A Very Civil War

On Saturday I met with some of the lads at the King's County Table Top Games Assn Quarterly games day in Kentville.

This was another 25mm ECW game, this one was based on Marston Moor using a rough ratio of 1:100 for over all numbers but using standard units in OSW mode. The players were not confined to historical deployments. Jeff as Prince Rupert deployed first with the Allied army under Paul and Martin deploying second.

Paul's vintage Minifigs provided the Scots Covenanters/Parliamentry Army while Jeff's (see  Armchair Commander blog) contemporary figure provided the Royalist army.

Scots and Parliament

Royalists

This was the third outing for my one page, Quick Play, low detail ECW rules. Over all the rules again worked ok thanks to players with the right spirit but there were a few new glitches and "not covered" bits. In addition my suspicion during the last game that I shouldn't have removed the melee resolution rule was confirmed. I also got some useful feed back on a few bits. We're only talking a few lines of text but that'll take me onto  the other side of the page so I may as well fill up the remaining space by adding more explanation and making some of the writing down some of the unwritten rules.

The first clash.

Same moment zoomed in.

The allies attacked slowly forward all along the line but Jeff did a Rupert and launched a strong cavalry counter attack on his right. This swept away the allied cavalry and then sacrificed itself knocking a whole in the flanking infantry. It was close though, they almost crushed the whole flank without being destroyed.

On the other flank, Martin found his cavalry hampered by a village and close and the resulting cavalry fight lasted the rest of the game without decisive result.

In the centre, the largely Scottish infantry mass attacked about as slowly as is possible rolling 2 d6 a turn for distance! This gave the Royalist guns time to do enough damage to make a difference in the following melee.

However, by this time, the Allied army had managed to lose all of but one of their commanders which was made coordination nearly impossible. Both armies had taken heavy losses but there seemed little hope of Parliament breaking the Royalist line and in case of a draw, the strategic advantage lay with the Royalists. They certainly did better than they did in history.

Thanks to Jeff, Paul, and Martin for an enjoyable game.

Lest We Forget

This November 11th is the 100th Anniversary of the guns falling silent in France at the end  of the "Great War".

From the Canadian Encyclopedia:

"Canada is traditionally assigned the tragic distinction of losing the last casualty among British Commonwealth forces during the First World War. Private George Price was hit in the chest from a sniper shot in the town of Ville-sur-Haine, near Mons. He died at 10:58 a.m., two minutes before the armistice went into effect, officially ending the ​First World War ."

National War Memorial, Ottawa - Confederation Square 

(courtesy Parks Canada/photo by B. Morin).

(I have twice had the privilege  of  going on parade at the Remembrance Day ceremonies in Ottawa. This year Kathy and I will be attending the local ceremony in Windsor.).

Boogie Woogie Bugle Zouave Boy (restored)

*** Prologue: Don't I hate it when this happens, although its only the second time (I think) that it has happened. Yesterday evening I wrote and published a brief blog post and at some point since, I apparently  overwrote it with an earlier  word-free draft while using my stupidphone as a flash light. (Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the useless piece of C^&% Samsung phone that I was talked into as a replacement for my wonderful but aging Motorolla?)  Anyway, its camera is the one redeeming feature and I had used it to upload the pictures directly to an empty post to see if that helped with the picture quality then I closed Blogger, BUT you have to close everything twice on this phone and the draft hung there, waiting to ambush and overwrite the published post at 4 am when a sleepy victim  would pick up the phone  and randomly squeeze buttons trying to wake it up while trying to see what time it is...... yup it cleverly reopened the wordless draft and published it over top of the published one without so much as a howdiyahdo!

So what follows is a new blog post because I don't remember exactly what I said the first time around.     

Its been over a month(!?!) since I last set brush to figure (which has to do with the demise of the halogen floor lamp that used to help illuminate my wargame table as much as anything else but its a boring story).  My decision to reorganize my ACW regiments into 4 stand units instead of 3 is fairly easy to manage for an army of motly Airfix ACW figures except for a few special units like Cesar's Zouaves (click here for their story).

Luckily I haven't painted them all yet and I bought a Zouave command pack from Musket Miniatures last year. These latter are HO/20mm and are therefore slightly smaller, accentuated here by the drummer and bugler being apparently portrayed as boys and the Zouaves being big fellows. I grabbed the bugler and 3 Zouaves and saved the rest for the 2nd regiment.

It was only after I had finished painting and started to base them that I remembered that I'm doing 6 to a stand, not 4.  hmmm  paint two more or...??   A quick head count showed that one unit or other was going to be short a figure or two so might as well be the Veterans. I just left 2 blank files.

What next? Well, next free day is next week sometime and there is a group ECW game on Saturday so we'll see when we get there!