, in eastern Saxony. We had to use Russians in place of Austrians, and are still tinkering with the forces available, the layout of the terrain and the timing of reinforcements.

The battle is all a matter of timing and momentum. The Austrians have to sweep a small Prussian force off a small hill (the Jäckelsberg), then deal with the inevitable Prussian counter-attack. In this refight I didn't do particularly well. The first wave of attackers - a brigade of grenadiers - were shredded by musketry and canister as they climbed the hill, and then the survivors were repulsed when they tried to charge into the Prussian redoubt.

My reinforcements fared badly too - it took two more assaults before the hill was finally taken, and in the meantime the Prussians had managed to deploy a fresh brigade of veteran troops, and were poised for their counter-attack. My objective was to capture both the hill and the village of Moys behind it. In the end I was struggling to hold one of these objectives, and the village remained firmly in Prussian hands. Losses were prohibitively heavy, and we were only saved from disaster by the dithering of the Prussian reinforcements, who failed in their attempt to change orders, and consequently their counter-attack never materialised.

Even my flanking column  - a unit of infantry operating in skirmish order (standing in for Croats), and a supporting unit of cavalry - did little to tip the scales in my favour. However, as a result of the game we now know how to balance the scenario, and to turn it into a more accurate refight. In the real battle the Austrians took the Prussians on the hill by surprise, and managed to capture it relatively easily. Then the Prussians counter-attacked, and the whole thing degenerated into a brutal fight at close-quarters, from which the Austrians eventually emerged victorious.

The rules worked well, but we're still concerned that they have a tendency to be a little slow. Consequently we're looking at ways to streamline the systems a little more. Unfortunately deadlines are also looming, as Dave Ryan of Partizan Press wants them finished ASAP, in order to have them printed and published in time for Salute 2009 (19th April). The clock is ticking...

For more on Die Kriegskunst, visit the Seven Years War page.

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Spanish Civil War  (Contemptible Little Armies - Back of Beyond) 20mm

I'm afraid the photos of this game didn't come out - I stupidly pressed delete rather than save.. My profuse apologies. Suffice it to say the good guys (the Republicans) trounced the bad guys (the Nationalist rebels), after storming their entrenched positions. We were helped by a sortie by a little Polikarpov I-16, and the appearance of an anarchist armoured truck which looked like an upturned bath on wheels.

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Red Rock, Kansas, 1886  (Legends of the Old West) 28mm

Once every few months a few of us get together for a weekend game - a large multi-player affair. Well, this one was a Wild West shootout, with eight different gangs, fighting through the sizeable town of Red Rock and its neighbouring Mexican village. My crowd were the hard-pressed lawmen, but their home town was visited by a host of others - rampaging cowboys, outlaws, a Chinese Tong band, Mexican bandits, Navaho Indians, Mountain Men, the US Cavalry and even the Texas Rangers.

Actually, there was very little point to it all apart from blazing away at everyone else, although the organiser Colin Jack tried his best. Buildings were ransacked for booty, a treasure trove was searched for, cattle were rustled, stagecoaches and mule trains waylaid, and various strangers passed through looking for a fight - most notably Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  That's my lawmen crowd below on the right - and a mean bunch they look too, despite the primitive state of frontier photography available at the time....

While I'll be the first to agree this isn't proper wargaming, it was still a harmless enough way to spend a day with a bunch of friends, even though you can't trust them not to shoot you in the back. The rules we used were the Warhammer "Historical" set Legends of the Old West, which are pretty flaky, and involve a lot of die rolling for little enough result, but at least they were fairly straightforward, and even city slickers and folks from back east managed to pick it up without any problem.

Still, fun though it was, I'd sooner have played a real wargame, with armies, and units, and pretty flags ....

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Orellana's Raft, The Amazon, 1542  (El Dorado - a home-grown set) 28mm

I'd rather hoped to play a game with Chris Henry's superb collection of Conquistadors and Aztecs, but that game is still on hold. Instead Colin Jack asked us to playtest his new show participation game - a rather silly affair based on a bizarre event. In 1541 the Conquistador Francisco de Orellana was campaigning in what is now Equador when he became separated from his main force. He decided to build a raft and float down the river to civilization. Unfortunately for him the river turned out to be the Amazon, and what followed was an epic danger-filled 2,000 mile voyage, which lasted the best part of ten months. During the voyage the Spaniards were frequently attacked by the Amazonian tribes who lived on the banks of the river, which is what gave Colin the idea for his game.

The Spanish player is allowed to pick his crew, from the vital (Orellana and a helmsman) through the useful (crossbowmen, arquebusiers or bucklermen) to the downright useless (war dogs or even a small cannon). An important decision is how much armour to buy to stave off arrows, and who to give it to.

Then his only decision is which course to steer, and therefore which river bank to draw fire from. I went first, and I made it off the table with about two Spaniards, having lost Orellana in the penultimate turn. We ran the game several times, and others were more successful - one player even managing to wipe out all the hostile Amazonians as he swept downstream.

As the playtesting went on Colin tinkered with the rules, and added little extra bits of "chrome", such as rapids (the raft is shown going through the extemporised white paper rapids in the picture below), and better protection. the chances of hitting were also changed a few times, but by the end of the night we think we honed the rules into something we can use at shows. I suspect it will make its first appearance at Partizan in May, by which time Colin will have sorted out all the figures and terrain he needed. For this effort we merely used a brown paper river, and the jungle scenery we usually use for Vietnam games.

OK, this wasn't the Conquistador game I expected, and it was rather silly, but with a bit of work I'm sure it'll make a great game to wheel out at wargame shows. Incidentally, if you're even vaguely interested in the story, try to pick up a copy of The Crossbowman's Story by George Millar (1955), a semi-fictional account of the voyage. I think it has also been published with different titles over the years. It's a fantastic read, and well worth the effort of tracking down. Of course the incident also inspired the Werner Herzog film Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972).

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Second World War, Pacific, 1944  (General Quarters) 1/2400 scale

We planned to do a Conquistadors versus Aztecs game, but Chris Henry who was laying on the game couldn't make it. In these circumstances we tend to run naval games, as they can be laid on at short notice, and don't involve a lot of organising. This was a multi-player affair, with everyone commanding a squadron / division of Japanese or American warships. Of course, we immediately fell into the trap of putting too many ships on the table, so even though we used an 8 x 6 foot table and set the action at night it was still extremely crowded!

The loose premise was that a Japanese Task Force was trying to escape from a landlocked archipelago - somewhere like the Philippines. It was set in 1944, even though naval purists will note that several of the ships we used had been sunk by then! the Japanese with a cruiser squadron and a small battleship one (the venerable Hiei and Kirishima plus destroyer screen), while the Americans blocked their path with a force of heavy cruisers and another centred around the battleships Washington and South Dakota. Both sides also had reserves - the American one consisting of more heavy cruisers and the battleship Tennessee, while the Japanese had the Hyuga and the mighty Yamato.

These reinforcements were diced for - the American reserve coming on almost straight away, while the Yamato force didn't appear until halfway through the battle. Well, the two cruiser forces clashed and exchanged salvos, causing enough damage to sink one heavy cruiser per side. I suspect the American cruiser commander used his under-gunned Australian ship the Canberra as a human shield, protecting the better-armed American cruisers which followed it its wake! The Japanese destroyers scored a torpedo hit on the South Dakota, but their battleships were outclassed by the American battlewagons, who inflicted significant damage on the Japanese battleships.

Then the Yamato appeared. It wiped out the Canberra with its first salvo, and then proceeded to sink or cripple an American heavy cruiser every turn after that. the American battleships wisely kept their distance, and kept out of visibility range of the leviathan, lobbing shells at it using radar. Of course by that time both sides had problems - the cruiser forces of both sides had been mauled, while the battleships (apart from the Yamato) had all suffered some form of damage. In the end the game was declared a draw. Despite the advantage offered by the Yamato the Japanese would have had problems getting the rest of their forces off the table, while the Americans would sensibly have hauled off and waited for dawn, when their aircraft could deal with the Japanese monster battleship.

As usual we used the old-fashioned but reliable General Quarters rules. I know a new edition has come out, but working on the principle that you can't teach an old dog new tricks we decided to use the tried and tested older set (which came out more than 30 years ago). After all, when you only play a naval game once in a blue moon you and you drink beer throughout the game then you don't want to make things too complicated!

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Second World War, Ardennes, 1944  (Rapid Fire!) 20mm

This is what comes of not organising a game beforehand - You get roped into one using rules you don't know, and scenery dragged from the depths of the club store. However, the tanks looked nice - and there were lots of 'em! the scenario was based on one from the new Rapid Fire! scenario book covering the Battle of the Bulge. OK, in this game the frost-free ground looked lime green rather than slushy, the trees still had leaves on and the roads looked like they'd been freshly swept, so the whole idea of recreating the Ardennes in late December 1944 was rather ignored. Still, as I said before, the tanks looked nice!   

The idea was that the American armor was trying to widen the corridor south of Bastogne, and they launched a drive to clear the Krauts from a handful of villages to the west of the Bastogne to Marletange road. As in any Rapid Fire! game there were lots of toys on the table, and a tank represented a platoon, while a group of ten or so infantrymen were meant to be a company. This is a command level above the regular Battlegroup Panzer Grenadier games I play, so it took some getting used to. Fortunately my fellow American players were adept at using these somewhat peculiar rules, and Neil - the guy with the tank-heavy command managed to ambush a column of Kraut armour as it crested a ridge. Visibility was down to 12" at the start, which played in the American's favour. By the time the freezing fog lifted the Germans were reeling, having come of worse in the tank duel. Meanwhile the American infantry-heavy column captured its two objectives, and so secured a victory.

I'm afraid that as the commander of the American reserves my contribution was merely the odd artillery stock, airstrike and long-range tank shot. Still my guns knocked out a Stug, my thunderbolt took out another (see the picture above), and by the end of the game the Krauts were beginning their long walk home to the German border. Nothing is more satisfying that a tabletop littered with burning Nazi tanks...

As for the rules, I used to play Rapid Fire! many years ago, but I've never tried this new version. I enjoyed myself, but I didn't become a convert. Its strange, as on the whole I like my rules to be simple and straightforward - which Rapid Fire! undoubtedly are. I suppose I just regard the Second World War as a slightly more technically advanced period, and so tanks blowing up on a roll of 5-6 doesn't seem to cut the mustard. It was interesting, but I think I'll stick to the slightly more complicated but intimately a lot more satisfying rules I use regularly.  Oh, and for an example of a much prettier Ardennes game, check out the Parker's Crossroads scenario in Journal 8.

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