In the July issue of the REVIEW, I described a battle, circa 1850, between the Brits and the natives. Cleo and Bob Liebl presented the affair at their home, and the encounter was in preparation for a presentation at HISTORICON. The battle described herein is essentially the same scenario, but it's Mod 4(?) of the rules, as Cleo and Bob are continually trying to achieve perfection in their set-up. The biggest change occurred after a visit to my house in which we all participated in a renaissance game. In my 25mm renaissance figure collection, I have several pennant bearers whose staffs I extended and on which I can slip 4 or 5 small beads. Depending upon the game, the beads can represent casualties, or orders, or ammunition... whatever is apropos for the rules in use. In the game I presented, each division commander (where a division was defined to be 4 to 5 units) was given a pennant bearer, and he diced for the beads he received. Each bead represented an order... by using up a bead, he could have a unit fire, or advance, or change formation, etc. In fact, by using an additional bead, he could have a unit fire twice in the fire phase. The bead-resupply chart was a restrictive one... beads were hard to come by, and a commander was apt to find himself with an immobile force if he performed too many fancy maneuvers with his units. Cleo and Bob liked the bead procedure, and incorporated it into their British colonial rules. Bob has no standard bearers, and he did me one better. He set out, for each command, what resembled an ice-pick set on end, on the shaft of which were slipped the order beads. I was in command of four native units, about 10 men each. Two of the units were 'fanatics', armed with scimitars only... the other two units had jezails, long range muskets which outranged those of the British. At the start of each bound, I received 4 beads for my units, and diced for additional beads. A toss of 6 on a 6-sided die produced 2 extra beads... a toss of 1 took one bead away. Turn 1 On Turn 1, I plucked a bead off my ice-pick, and on to the field moved one of my jezail-bearing units. Another bead, and one of the fanatic units, Eagle Scout #1, move on. Another bead and Eagle Scout #2 came on. And for the last bead, my jezails fired. I had used up my 4 beads, and still hadn't brought on the second jezail unit. As I mentioned in my previous article, these rules are afflicted with the PIQUET/CHAINMAIL syndrome... each type of unit uses a different type of die for fire and combat. Each man in my jezail unit tossed a 10-sided die. Four of my jezails took aim, tossed their dice at one target, and knocked him off. All firing is done by looking for a 6 or better, regardless of the type of die tossed. With their 10-sided dice, each jezail-man could therefore hit a target in the open with a 6,7,8,9,10. When they targeted a British unit in a house, there was a -2 modifier to the die toss, hence only a 8,9,10 would produce a hit. I should note that the regular British units were reinforced by a number of Ladies Auxiliary units. Cleo had, some time ago, purchased a quantity of 25mm Victorian ladies produced by OLD GLORY, and there were, I think, 4 of these womanly units on the table. All of the Ladies Auxiliary units used 6-sided dice, causing them to fire fairly ineffectively (only a 6 produced a hit). But I had other things to do besides looking at the ladies. My jezails had a range of 18 inches, outranging the British 12 inch range. Some 24 inches away was set up a British artillery battery, just out of jezail range. The gun in this battery was Ol' Betsy, and all the British crew had to do was to put some powder in the barrel, push in a big iron ball, and Ol' Betsy would automatically lock on the target, and WHOOM!, lots of men in the target unit would evaporate. At the 24 inch range, Ol' Betsy was firing shell, which had a 3-inch burst circle, and every one of my men (and there were many) within the magic circle dropped to the ground. By the end of the second turn, my jezails were no more. It was obvious to me that somehow, I had to take out Ol' Betsy, or my men would vanish without ever closing with the British. And so on Turn #3, I used 3 of my precious beads for fanatical Eagle Scout unit #1: the first was used for its normal 12 inch move, and the other two allowed it to charge an additional 16 inches, right up to the muzzle of Ol' Betsy. At the same time, I used a single bead on Eagle Scout #2, permitting it to charge 12 inches into Mrs. Orp's house, located right beside Ol' Betsy's battery. The crew of Ol' Betsy used a bead to fire canister at Eagle Scout #1. I think they tossed several 12-sided dice, and had a modifier of +1 for short range, so that they hit on 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. WHAMMO! It was hard to miss. Then the crew took 2 additional beads for a second shot... more WHAMMO! and Eagle Scout #1 was no more. The men of Eagle Scout #1 had given their lives for the Pasha. And while the men of Eagle Scout #1 were being eliminated, Eagle Scout #2 was engaging Mrs. Orp's Ladies Auxiliary of Upper Sussex, the 10 ladies of which she had gathered in her house. Mrs. Orp's house was a rather small bungalow... it had one door, and two windows, and my men entered each portal. My boys were paired off with the ladies inside... my men tossed their 10-sided dice, Mrs. Orp's ladies tossed their 6-sided dice, and the higher total won. In this first series of contacts, each of my men suffered a -2 on his die toss, since he was within the house, and it was hard to effectively swing his scimitar without catching it on Mrs. Orp's curtains. But curtains or no, Eagle Scout #2 came through. I remember asking the player that ran Mrs. Orp's Ladies Auxiliary if he'd simply order the unit to surrender and spare the ladies from the slaughter to come. A hard fellow... he refused, and the ladies fought to the last person. Mrs. Orp's house was mine... and I had won 50 victory points for the Pasha! Now it's Turn #4, and with a single bead, victorious Eagle Scout #2, without even pausing for breath, charges out of the Orp house and into the flank of the crew manning Ol' Betsy... the artillerists weren't permitted to get off a shot. And a good thing, too... for Eagle Scout #2 could have suffered the fate of its brother unit. At first, I thought that the gun crew was going to use a bead and retreat before the onslaught of Eagle Scout #2. No such luck. Instead, a bead was used to bring into the melee a support unit... Hatty's Ladies Auxiliary of Lower Sussex... a conglomeration of what Cleo termed 'ladies of the night', much tougher than Mrs. Orp's group. In contrast to the 6-sided dice used by Mrs. Orp's ladies, Hatty's girls used an 8-sided die (and a long hairpin). I should note that before a melee took place, the rules called for each participating unit to take a morale test. The unit tossed a couple of 12-sided dice, and the total determined if the unit would fall back, or hold, or whatever. What was most interesting here, was that in the morale test, the artillery crew and Hatty's girls and my own fanatical scimitar-men all tossed extremely high and all turned out to run berserk in the melee... all were deemed temporarily mad and insane... all had "+" modifiers to add to their combat dice. We had a huge bunch of screaming lunatics, male and female, in the melee. Very historically accurate. There were 10 men in Eagle Scout #2, there were 4 men in the artillery crew, there were about 8 women in Hatty's unit, and all mixed it up. I let someone else pair off the opposing figures... I took one look at the mass of engaged figures and decided to allow another party to determine who fought whom. Most of the combats were 1-on-1, but several were determined to be 2-on-1, and I couldn't puzzle out why. The artillerists used 10-sided dice, the same as my boys, but that didn't seem to save the gun crew. Someone would shout "Roll against the gun crew!" and I'd toss my 10-sided die and the crewman would roll his die and he would fall to the ground. Then someone would say "Roll against the lady!" and I'd toss my die, and the lady would toss her 8-sided die, and the poor lady fell to the ground. Hack! Slash! Smash! Many, many dice tosses... the eventual result was that Eagle Scout #2 was victorious again. They had captured Ol' Betsy for a total of another 25 victory points for the Pasha. Note that this article focused solely on the exploits of my command. I could care less what happened elsewhere on the field. I assume that other player's units fired on each other, engaged in melees, but who cares? At the end of Turn #5, we tallied the scores. The natives had lost many more men than the Brits, with each man killed representing a victory point. The higher total victory points, however, went to the natives because of the geographical objectives taken. Because of the size of the forces involved, it took quite a bit of time to get the game going. Cleo and Bob started their set-up routines, placing terrain boards on the table, at 7:00 PM, and we finally made our first move, Turn #1, at 8:45 PM. And, finally, I must comment on the casualty figures used... or, rather, the lack of casualty figures. When a man (or lady) was killed, the figure was tilted on its side, an abomination if there ever was one. Not even an elegant 'bead system' of order-giving can quite make up for all those figures lying on their sides. Back to PW Review August 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com