Porting Myself to Halifax

On Wednesday I made the trek cross province to Ron's for a Sudan game. When I arrived I discovered that he had laid out the example Colonial game from Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame but with British instead of Egyptian troops on the Imperial side.

The second game nears the end. Mostly 25mm Ral Partha with a handful of Minifigs apart from some Airfix Camel Jockeys and my Scruby Arab cavalry.

We played the game twice. First time around we played straight up and realized we had both made mistakes about how the Strength Points work. I had read the Sudden Death option first which has a 50℅ exhaustion rate and missed that the basic or Roster system had a 30% loss exhaustion point. We had both missed that the book makes no reference to the strength point value of units lost but just a loss of strength points. This means that an army can be exhausted without losing a single unit which rather makes reserves less valuable. A look at the example was of no help since in the last turn, the Egyptians dropped below to 30% mark whether counting the SP's of destroyed units or just the percentage of overall SP's.

In any event it took about nearly two hours before I ground down the British to their exhaustion point and managed it by only using my gun and the muskets of my cavalry and better infantry. With a string of spearmen across the table behind a line of hills the exhausted British had  no option but to retreat. The outcome was never in doubt.

We reset the table and played again using sudden death. Since the number of figures per unit was irrelevant we beefed them up to look better. This game took a bit less than an hour but it was exciting/nerve wracking and involved some hard thinking. Until about the second to last turn the outcome hung in the balance and only some favourable luck saved the faithful, inspiring three units of poor troops to retreat rather than be destroyed and blinded the infidels' sight so that two successive artillery shots needing 2 or better to hit, missed! A double move then allowed the venerable Airfix tribe to exploit  a gap  to make a flank attack and things started to slide for the British.

That second game was the sort of fun game that makes you want to reset and play again but it was time to head home.