Another Mutiny Game

 I had the chance to play another Indian Mutiny game on Tuesday night at Oldmeldrum Wargames club. The Osprey blue books make for good off the cuff games and as my stuff was still sitting out of storage it was easy to put on a game. 

This time the defenders were the Mutineers and it looked like the British, were poised to roll them over from the very beginning. 

However Dave was able to get his men into cover and turn to face his attackers and it was then that both sides realised they had the same weapons and were facing soldiers as well trained as each other. Sending in the HEIC Europeans, whilst the Loyal Sepoys worked round the flank, Ross faced off a charge from some Badmashes and took casualties which whittled down his men.

Dave then launched his cavalry hoping to break the British line. Two charges were needed, but the aim was achieved and one of the European units was sent scurrying to the rear. However the cavalry were now themselves vulnerable and were charged by a unit of Loyal Horse and Ross was able to restore the situation. 

Ross's Sepoys seemed reluctant to advance against their former colleagues failing several activation dice and, now in musket range, the Europeans were suffering badly as their shots were unable to tell against the   Rebels. Taking another volley they were down to the last man. 

Whilst waiting for the loyal sepoys to come up, Ross had put his CO in with his cavalry and now sent them in against the Mutineers. It didn't go well and they were forced back, but worse still the officer was down and his force was now without a senior officer. 

By now both the Mutineers and the British had lost two units, the latter all of it's European men. The Mutineers were in good cover and I'm good order though slightly weaker than the Loyal Sepoys facing them as such they could probably hold their own and so with the darkness of the end of the game falling we decided to call it there and allow them to slip away into the night....

We really enjoyed this game, a more complex battle than initial deployments and points suggested it would be. TMWWBK has a way of not letting you get your own way and out games have always been fun. 

We don't have individual unit commanders as we tend to play with two or three aside and so allow for one officer with traits per player. To compensate we allow 7 to activate units. Another house rule is that a pinned unit can retire without having to make a rally check, if it has a clear path. This allows units to get back out of range and recover without always being whittled down on the spot. Of course if the unit is within range it can still be shot or attacked so it's no guarantee of safety! We also brought in the blunders table from Rebels and Patriots....because we miss it and with less characters on the table it's good to have those random factors without the hassle of remembering who has the best moustache or is the generals nephew! 

Guadalcanal for Bolt Action

We've been fans of Bolt Action for a while at the local club. It's a nice simple set of rules which means it's easy to play a pick up game. You need to be a little organised with your force and know what you have and how much points this is worth for a balanced game, but it doesn't take much to chuck some scenery on the table and crack on. 

Sometimes however you want a little more detail and depth. And so it was that we picked Guadalcanal as the setting for a series of linked game using our newly acquired Japanese and US Marines. 

The Bolt Action source book "Empires in Flames" has an excellent level of introductory background detail for the whole of the war in Asia and some great scenarios. A few weeks back we played Alligator creek and the Japanese managed to sneak a squad across the river on the last turn to secure a marginal victory. Next time I will deploy my Marines on the river bank!!

Last nights game was a follow up action - The Raid on Tasimboko. After Alligator Creek the marines  sent a force by destroyer to raid a Japanese encampment and supply base. Initial reports suggested that large number of troops were deployed there but the marine CO chose to ignore this. Despite landing and passing signs of large numbers of enemy in the area the village was only lightly defended by a rearguard force. These guys still managed to hold up the raiders until they were flanked and gave them a scare by opening up with a 75mm howitzer over open sights. However the marines carried the day and secured some vital intelligence info which served them well later in the campaign.

Our game featured a scaled down version of the attack. In stead of the company level action we took down to a squad level game with two waves of two Marine raider squads attacking two Japanese squads. The Japanese defender had a number of support weapons but a limited number of personnel - crew for the weapons had to be told off from his rifle squads and counted as inexperienced when using the guns and MMG. This gave the defence a disorganised feel but didn't cripple the Japanese player. The whole board was open jungle except for a strip down the table edge representing the beach and coast area.

The marines moved up from the jungle in two waves, one to the front and the second arriving on turn 4 from the flank. Their rifle and BAR  fire managed to keep the defenders back and pinned down while they advanced. The marines were also able to call in support fire which whilst it did not kill any defenders made them duck back with several pin markers. The Japanese 75 opened up as did the MMG  and caused some light casualties which were swiftly attended to by the marine medic. 

The critical part of the game came when the crew of the Japanese 75 were driven off by a poor morale test and the marines were able to concentrate on knocking out the MMG. With that threat gone the closed to short range on both the front and flank. 

It didn't go all their own way however - a last gasp banzai charge by the defenders took out a marine squad, but by this time the rest of the defenders were dead and three marine squads were at the edge of the village. The game was over.

A fairly close result to the historical battle, even with the scaled back size of the game! 

Christmas Game - Mollwitz

There's been a lot of discussion on the A Military Gentleman forum about the battle of Mollwitz, Frederick's first battle and the opening gambit of the wars between Prussia and Austria over Silesia. How to represent the armies and whether there was snow or not and if so how best to model this on the table top have been debated with various ideas being suggested. When the topic of a Christmas game came up at my local club it wasn't too difficult for me to find something to put on!

The Battle 

Mollwitz was fought on an April afternoon in 1741 in what is now Poland. Spring you might think, however the topic of snow is mentioned in one source who claims it was up to 2 feet deep! Living in Scotland snow is not unknown in April, indeed we had a flurry in May last year. But I wanted to look into this further. 

The winter of 1740/41 was particularly harsh and cold. Temperatures as low as -12 were recorded indoors. Across Europe people shivered and suffered and a frost fair took place on the Thames that year. In Ireland the bad weather made crops fail and caused a famine which took the lives of more than those killed by the more famous potato famine. Even today that part of Poland does have a 15% chance of heavy snow in April - how much greater would that have been during the period known as the little ice age in the conditions described above? 

Weather conditions appear to have been poor at best and warranted the use of my winter cloth and snowy pines. I also knocked up some frozen streams from white craft foam and snow flock.

The Prussian and Austrian armies had become separated and the former found itself one cold morning a few miles to the rear of its opponent. Frederick decided to give battle and the army advanced and began to deploy, hoping to surprise it's enemy. Surprise was indeed caused with the Austrian army being forced to redeploy hastily to meet this threat to its rear. However it was given time to do so because the Prussians had formed up so far off and we're moving very slowly forward. 

Had Frederick, not quite the tactician he would become in later years, deployed to soon in order to maintain a neat and geometric formation?  Was the wintery conditions a factor - causing the Prussians to be slowed by the snow ? Who knows now but the Austrians were able to reform and prepare for battle, albeit with their normal order reversed. 

It became apparent as the Prussians advanced that they had left their right flank in the air and appeared to be anchoring their formation on the banks of a stream. They had bunched up and some of the units of their first line had been forced into the interval between this and the second line. This was to have an unexpected benefit as the day wore on. 

By early afternoon the armies were close enough to for action to commence. On the Austrian left it had been noted that the Prussian flank was exposed and a heavy cavalry assault was launched in this wing by Ganeral Romer. The Austrian cavalry proved by far the better of the two sides and its better lead, more numerous troops sent the Prussians crashing to the ground or fleeing in defeat. Despite having infantry deployed with the cavalry, the Prussians were unable to prevent their loss and the right flank of their army was left open and exposed to being rolled up. The Prussian general Schwerin, the most experienced man in the field, reccommended that Frederick left their field as things began to look bad and he did so taking no further part in the battle. 

All was not lost however, the grenadiers deployed in the interval between the two lines and other elements of the Prussian infantry turned to face the threat and in the absence of leadership from their command, the unfortunate and late General Schulenberg who had been slain by a cannon ball, fell back in their training and sent volley after crashing volley into the Austian horse, stabilising the situation and allowing the army to continue to advance into range of the Austrian Infantry. 

These fellows didn't have the drill and discipline of their counterparts and still used wooden ramrod straight and a deeper, less effective firing formation. The Prussian musket volleys poured into them and their regiments began to crumble, with one source seeing them crowding round their flags in deep masses. 

Light began to fade and this saved the Austrian army, allowing it to withdraw. However it just have seemed a godsend to the Prussians too that they had driven off their foe despite their cavalry's ineffective performance.

 

This was the only major action fought between Prussia and Austria for over a year and Frederick used that time to drill and retain, applying the lessons learned from Mollwitz. The Austrians were still engaged against France and Bavaria and so didn't have time to learn or apply any lessons. The next encounter would be a very different battle.

The Game 

I used a 6x4 foot cloth for the battlefield. The terrain was very flat and featureless so a cloth was perfect for this. The material was a synthetic felt bought from John Lewis and did a good job of representing snow. Trees were winter pines from Lemax,  a small copse appears in front of the Prussians as they advanced. As noted above I used craft foam for the frozen stream. This worked well but did curl a bit as the game went on. I will need to look at that.

The Order of Battle and deployment was based on the excellent entry on the battle on the Obscure Battles Blog (http://obscurebattles.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/mollwitz-1741.html). I took the units listed there and working out the average frontage for horse and foot based on some other information I have. My 4x 40mm units represent 2 battalions of infantry so this gave me a ground scale which I was able to us for the game. Forming up the Prussians from the stream left with their flank in the air, just as in the battle, all was set. We didn't quite have enough figures, so there some stand ins were called up, but almost all the infantry were the correct nationality. Lastly I halved all movement and ranges, this being the effect of the snow and to allow the Austrians time to pounce. This worked perfectly and the battle very much followed a historical line. 

The Austrian cavalry chewed up the Prussian right, but the infantry turned and closed off the formation, giving the front line enough time to close and begin firing into the Austrian infantry, who began to suffer.   Despite repeated charges the Austrian cavalry commander could not break down the Prussian lines and despite some decent shooting, the outnumbered Austrian infantry were forced to withdraw. 

The result was an excellent refight of the battle with the 7 players, 4 Prussian and 3 Austrians, having to cope with much the same issues as their counterparts did.