Two Wargames

       This week I had time for two wargames. The goal was to try out new rules. One was to try my Chessboard Campaign; the other Bob Cordery's "Portable Wargames", with a change to one of the rules.

    The "Chessboard Campaign" didn't work out as planned. Usually using the Horse & Musket 2.0 rules, most of the action takes place in the center of the board. I used my house rules to fight an ancients battle between Turks and Arabs. The Arabs succeeded in pushing the Turks to their back line before the Turks lost 50% of their army. Using my proposed campaign rules, the Turks would have no room to maneuver in the next game. Any army in such a situation would probably retreat to fight another day.  So it's back to the drawing board for the Chessboard Campaign, although I do have another idea for my chessboard.

    I decided to try to take another look at Bob Cordery's Portable Wargames. In his rules, one rolls to see if their unit hits the opponents unit. If they score a hit, they then roll for the results.  I just roll two dice; one for hits, the other for results if they score a hit. I also changed the rule where if certain pips comes up, the unit can choose to either loss one strength point, or retreat one square. For my game, the unit retreats, unless it can't retreat. At that point they lose the SP. A nice simple fix to having built in automatic retreats.   I then made a mistake that affected the trail run. I chose the armies and scenarios based on Neil Thomas' One Hour Wargame. The armies were fine, however, the scenario chosen was #3, which was a river crossing where the goal is to seize two bridges. This led to a game where the armies were bottlenecked into two areas, and the game bogged down. That, along with me referring to the rulebook constantly, slowed the game to a crawl. I should have just used an open terrain field to learn the basics of the rules.

The Turks are on the left, the Arabs on the right.

The figures on the white horses on the baselines were the "Headquarters" that the other side must capture.

The Turks have dropped below 50%, ending the battle. 

In my proposed campaign rules, the Turks would deploy on the squares behind the blue  chalk line.  As can be seen , there is no room for the Turks to really do any maneuvering.  Back to the drawing board! 

Portable Wargame. British army on the top; Boers on the bottom. This game gave me a chance to use my newly acquired Peter Laing Victorian Parade figures.

Both armies advances.

Artillery fire pushes one Boer unit back. At first I rolled for initiative, then realized that I forgot that artillery fire is supposed to take place before movement. Also, this was a solo game. However, I didn't use the solo rules that are mentioned in Portable Wargames.  I really wanted to get a feel for the rules. Both sides got to move all units each turn.

As can be seen from the above photos, the games was a back and forth game. For me the game bogged down.  I think the game would have been more enjoyable with an open field to allow more maneuver, at least until I get the rules down pat. Of course, I only read the rules once (I try to read them three times before playing) proving that even simple rules aren't so simple!

Thoughts on a "Chessboard Campaign"

Besides shipping  another 6 pounds of  figures out and having a quick wargame,  little has been done with the hobby, until last night.

I woke up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I get the strangest thoughts when I wake like this.  I started thinking of a "Chessboard Campaign". For this campaign I would use simple rules such as  Chris Salander's Horse & Musket 2.0 rules. With his rules there is a headquarters on the base line of each side; the goal being capturing the HQ. In most of my games, one side is usually destroyed before it comes to that.  My thought is to have the first side to lose 50% of their forces forced to retreat one square backwards; that would end the day. Next day both sides would be back to full strength, and the battle would start anew where the battle line ended the day before.  First side to capture the HQ would win the game. Of course, I have started thinking  of variants on these rules, such as each side would only get a percentage of their forces back every game. Also, the possibility of having several villages on each side, which would be goals for each

side to capture.

This being Memorial Day weekend, I'm hoping to get a game or two in using the campaign idea.

One of the readers to receive some of the plastic toy soldiers sent me this picture of some of them in action.  It 's good to see them in action again.