Siege of Troy - Dux Britanniarum & Too Fat Lardies "Sacker of Cities" 2017 Summer Special

For our first meeting since lockdown began, Chas took us back to a socially distanced Troy, circa 1250 BC. The scenario was set during the siege of Troy, with the battle outside the walls of the city, between the Achaens and the Trojans. This was a Homeric tale, rich in the heroes of the Iliad.

https://toofatlardies.co.uk/product/summer-special-2017/

The encounter was fought in 28mm to Dux Britanniarum rules, using the "Sacker of Cities" supplement for the Trojan era, found in the Too Fat Lardies Summer Special 2017.

Figures used were from Redoubt and Black Tree Designs.

We had two commanders on each side, led by their respective heroes. Chas took Paris and half the Trojan army and I had Hector and the other half. The Greeks were led by Achilles and his Myrmidons, whilst Ajax and his contingent, headed up the rest of the force.

The scenario was that a trophy of importance to the Gods had been lost at a ruined temple between Troy and the beach. Both sides set out to claim it.

Ajax and Paris seek a trophy

Before leaving to fight, both forces' heroes made proud boasts about what they would achieve that day. These boasts became part of the objectives of the game. Together with achievements
or disgraces in battle and retrieving the trophy, these affected the level of "kudos" gained by each hero.

Siege of Troy - Dux Britanniarum & Too Fat Lardies "Sacker of Cities" 2017 Summer Special Achilles swore he would kill more heroes than any man that day. Ajax that he would kill more men than any other hero. Paris that he would kill a hero with an arrow and Hector that he would slay Achilles.

With the stage set, Paris took the Trojan left and Hector the right. Achilles faced off against Hector and Ajax was opposite Paris.

Things started with some long range bow fire, to little effect. On the Trojan left, Paris sent some skirmishers and spearmen to contest the temple site, whilst exchanging bow fire with Ajax's forces.

On the Trojan right, Hector sent his bodyguard unit forward supported by spear armed units, whilst his skirmishers moved into rough terrain.

Hector and Achilles forces clash

Across the battlefield, both sides accumulated shock from missile fire, but the spear armed troops ground on and locked in combat.

The Trojan spear units were getting the worst of it, with several units falling back and a couple running off, but shock tokens were building up on the Greek units too.

Sighting Achilles in his chariot, Hector decided to try and break through the line and challenge him. Several battered Greek units broke under his attack and the way was clear to Achilles.

Meanwhile, Ajax was setting about the Trojan left and several units broke. Ajax's pile of kudos tokens grew accordingly. However, the situation in the temple area was more finely balanced.

Hector and Achilles charged into combat with each other and a desperate struggle developed. Both sides made the most of favours from the Gods and their heroic abilities.

Paris attempted to get some glory, firing his bow at Achilles, but he could not find his one vulnerable spot. 

Hector spies Achilles

Paris stabilised things somewhat on the left, but he was still under intense pressure from Ajax.

On the Trojan right, Achilles and Hector fought on in an epic battle, with Achilles eventually succumbing, adding to Hector's stack of kudos tokens.

Both sides retreated to their camps to lick their wounds. This was going to be a long and bloody siege.

The scribes on both sides wrote of their heroes' great deeds and severe losses. Another chapter was added to the Iliad.

A good game, well run by Chas, to an interesting variant of the Dux Britanniarum rules. I particularly liked the way the game emphasised the heroes and the fickle whims of the Gods, all through a card based mechanism.

Many thanks to Chas for running the game, as a practice for one of our offerings at "Clotted Lard 2021". The rules were easy to pick up, especially if you had ever played a Lardy game before.

Vince

Somewhere in Spain, Circa 1810 - Fistful of Lead, Bigger Battles

Battle of Cacabelos Bridge - Richard Simkin

Editors Note: Unfortunately with a new variant of COVID 19 affecting parts of the UK and finding its way into the south-west, now with the holiday season underway, together with time needed for second vaccinations to take full effect, several of the club's members, including myself were not able to attend this, the first club meeting since we were forced to close our doors back in March 2020.

However it gives me great pleasure to post Si B's report on the game he ran, one of three run at club yesterday, to formally record the Devon Wargames Group is back up and running in this, our club's fortieth anniversary year, and looking forward to being able to welcome not only club members but eventually new prospective members as well.

Napoleonics is a popular theme and the Peninsular War is a favourite of many, so we have a good game to kick-off our new start with.

JJ

So, for the first post Kung flu meeting, we tried ‘Fistful of Lead; Bigger Battles.’ It was our first game with the rules and the first outing of Si’s plastic Napoleonics.

Fistful of Lead Bigger-Battles Rulebook

The rules are deceptively simple. They are card driven, with players being dealt a card per unit to form a hand. The cards activate units, being played in sequence high to low but the players choose the unit to be activated. However several cards also give bonus actions such as Shock removal, quick reloads or stragglers returning to their units. This makes play much more interesting and also allows players to sequence their actions and prioritise according to a plan. Wild cards add a layer of unpredictability with cards being kept hidden until their turn.

We played a version of Scenario 4 from the rule book, although the attackers had a 2:1 advantage. This was mainly to allow for three players with manageable forces. The two French players, Steve and Steve (of course) had five units of Line infantry each, a field gun and a unit of Dragoons. The defending British initially had two units of Rifles, a field gun and a Line unit, reinforced by two cavalry units and three Line infantry units over subsequent turns.

The scenario requires the capture of the ridge with the defenders set up in place and the attackers entering the table from the nearest short edge.

The French on the right made a straight advance for the ridge, pausing to exchange musketry with the British rifles and the field gun. On the left they slowly moved around the woods which only gave space for a single unit to engage the second unit of British rifles. As a result, the rifles got the better of the

first exchange, easily repulsing the first French unit. However the following French units repulsed a cavalry charge and drove off the rifles.

In the centre and on the right the French numbers slowly asserted themselves, with Voltigeurs gaining the ridge and driving off the British gun crew. Having abandoned their gun, they’ll be wearing white lanyards for a while.

British cavalry on their left made a quick charge into a unit of French Dragoons, forcing them back, then into a French Line unit, seeing them off completely. However the French Dragoons rallied and against the odds put the British cavalry to flight having lost all but two of the unit.

The British rifles in the woods on the French right finally succumbed to overwhelming numbers, the last man eventually being forced out. By this time the British had been forced off the ridge all along the line and could only fire up at the French from the reverse slope. They didn’t have sufficient numbers to push the French off but both sides were seriously depleted, so we called it a French victory.

The rules gave a fast action packed game. We played about fifteen turns over four hours with eight British units and fifteen French between three players and an umpire. It only took a couple of turns to get the basics but the card play took perhaps an hour to grasp the full implications of some of the effects and combinations. 

Fistful of Lead is a great club game, easy to teach and good fun. There’s enough nuance and chrome for it to give a good impression of a Napoleonic skirmish and certainly a good alternative to some other similar rules. 

All in all, a good afternoon’s entertainment but particularly good to be rolling dice with friends again.

One thing I forgot to mention, figures are all toy soldier plastics, mostly Zvezda and Hat with some Italeri and Airfix.

Devon Wargames Group - Club to Reopen to Members Only June 2021

It is with great anticipation that Devon Wargames Group is looking forward to recommencing club activities, starting on June 12th 2021, initially to club members only.

Due to the restrictions placed on the club we will only be able to put on games for members who will be required to confirm their attendance and the game they wish to play which will be preorganised to ensure that there are no more than six players per game and that they are able to be spaced appropriately around tables under strict guidance that players from different games will not be mixing whilst in the building and that hand sanitising gel will be used when entering the building and after using the toilets.

It is hoped, based on national guidance plans that these restrictions will eventually be changed and the club will be able to return to our normal ways of planning and organising games together with a much more relaxed social interaction between players and game organisers, but until then it means we are unable to welcome new prospective members to the club or indeed current members turning up without prior notification and wanting to join in a game.

This is the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Devon Wargames Group and it is great news to see that the interruption in the club's activities in the past twelve months looks likely to be ending and we will soon be able to enjoy presenting and playing historical wargames and able to welcome new people into the club and hobby.

Any changes to this current situation will be notified here on the club blog.

The Battle of Willow’s Edge : 15mm ECW at Devon Wargames Group

 

Rules used: To Defy a King

Figures: Blue Moon, Mikes Models, Magister Militum , Minifigs and probably a couple more

Cloth : Tiny Wargames

Buildings: some Hovels, others too old for me to remember

Over the last twelve months I have been slowly building up a 15mm Royalist army to go with my already completed New Model and Scots armies and whilst I am still missing most of the cavalry I felt that there was enough available to run a game. With the use of Mr Land’s 8x5 home table I could do what we all like to do and that is to get the whole lot out and then play for a day.

Now as this was an ECW battle the course of the fight went like this; the infantry marched forwards, fired at each other for a while and then meleed for the rest of the day, meanwhile out on the flanks the cavalry fought each other until one side was victorious, chased away their opponents and then turned in on the infantry. Right that’s the AAR done so this report will be more picture heavy than normal with a few comments on the rules used and if they worked for such a big battle.

Although the above is a bit stereotypical, it was what I wanted to try and achieve, I don’t want to see musketeers machine gunning down their opponents and the infantry should slug it out for most of the day. Also with the cavalry I want to try and get a situation where there are waves or lines of conflict, the possibility should exist where one side might break quickly but mainly I wanted a to see a bit of too and fro until one side gets the upper hand.

Perhaps you need the bigger type of battle to achieve this as you will have the extra figures available but then again with smaller forces you should still be able to achieve something similar but more quickly due to the lack of reserves.

To Defy a King is one of those rule sets that never caught on and has disappeared into the wargames cupboard along with so many others that we buy, I still use them for ECW as I like many aspects of the rules especially the army creation section. The rules are written mainly for around 10-12 units per side sprinkled with a bit of period flavour but I didn’t see any reason why it couldn’t be used for 40 units a-side with a bit of pruning.

So out went giving orders to brigades and then sending messengers to change them which does normally work quite well and I also decided not to bother with any unit specifics like Ironsides or Brave etc, I just kept in the three quality levels and the different troop types. 

Beforehand I had made up some small chits to help identify the various quality levels and I distributed equal quantities of each type to both sides sufficient for their forces, I did however give the Scots/New Model a couple more Raw chits in their mix as they had more units and to reflect the Scots lower quality and the Royalists had two more Veterans in their set. Then they randomly drew a chit and placed it against a unit. After that was completed I allowed both sides to swap any three chits around amongst their armies.

These rules I find give me the period flavour I am looking for by how it handles combat. Melee and shooting work the same so I will roll it all into one explanation; you fight or fire per stand and need to score 8 on two dice with a few pluses or minuses. Using pairs of differently coloured dice really helps so that you can then throw them all in one go, the number of hits thus obtained is your chance of inflicting a stand casualty so you are not likely to inflict more than one at a time, the number of hits achieved must then be converted into a kill, 6 hits will remove a stand so anything under or over that will then need a single dice throw equal or under to the number of remaining hits in order to convert. 

Quite frequently the players only managed to get one or two hits needing them therefore to throw a one or a two to take off a stand. For example at the start of the game I allowed a three turn artillery bombardment, both sides had six or seven guns with each gun having two shots per model, the total number of hits I think was five and then only two kills were achieved, sounds like a terrible game.

In fact they loved it, casualties amongst the infantry did slowly accumulate over the battle and fresh units had to be fed into the fight, in comparison cavalry losses on the other hand were a lot heavier. The players decided after a while to stop trying to shoot the enemy away and instead get down to push of pike all along the line.

In melee along with the occasional stand removal you will also be pushed back a number of inches equal to the difference in the damage caused (not kills) and you can only go back so many total inches before breaking or routing (infantry and cavalry do different things), this distance will depend on your quality level. See it more like losing the will to continue fighting rather than unit losses if the lack of dead bodies worries you. The players would see a unit on its final inch just win the next round and regain some ground as the fighting flowed backwards and forwards.

The cavalry units being smaller were more prone to being destroyed but also had less possibilities to cause casualties due to their lack of stands, getting that one or two kill possibility conversion was important but I noticed that the push and pull of the melees was attracting their attention far more than taking off a stand of figures as it was key to their winning or losing.

Returning from lunch we found that we had acquired an additional player.

 Don’t try and move me, I am full of Mouseketeers

In the end I think I achieved more or less what I wanted, I had a game that the players enjoyed and with the right period flavour to my way of thinking.

For the record the Royalist right wing cavalry struggled to break through in what was a large swirling cavalry melee but definitely had the upper hand with some of the back line Parliamentarian infantry having to be moved out to help block the pending break through. On the left where there were smaller forces, the Parliamentarians had broken the majority of the Royalists facing them and were heading back towards the centre.

Here the infantry battle was going the way of the Royalists who despite their lack of numbers had pushed the Parliamentarian/Scottish line back to the bottom of the hill.

Of course this is not an evening type of game but no game this size would be and I will definitely play the smaller version using the army generator again, maybe with all or some of the rules in play or maybe not.

Now that the Royalist cavalry is almost up to strength and I have made some nice little holders for the chits to sit in, I wonder if it would work with fifty units per side.

This has been a Mr Steve production.

Clotted Lard 2020

 

With normal club activity suspended during the pandemic it was not unsurprising but hugely disappointing that the decision to cancel this year's holding of Clotted Lard was made, with, in this that would have been our third holding of the event we had twelve games scheduled together with about 60 attendees.

With the previous two shows the monies raised by our Lardy gathering was passed on to Combat Stress the veterans mental health charity and it was with great pleasure that despite the cancellation, the club was, thanks to the support of those intending to attend, able to pass on the money committed to the charity, which the club rounded up with an additional donation to bring the total raised to £400.

A copy of the letter from Robert Marsh, Director of Fundraising at Combat Stress acknowledging receipt of the monies is shown below and once again thank you to everyone involved in enabling the good work of Clotted Lard to continue in spite of a global pandemic and not being able to enjoy our normal day of wargaming with the Too Fat Lardies.

Normally with our Clotted Lard post I would have hoped to bring visitors to out club blog lots of eye-candy to outline the fun day of gaming and thought we should try to compensate in some way and so I have included some pictures of various projects club members have been focused on during the current restrictions and that get posted to our internal club IO Group forum.

This sample of pictures shows that although club life publicly is in stasis, work continues in the club to develop our joint collections which will enable us to create yet more fun on the table-top when things return to normal.

 

As well as additions to the Wars of the Roses/Medieval collections we also have examples of work in later periods including WWI/RCW 15mm figures as well as other collections spanning various historical periods and genres, that all point to the continuation of our hobby life away from club, but very much in anticipation of being able to get back together and enjoy the company and banter that is wargaming and what we enjoy doing.

It looks like restrictions on our communal way of life are likely to continue for the foreseeable, but I think these pictures help illustrate that the Devon Wargames Group is just hibernating through this period and will come back with yet more great games to enjoy and with an eye very much on hoping we might be able to play with our new collections at another Clotted Lard in September 2021.