Dominion of...Patriots and Redcoats

 

Yet another Dominion of... variant!  Again, for such a simple system this has a nice 'feel' to it.

Lexington & Concord, 1775. 2mm toys.

British victory!

Second game. The wicked colonials even the score.

Third attempt: another triumph for the Brits.

Trenton. Pretty much the only battle of the war I know anything about!

A very hard fought battle but the King was let down by his Hessian mercenaries

Trenton 2. A victory for the Hessians. Er, I mean Brits!

Look carefully and you can see the Hessians grinning.

The decider. I hope the King gets his money back from the Prince of Hesse.

The toys are 2mm Irregular. Originally painted and used in Franco-Prussian War games, they've also been used for ACW and the AWI version of Command & Colours.  Very versatile, these chaps!

Bunker Hill

As I'm already a big fan of the Command & Colours series of games, when I heard that Tricorne, the version covering the American War of Independence had been published I didn't think too hard before placing my order.  As regular readers will know, I view C&C as a toy soldier game and play the Napoleonic and ACW versions with 15mm toys and the Ancients wersion with 25mm toys - all on Hexon terrain with it's 4-inch/10cm hexes.

All very well, but I don't have any suitable toys for AWI and any I do paint will be in 54mm.  Then I remembered my Irregular 2mm blocks which I originally acquired about 15 years ago for use with Richard Brooks's Minischlacht and Terrible Swift Rule games.  By re-purposing most of the figures I had already painted I managed to cobble together enough troops to play the (chronologically) first scenario.

Here is the game setup.  Graham led the wicked rebels (left) while John commanded the colonial oppressors.

Some of the terrain was a bit of a lash-up.  Here are the Continental earthworks on Breed's Hill.  And I forgot some of the actual hill.  Ah well.

The British left.  While the bases of the Continentals were edged in pale blue, the Brits used red.  Light troops have a green stripe on the left of the base, regulars blue, militia yellow.

The woods were made from cork tile with green felt glued atop.  They looked surprisingly effective.

Continental riflemen skulking in Charleston.

HMS Lively - a 20-gun vessel bombarded Charleston at one point.  This is a 30+ year-old 1/3,000 model kindly provided by John.

As the enemy were largely dug in, the Brits decided to advance.

So how different is Tricorne from other C&C games?  Surprisingly so.  It does a very neat job of replicating the flavour of linear warfare.  Infantry unite exchange fire in the hope that the enemy will run away!  Rolling a flag on the combat dice means, as usual, that the target must retreat (unless supported, with leader etc) but then the retreating unit rolls again.  This time a failure to roll a flag means that the unit keeps on running.  Not that you'd know it from my bungled explanation but it does get pretty tense!

Play proceeded fairly slowly as we adapted to the new game systems and troop types.  We were hampered by the absence of Martin and Jerry who - the only ones who can be relied upon to read and understand rules!  We wound up at a convenient point with the Brits trailing by 2 banners to 4 and accepting that they weren't going to win.

Grudge Match

Martin has already provided a (possibly more objective) report on this game.  He also provided the above photo, while those that follow were provided by official DDR channels.

The roads were jammed with abandoned civilian vehicles.  Needless to say these were comprehensively looted and my command BTR now sports a rather nifty Blaupunkt stereo...

The DDR initial deployment.  Our plan was simple.  With a regiment of reservist-crewed T-55s it had to be!

Out troops take up position - we opted for a fairly static defence.

First blood went to the Comrades as some Luchs armoured cars were sent to the scrapyard.

The West Germans were a jittery crowd and threw consistently appalling morale dice.

The enemy advance soon stalled - but could we keep up enough pressure to see them off?

A load of wobbly fascists cowering on the woods.

When the advance resumed we brought the advance elements under heavy fire.

Endgame - the West Germans called off the attack and it was schnapps and medals all round in the DDR mess.

Delaying Action

 This was a NATO Brigade Commander game run by Martin using his 2mm toys.  John and Tim C (above) led the wicked capitalists....

...while the forces of progressive socialism were commanded by Jerry and your Humble Correspondent.  A clear victory to us in the battle of the silly hats.

  The field of battle.  Each 10cm hex is 1km across in the game.  

Out objective was to head west and not stop!

The Sov forces were a Tank Regiment 3 Btls of T-64, a  Motor Rifle Btl in BMP, a SP artillery Btl and a Co each of AA, Recce, Engineers and HQ.  We also had 2 flights each of Mi-24 Hinds and Su-17 Fitters on call.

 We also had the Divisional Recce Btl, augmented by engineers and SP artillery.

Our cunning plan was to send the Recce Btl on the right to act as a distraction while the main force moved along the axis of the autobahn.

The opening moves saw out programmed artillery landing on four crossroads, while the Brits blew up bridges.

 The wicked Brits flew in some TA reinforcements by helicopter.

 As usual, activation was card driven.

The British defence line was pretty much where we'd expected to find it.  This squadron of Chieftains was an unwelcome discovery.

 We soon called in the Hinds to deal with the Chiefies.  We upset them but didn't kill any.

 An overview of the devastated landscape.

 Those Chieftains were quite a problem - both heli flights were soon engaged.

 

 Once our barrage lifted we were able to move through the villages - but then the British gunners opened up...

 The Chieftains soon ran off to the next position while a T-64 Btl stormed along the autobahn.

 Barrage over, it was time to move up the Btl of Sp 122s.

 The Brits in the centre soon came under enough pressure to drive them away.

Endgame.  We had one Btl off the western end and another poised to follow. At this point the Brits decided to pull out.

We agreed that honours were pretty even.  The Brits had successfully carried out that more difficult of operations, a delaying action and withdrawal under fire.  The Sovs has successfully pressed forward covering 12km in an hour and a half with a very acceptable casualty rate.