A stroll in the forest

A write-up on a forum led to me blowing a whole $6 on the pdf of Fistful Of Lead - Horse & Musket.  This is a rather jolly skirmish game and while I generally don't care for skirmish actions, this looked to have the right level of complexity (none) and frivolity (quite a bit).  The real draw, so to speak, is that it is card driven.  The book helpfully contains a few scenarios so on Wednesday we tried out an small action set in the North American colonies.  Us plucky Brits (John and I) had to escort a wagon of essential supplies along a road which crossed the 5-foot long table.  Simple, eh?  We had two groups each of 5 men and of course the wagon.  The latter was about £3.95 a couple of years ago.  John's command (far side of wagon) are mostly ACTA AWI British Light Infantry, painted by me.  My chaps were BMC AWI figures - a small part of a collection I bought a while back from the man behind the splendid Portland Little Wars blog.

 At first all seemed quiet.  After all, what sort of villain would disturb the King's peace?  At the other side of the table, Martin and Jerry were looking a bit shifty...

 But then shots rang out and one of John's chaps fell dead.

The woods on both sides of the road were teeming with wicked rebels (Accurate Continental Militia painted by me)

Despite skulking in woods, one of the ruffians was soon wounded (red marker - the yellow means he is also shaken.  Black means reloading).  Our man leading the horse can be seen trying to sidle off.

 Though we were laying down a withering hail of disciplined musketry, it soon became apparent that standing around in the open had it's drawbacks.

 Much of my fire was targeted against the officer with the pistol.  Note the chap waving his hat from behind a tree.

 We moved forward again to try to see off a naughty colonial intent on stealing the wagon.

 This plucky redcoat shot him from point blank range...and of course missed!

Toys often acquire identities in our games.   Having dispatched the officer I had inflicted 'shaken' markers on 'hat man' behind the tree and 'Ben Franklin'.  In the other wood and off camera was a rifle-toting chap known inevitably as 'Davy Crockett', one American in a fur hat looking much like any other to us Brits.

 By now the enemy had the wagon and had led it off the road.  Where it promptly became stuck.

 Another ruffian ran from the woods to take charge of the wagon....

 ...but was soon under fire....

 ...and lay wounded.

At this point - and after only abut 90 minutes of play - John and I decided to march off in a dignified manner/desert/flee to Canada, leaving the rebellious ruffians in possession of the (stuck fast) wagon.  One can only imagine their faces later when they open the big crate of 'essential supplies' to find only wig powder and portraits of the King.

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.