A Gentlemanly Diversion.

The plan for this afternoon was to finish assembling my Canadian/Faraway 54mm pioneers  but.....

First blood! 
(I need to move my lamp back upstairs so I can dispel the gloom and get sharper pictures again.)

Its been two years now since I played Howard Whitehouse's "A Gentleman's War" at Fall In!. Since then I've had the pleasure of expressing opinions etc on line but despite good intentions had not actually gotten around to playing a test game at home. I'll skip the long list of excuses and just say that I finally realized that I had figures I could use by a quick melding of small units and set to.

I wanted a small, trusted, scenario, Blasthof Bridge came immediately to mind. For reasons that have nothing to do with the rules, I decided to try laying with 1/2 ranges on a 3ft x 3ft playing area.

The layout: Faraway with some Hougal auxiliaries as the Imperial forces on the near side of the river, Oerberg with some Foreign "Volunteers" from Oberhilse as the Elector's army on the Farside of the river.
 

The basic rules are fairly traditional, I won't use the term Old School as I no longer know what that means. They are not strict on organization but typical units are battalions of 12 infantry, regiments of 6 cavalry and one gun batteries. I did my best translation of the original forces to this format and followed Soubise and Kornberg's plans and have been trying to role play their personalities. 

Faraway (Imperial) forces deployed.
(3 x12 infantry, 2x6 cavalry, 1 gun)

The sequence of play is card driven with variable length moves based on rolling a number of dice like TS&TF and MacDuff to the Frontier etc however the card activation has a number of twists that introduce a second level to the game. Certain cards have special abilities, group moves etc while a hand of "Hold" cards can be used to allow reactions or extra moves and so on. Above all, Jokers trigger various special events and their appearance is the closest thing to "a  turn".

Oerberg (Electoral Army).
4 x 12 infantry, 1 battery, 1 x 6 cavalry  

Combat is by rolling 1 die per X figures needing N to hit depending on range and other modifiers followed by saving throws and sometimes a morale check. Special unit characteristics add all sorts of tweaks which I'm skipping for now for simplicity.

Where the game paused for the night. 
(The red and blue markers indicate units that have acted so far this ... round..for that side)

After about an hour of playing and looking things up, I had to stop for the night. The Queen's cavalry have just crossed the bridge and, as in the original game, have been hard hit by the enemy artillery.