JWS Reunion

As you may have notice from my Twitter feed, last weekend was a get together for the old guard of the Jersey Wargames Society. We haven't got together as a group for quite a while and so we decided to put on a few games.

First up Lenin provided the Battle of Um Bbongo Gorge as an outing for his extensive Darkest Africa figure collection. Playing to type I took the part of Commandant Hercule Poirot (a famous Belgian) the representative of His Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians. As the only representative of law and order in the chaos that is Africa, my mission was to stop an invasion by that upstart self-appointed so-called king Ndofa, tackle any slavers and collect taxes and export duties.Things did not start well when I was ambushed by some uppity locals and one section took rather a beating. Having regrouped I spotted some suspicious arabs who could only be up to no good and advanced to investigate. A closer look and the application of my "little grey cells" told me they were slavers and quite hostile. After giving them a pretty good thrashing I turned back toward the local village which was under attack from that rotter Ndofa. After clearing up the misunderstanding with the locals we joined forces to stop Ndofa from stealing the the village cattle and drove him off, albeit the village was a little scorched afterwards. With little persuasion the villagers paid their tax dues in cattle and I was free to discuss the export of ivory and other goods with some big game hunters (must have been after some very big game as they had a small artillery piece!). I made a rapid assessment and secured the appropriate duty and then escorted them to our steamer.

The afternoon game was the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513. With most of the players knowing relatively little about the actual battle it unfolded in a relatively historic way with the English discovering the marsh in front of the Scots position the hard way. With some nicely conflicting victory conditions the Scots forces (some of which I was commanding) played a pretty defensive game but eventually the English got their forces through the marsh and our lack of effective ranged weapons led to the natural conclusion.
On the Sunday we were treated to a series of small games all of which had been cleverly designed to fit onto a chess board. The first I played was a tavern fight between the Three Musketeers and Rochefort with some Cardinal's Guards.
The rules provided for all the usual chandalier swinging, bar sliding and table crushing action and use poker dice for combat resolution. As Rochefort I managed to capture two of the Musketeers and D'Artagnan but one slipped through my fingers...
The next compact game was the Fight in Balin's Tomb between the Fellowship of the Ring and a horde of goblins with a Cave Troll! This game is still in the development stage but provided some fun action, especially with the Troll.

Next on the agenda was my game, Chaos in Caracabra de la Cruz, a 28mm skirmish in the Spanish Civil War. With five factions, three Nationalists and two Republican, with some interesting victory conditions the game promised some interesting encounters.

Clearly some of the players actually read their victory conditions because the Carlist contingent followed their's precisely and captured and held a significant part of the village. The Anarchist and Communist militias almost opened fire on each other but the timely intervention of the local priest, in defence of his church, avoided that blue on blue encounter. The Falange reached the church but couldn't get in a withdrew, just in time to block and advance by the Communists who had already had a little encounter with the Guardia Civil.

The Anarchists decided that dynamite was the obvious solution to a locked church door; however the effect led to an appropriate quote from the Italian Job! A similar attempt by the Communists to use dynamite went a little awry when it turned out the dynamitero was quite a familar with it as he'd made out and dropped it amongst his own side.

Meanwhile the Anarchists, playing to type, blew up the church and withdrew (almost in that order!). In the end though it was the Carlists who held on to their conquests, despite a serious challenge from the retreating Anarchists.

Gaming Weekend - Day One

Last weekend Lenin visited for one of our regular weekends of gaming. We managed to get seven different games in over the three days along with a couple of board and card games.

I decided this time to provide a run down of the games in instalments. Here are the two we played on Saturday:

Arrow through Andalusia, 3 August 1936

Keen to get my Anglian 28mm Spanish Civil War figures onto the table, the first game was a scenario from the Iron Ivan book Atacar es Vencer!. Whilst the scenario was originally written for Disposable Heroes & Coffin for Seven Brothers I suitably adapted it to fit our favoured Two Hour Wargames' rules Nuts! and the figures I had available.

The Nationalist Column Asensio is on its way towards Madrid racing along the main highways until they encounter resistance, as they did here. They then dismounted elements of the 4th Bandera of the Spanish Foreign Legion, the 2nd Tabor of the Regulares of Tetuan and some local Guardia Civil and began an assault.

The Militia had built some barricades and were attempting to mount a stiff resistance despite their lack of almost any automatic weapons.

Initially the Nationalist advance was slow, with an attempted flanking manoeuvre by the Legion being blocked but eventually the lower Rep of the Militia began to show with more Hunker Down results and, with the volume of fire reduced the Nationalists were able to advance across the open ground to the barricades.

The attacks on the flanks were the first to go in followed by the centre and despite some valiant resistance by the Militia the Nationalists took the village.

The Patrol

Our next game was an opportunity to both trial the new Colonial Adventures rules, once again from Two Hour Wargames, and also to get some of Lenin's extensive Foundry/Copplestone Darkest Africa figures to the table.

The scenario was a simple two unit patrol by the Belgians across the table which triggered various random encounters with tribesmen as the patrol's advance proceeded.

The troops and terrain were rolled for randomly as outlined in the rules and we then proceeded with the trial game. We initially started with three possible enemy forces (PEFs) on separate areas of the board but as the game progressed one of these split a few times and we ended up with six PEFs. This combined with the other forces which can be triggered as you move across the table gave an interesting game. In the end the PEF at the far end of the table turned out to be the main enemy force which turned out to be a little more than we could handle resulting in a desperate last stand by Lenin's officer after both my entire force and his own troops had been killed to a man.

It later transpired that we hadn't been playing the final enemy mob quite correctly but in any event the rules gave us a fun game and will be making another appearance.

Colonial

Lenin has a frankly astonishing number of the Wargames Foundry and Copplestone Castings Darkest Africa figures - I wouldn't be surprised if it was all of them actually! Anyway, the ones he has managed to paint (and it's a surprisingly large number of them) don't see the table anywhere near often enough as they're very nice (as you can see). So we decided to kill two birds with one stone and try out the Antwerp Fusiliers' Afriboria rules with them.

Colonial

The rules are inspired by the Commands and Colors system but give a different type of game. We enjoyed it but there was rather too much of people being surprised by animals and eaten for our liking (not enough variety in the event cards!). It certainly has promise though.