Happy Hogswatch

 

The Battle of Cape St Quendon

As has seemingly become an annual event, I travelled up to the Herts Volunteers to put on a large Sails of Glory game.  This year’s game was loosely based on the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797 which saw both HMS Victory and Nelson featuring albeit not together.  Here are some photos from the game:

As with the historical engagement the game was a victory for the British.

France 1940 - The Bridges

A good while ago I managed to pick up a Cigar Box Battle river mat on eBay. I had long been thinking about the interesting challenges of a game with one side having to make a strategic withdrawal across a river and the other trying to seize the crossings. Finding the mat advanced my plans for that game. Unfortunately the pandemic got in the way and with all my projects the timeline extended well beyond the original plan.

But after picking up not just one but two bridges from Sarissa Precision things got under way. I had chose a road and a rail bridge, so I obviously needed to build the track to go with the former and decided a station would also be a good addition. I also wanted to make the game big both physically (a 12 foot by 6 foot table) but also from a Chain of Command perspective; this meant at least a company a side. Fortunately I had collected sufficient 28mm figures to make that work. So I finally put the game on at the club. 

It saw a rag tag French outfit as the defender facing a determined German company supported by a platoon of tanks. The French were made up of a platoon of Foreign Legion and a platoon of Tirailleurs Sénégalais on one side of the river, needing to withdraw across the bridges and a Motorcycle platoon holding those bridges. The French also had some support in the form of an anti-tank gun and some engineers in a truck - the latter to demolish the bridges before the Germans could capture them intact. Along with two Bouteilles Incendiaires, two roadblocks and a couple of full Chain of Command dice for the withdrawing troops, this was the defending force. The Germans, in addition to their infantry company and tank platoon, had an Adjutant, a Pioneer team in a Kubelwagen, a SdKfz 222 armoured car, an infantry gun and a truck with four rubber boats. It wouldn’t have been an early war game without a Shabby Nazi Trick - the German players selected a fifth column sniper (Jean-Claude). We played through the patrol phase which saw some interesting jockeying for positions around the buildings on the German side of the board. With jump off points then positioned we were ready for the meat of the game.

The Foreign Legion were covering the French left flank and the Tirailleurs Sénégalais on the right. The Germans began their advance with the platoon on their right flank making serious progress until they encountered the Legion. The other German platoons soon found that the Tirailleurs weren’t going to be easily dislodged and put them under heavy concentrated fire. The roadblock constrained the easiest route for their Panzers and so the main armoured advance was through the farmland to the right of the road. 

Repeated exchanges of fire were telling on the French forces as they tried to hold the Germans long enough for their engineers to deploy and mine the bridges. 

Eventually they began to fall back but not before taking serious casualties. Meanwhile Jean-Claude who had been placed in the church tower (it’s traditional!) was causing the French some unexpected problems. 

With the French C-in-C desperate to blow the now mined bridges he ordered a full withdrawal but this was easier said than done with the Germans covering most of the routes to the bridges.

The Tirailleurs were aiming for the road bridge but when they got there the C-in-C ordered them to switch to the distant rail bridge so he could blow the former. 

Meanwhile the German pioneers were making heavy weather of destroying the roadblock and the motorised elements of the German force were still held up as a result.

In the end only a single Legion section got to safety before the second bridge was blown and with neither side having been able to meet their victory conditions I declared the game a draw.

Aliens! This time it's.....September

 At the last club meeting I played a game of Aliens. The rules were a close offspring of the original Leading Edge Aliens board game and it was lots of fun.  The scenario was loosely based on the movie with the Colonial Marines trying to escape to the APC.  Here are a few photos of the game:

In the end we managed to get more Marines out than they did in the movie so we decided that was a win!

Freikorps und Spartacist - Westhafen

Having enjoyed the last game of the Freikorps und Spartacist rules, I decided to expand both the table size and player count.  Of course this required the acquisition of a significant greater amount of terrain along with some additional units.

Once I had pulled all of this together I put on a game at the club meeting this weekend which saw a much larger Freikorps force including an A7V tank and a Garford-Putilov armoured car along with some Stormtroopers facing a similarly enhanced rebel force albeit with only some unarmoured transport.  

 The game started well for the rebels with the Freikorps deployment halting after the second round but they really didn't sieze the opportunity created by that advantage.  There were some hard fought street battles with some significant groups of civilians coming under fire from the Freikorp forces - perhaps too much of a concentration on the civilians meant they weren't eliminating the rebel forces.  By the end of the game neither side had reached their overall victory conditions and based on levels of army morale meant I had to call the game a draw.

Here are some photos from the game:

BOHICA 2 - Search and Destroy

Our second outing for the BOHICA rules involved an apparently straightforward search and destroy mission.  We did have some armoured support this time around (in the form of an M48) but we were in for some surprises!  Our map and the real map were different in a number of ways, the road was mined and we were facing some NVA with armoured support rather than just the VC we were expecting.

We also had some clarifications on the various elements of the rules we either were not playing correctly or we confused about in the last game.

Here are some photos from the game:

Whilst the game was fun we were still not entirely convinced as some elements remained a little clunky.  Our umpire is now keen to try a game of Force on Force with the Ambush Valley supplement to see how they compare.

Starship Troopers

At the last club meeting we played a game of Starship Troopers using 25/28mm figures and lots and lots of Bugs!.  The rules were a home-brew set that were easily picked up and allowed the game to move at a good pace. The terrain was a  great example of recycling, kit bashing and scratch building with some time being taken to try to identify the origins of the various pieces!

The impressive number of Arachnids (over 100 by the late stages) were all from the old Galoob action figure range and included Warrior Bugs, Heavy Bugs, Tanker Bugs and a Plasma Bug - we were lucky and no Hopper Bugs actually appeared in the game!

Here are some photos from the game: