Battle Report - American Civil War Game

One of my Christmas presents to myself was the set of American Civil War miniatures rules, They Couldn't Hit an Elephant, published by Too Fat Lardies. Like other TFL systems, these rules emphasize command and control and the friction of battle through command points for leaders and cards that activate units and leaders in a somewhat random manner.

For this game, my son John and I put my entire ACW collection of 25 to 28mm figures on the table. We used the TCHAE random leader generator for 1865, and managed to get a bunch of second rate leaders (John says his leaders were worse than mine). We had two brigades (five regiments total) and two 3 gun batteries each. Probably we had too many leaders (two brigadiers and one divisional commander) and were so spared some bad command and control headaches. We each took two real blinds and one dummy, though John chose to use his dummy blind to group his two batteries of rifled cannon together.

In our little battle, John was represented on the table by General Jebediah Smith, an Inexperienced commander, and his two subordinates, Brigadier Whitewall and another guy so forgettable that his name is already lost to history. My CinC was General Thaddeus P. Cornpone, a Cautious Inexperienced commander, General Lone Star, an Inexperienced commander, and General Stanley McWhiskers, a Professional commander.

John's Union forces enter the table under blinds. My confederate commanders would do a lousy job of spotting them.



John spots the Mississipi brigade of General Stanley McWhiskers (named in honour of our newest cat) advancing in column of march. Once a force on a blind is spotted, it must be deployed on the table.



The cards favour one of my brigades, the Texans under General "Lone" Star, who claims what will soon become a strategic hill.



John spots the Texan brigade and they are deployed on their hill. A Union blind is coming up fast against them - it is a dummy? I haven't been able to spot it yet.



The Texans prepare to hold. The figures are mostly Old Glory - the artillery commander and the chap on the horse in the background are Dixon figures.



John reveals his brigade from its blind and throws it into battle. The lead regiment are painted as the Union Iron Brigade and are a mix of Wargames Foundry and Old glory figures. The lovely flags are from GMB designs. John lead with the men of the Iron Brigade and supported them with the Irish of the 69th New York. Like many Civil War commanders new to the battlefield, John found it hard to coordinate his attacks. At this point John realized that not allocating his batteries to direct support of his infantry brigades was probably not a good idea. The hill advantage to the defending Texans certainly worked against John's bluebellies.



Union troops storming up the hill, braving showers of close range cannister from the Confederate battery (second rate smoothbores but still deadly at close range).



"Hold 'em, boys!" General Star anchors his two regiments of veteran Texans. He would lead a charmed life in this game.



In the centre of the table, John's massed Union battery comes of its blind and engages the skirmishers screening the advance of McWhisker's Mississipi brigade. the artillerists are Wargames Foundry - the Union infantry in the background are ancient Minifigs figures I started painting back during the first Gulf War. One of the rules we forgot was the ability of commanders to use their command pips to direct the fire of artillery more effectively. We both had commanders to spare and they might have made the artillery fire more effective.



John's other brigade, two regiments of average Union infantry, comes off its blind facing McWhisker's brigade. With his next card, John would adroitly move this brigade to completely flank McWhiskers.



On the hill, the Iron Brigade has been thrown back with heavy losses, interpenetrating and disordering the 69th NY which was supporting its attack. Lone Star seizes the moment to throw the supporting 4th Texas down the hill and into the Irish ranks. Isn't that little outhouse in the background the cutest thing? Another thing we forgot was the rule whereby victorious units have to test to see if they will pursue routing units. There were several charges and routs in the game where pursuits might have made a difference either way.



Meanwhile, disaster on my left flank. The Union brigade is lucky with its cards, and hits the leading two of McWhiskers' three regiments in their flank, routing them towards the Confederate centre. Those Yankees may be old Minifigs, but they're deadly in a flank attack.



John's luck runs out. The next card favours McWhiskers, who countercharges with his one intact regiment of Mississipians. They stop the Union brigade and throw it back towards its artillery.





On the right flank, John's Yankees are busy skeddadling. His general tries to rally them with cries of "Think of your mothers, boys, what would they say?" but to no avail. Lone Star drives the routing bluebellies off the board with his Texans. In these rules, once a unit falls below half strength, it's pretty much toast.



In the center, Genl. Cornpone was able to rally McWhiskers' routing regiments, while John had rallied his boys, and so a standoff developed on the left flank. However, the battered but victorious Texans were now threatening the Union batteries in the centre, forcing them to limber up and, says John, "strategically redeploy" rather than retreating. However, sadly for the Union, once limbered they were attractive targets for the Confederate gunners, and within minutes half the Union guns were knocked out. At this point, we called it a day. Jebediah Smith would withdraw and write a report to Abe Lincoln citing "unfortunate circumstances" as the reason for his delay in subduing the rebel forces and asking for immediate reinforcements. General Cornpone would send a report to Richmond simply saying "We whupped 'em good. Good fight. Too mussed up to chase 'em though".

Here the happy generals, clad in Dad's civil war reeneacting gear, pose for the newspapers.



Concluding thoughts - we both liked these rules. They were simple enough to be playable and they gave us a good game. We both felt some of the frustrations of the civil war battlefield. Even as I write this, new figures are being painted for the rematch. Will Jebediah Smith be able to turn the tables on Cornpone and drive him back to Richmond?

Work in Progress - 25mm ACW Rebel Infantry

These chaps have been kicking around my collection for several years. Started them, did a rubbish job, laid them down in disgust, moved twice, and now I've got a major jones on for the ACW again and I'm getting them finished ASAP. Most of them are Redoubt, which makes a yummy ACW line, and a few, the tall thin guys with the packs, are Old Glory. The Redoubt figures are in various skirmish postures. They'll look great behind the stone wall sections I have coming from Hovels in the UK, via the Michigan Toy Soldier store.

Personally I find painting rebs a pain. I can't just paint them grey. I've spent too many years in ACW reenacting to do that. There is too much variety in uniform, various shades of grey and brown (the famous butternut) plus some captured Union gear plus civilian shirts, blankets, hats, etc. It does slow down the job of painting, but the work is more interesting, I suppose.

You'll have to click on each photo to see the complete image.

Some Terrain Efforts

Some of the more recent things off my workbench.

First, an idea that's been kicking around my head for a while - a way to make cornfields for American Civil War 25mm collection. I drilled holes in a sheet of
1/4" pressboard, trimmed lenghts of artificial Christmas garland, and voila. Ms. Padre things they look more like they belong in a Vietnam jungle then they do at Antietam. She's probably right, but for now they serve a need and I'll probably make more of them:



In a different vein, I recently finished these these three plaster ruined buildings in 15mm scale for my WW2 collection, bought when I was at the Hotlead game convention in Stratford, Ontario, last year. I have no idea who the manufacturer is. I thought at the time they all looked suitable for my Normandy project, but on closer inspection, two look like they belong in Italy. No matter. I can use them too, somewhere. I just have to paint my Battlefront mid war British infantry company as Canadian 1 Division, buy some German paratroopers, a lot of armoured kit for them, and ... my God, someone shoot me.

The NW Europe style ruin:






And the two Italian jobs:

From my Workbench: Lord of the Rings and ACW figures

It's been three months since I've been able to sit at my workbench and and produce some painted miniatures. Finally a chance over the holidays, and here's the result. Most are from the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings line, designed by the Perry brothers (whose own lines of figures are worth a plug as well). Expensive figures in lead, relatively cheap in plastic, and gorgeous to paint.

This big fellow, the Isengard troll, was hired to bolster my Uruk-Hai army, which regularly gets demolished by my son John's dwarves. As usual, Blogspot is squashing the pics I post to the right, so click on each image to see the complete view.









Three veteran soldiers of Minas Tirith from the Osgiliath garrison, intended to be an anchor for my Minas Tirith army, waiting to be painted. I liked the patchwork and threadbare look of these old campaigners:





Shagrat, a dreaded and crafty captain of Mordor, He too has an army waiting to be painted to follow him into battle:





Finally, these two figures from the Redoubt American Civil War line - I painted them some years ago but never based them properly. They are part of my Irish Brigade project. General Thomas Francis Meagher, in his self-created green uniform:





The Irish Brigade's famous chaplain, Father Corby:





Corby and Meagher together;



Hopefully I'll get some pics of my troll squashing dwarves when my son and I drop the gloves next time!

From My Workbench - WW2 British Infantry swap for Rohan House

Thanks to the email listerv for the Too Fat Lardies Wargames group, I bumped into Stephan Milan, a chap in the UK who can't paint miniatures any more due to carpal tunnel syndrome, but who enjoys making model buildings and can apparently still wield a mean exacto knife. I like painting and I suck at scratchbuilding models, so it seemed like a beautiful friendship.

In July I received this lovely model of a house, copied after the Rohan halls and dwellings in the Lord of the Rings movies, and scaled at 28mm to go with my Games Workshop figures from their LOTR range. My son John pronounced it "way cool" and I was definitely impressed.

(Remember to click on the images for a larger view):







In return, Stephan sent me a platoon of AB Miniatures lovely 20mm World War Two metal figures with the very specific request to paint them up as members of the 1st Hampshires Regiment, a British battalion from the 50th (Northumberland) Division which landed on D-Day. Stephan also requested that they be painted in a greenish battledress (British serge wool battledress varied in colour).

I was quite nervous doing so many figures for someone else, but looking at Stephan's lovely house gave me my inspiration to bash on. It was a busy summer with a lot of chaos, but I got them done in early September and mailed them to Stephan, who was kind enough to say they looked good. Here they are.

Minions of the Molemen - A Rugged Adventure

My wargaming chums in SW Ontario (lads, it grieves me to leave ye!) love a subgenre of wargaming called "pulp". Pulp games are based on the comics and penny novels of the 1930s, the era of serialized movie adventures, Dick Tracy and Indiana Jones (back when Harrison Ford was young and the whole Indy thing was fresh) - robots, mad scientists, private eyes and Nazis, and creatures as imagined by H.P. Lovecraft are all part and parcel of pulp.

The game described here happened in late June 2008 at RiCon, a gathering of maniacs, old and new friends, in the basement of the ever-hospitable Rich (Rico Da Barbarian) Brayton and his lovely family. The inspiration for the scenario is from the twisted but beautiful minds of Lorenzo Gionet and James Manto. The writeup below is James Manto's brilliant pen and the captions for the game photos are by Lorenzo. The figures are from their collection and include figs by Ironwind, Steve Barber, Bob Murch, RAFM and Moonstone. Buildings are either scratch built or from model railroad scenics, and the vehicles are from toy stores and flea markets all over SW Ontario. God knows how many players there were - dozens? It was like a Jimmy Cagney/Jackie Chan movie directed by James Woods and produced by James Woo.

Cue the saxophone background music and shot of a dark, rainslicked city street, before a gravelly voice begins the narration:

It started out as a straight forward job. And that's the way I like them. Straight forward and money in the bank. But it wasn't. The client was rich enough to send his lawyer into my office like an errand boy in a $200 suit.
"You Mallory?" the suit asks.




I pushed the brim of my fedora up off my eyes but didn't take my feet off my desk. Manners only go so far. Besides standing up would just show off how rumpled my $10 suit was. "Yeah, that's what it says on the door; 'J. Mallory-Private Investigations'.

"Can you be discreet? I represent a very wealthy man who doesn't want his problems getting into the papers."

"I wouldn't be in business if I had a loose mouth, would I? Now why don't you tell me those problems and I'll see if I can help."

So he did. The Old Man had a tear away daughter named Ursula.



She'd fallen in with a bad crowd; those Nazis you read about in the papers with that funny little guy on the newsreels. And I ain't talkin' about Charlie Chaplin. Seems Ursula liked wearing tight black uniforms and she and her new friends were fixing to head back to the Fatherland for a big party. I needed to get her back so her father could put her into a very expensive and very strict convent school. More uniforms but without the parades and torch lights in Nuremburg.


So I'd been on her tail all week and found out they were planning a rendezvous in old man Barratt's scrap yard. I got in my brown coupe and headed down to the rough part of town. While waiting at a stop sign I noticed the gals pull up in a car behind me. They were all blond and dressed in smart black caps with silver badges. I pulled over and let them get ahead of me, looking into the glove box so they wouldn't see my face. They passed and I pulled out behind them.


As I rounded the corner onto Second, things got complicated real fast. Something as big as a building had erupted through the pavement at the intersection of Second and Elm.




Funny little guys who weren't Nazis were coming out and heading into Barton's Warehouse. Some bald guy in a white coat seemed to be giving directions. Later, I found out that he was Professor Calvera, a renegade scientist from some government big brain outfit.



He'd built the big tunneling machine and found these little guys underground to do his dirty work.

A couple of Black Marias howled down the street but it didn't look like the police budget went to driving lessons. The first van ran over a citizen and then the second rear-ended the first.





Capt. Goodenough, already starting to froth, jumped out of the second van and charged the stiff with a traffic violation.




His boys in blue ran down the street towards the weird machine and smack into an ambush. Big Tony had some gunsels on the roofs to give security for the mole creatures.




Three cops went down and Goodenough started screaming for help."Send lawyers, guns and money! I've got rampaging Bolsheviks down here!"


Some help showed up, but not for Goodenough. A big shadow blotted out the sun. I cranked down the window and looked up, it was a big zeppelin with a red swastika on the tail, low over the junkyard!. Ropes were hanging from the gondola and soldiers dropped down them into the scrap yard.






As if that weren't enough people at the party, a Hughes flying boat started circling and tiny figures with jets of fire jumped from the side door. The fighting scientists of the Rocket Corps had arrived to foil Calvera.




Two of the Rocketeers flew over to the zeppelin, boarding the gondola, while the rest landed on a rooftop beside Tony's men. They must have convinced them of their patriotic duty, 'cause the gangsters started shooting at the zeppelin guys.

(Note - I was playing the Rocket Men and my experience of these games is that the first few teams on the field end up getting shot to bits by every one else. I therefore thought that a big federal cheque would help Big Tony see his way to defending the US against the evil Molemen, and that worked pretty well as a way not to have to take on the gangsters. My idea to board the Nazi airship while the Zeppelin Truppen were busy below almost worked. MP)


During all the chaos, dock worker Shorty Muqhabele lead his gang of wharf rats into the warehouse to try and grab some barrels of whiskey.




This incurred the wrath of local Tong boss, Ya Wang. The Tong boiled out of the Chinese restaurant waving cleavers and chopsticks. Others appeared on a roof top brandishing a different kind of chopper.




Danny, the plucky street kid who only had one mother and every guy in the gang for a dad took one Tong down a shot from his slingshot but the resulting hail of tommy gun fire cut him and several other wharf rats down. A wild fist fight with knives, swords and crow bars developed behind the warehouse with Shorty's crew getting the worst of it.

Around the Molemen's machine another big fight had developed. I'm pretty sure there hadn't been a bigger fight since the Civil War, or maybe the Christmas sale at Macey's. Rocketeers were trading blows with Zeppelin Truppen and Molemen. Gangsters and Marines from the Naval Base were wading in too.




Stray bullets into the scrap yard had activated some of the old robots dumped there after they had rampaged through downtown last year.




The walking ash cans started battering everything in sight and carried off a couple of nuns. Ilsa and her She Wolves tried to ram through the crowd but wrecked their car on the rubble. They all got out and started fighting with everyone around.



I spotted the wayward offspring Ursula and jumped from my coupe. Drawing my pair of .45s I snapped off a couple of shots at the he-Nazis to keep them down while I dealt with the females of the species. I grabbed Ursula and slapped Ilsa.
"You've been a very bad girl."

When she tried to break free I slapped her too and dragged her back to the coupe.

A couple of carloads of G-Men rounded the corner, they'd also been tailing the Nazi spies.




Seeing me with Ursula in her Sunday Going to a Whipping getup, one of the Feds took a shot at me. He was so close I felt the unburned powder whistle past my ear. Fortunately he missed. With my free hand I slugged him in the nose and pulled out my license. That didn't help much as the dame and I got hustled into the back of a Federal sedan to be taken downtown for a long uncomfortable night in the basement of the Federal building.

We were sitting in the back of the car watching while the G-Men and Marines busted up the last of the She-Wolves and spies. The surviving Zeppelin Truppen were hauled back to their airship along with a captured robot. Big Tony's men started to fade. They tried stealing the Marine's truck but wrecked it backing down the street. A bunch got gunned down by the Marines in retaliation, and the rest grabbed an unguarded Black Maria and sped away.

Calvera and his molemen seemed to do OK. One of the Rocketeers had been knocked down and I saw him carried off by the Molemen. They also grabbed Ilsa in passing as she fell back from a gun butt to the head, and I think they even got a nun, but I didn't tell the G-Men any of this. Ma Mallory didn't raise any kids goofy enough to volunteer information to the feds!

Calvera's machine, loaded with loot from the warehouse and prisoners withdrew back into it's tunnel. More sirens roared by as Detective Sergeant Crueller





and some motorcycle cops finally arrived to reinforce Goodenough. The motor cops didn't stop soon enough and wrecked themselves on the hole made by the tunneling machine. Crueller spent the rest of the day rounding up stray robots with some help from the Marines. Crueller was happy though, Goodenough had made such a mess of things that his political career was finished. Duke O'Rourke, that up and coming new reporter for the Pottersville Expositor was there to catch all the dirt for the Monday edition.



The Old Man's lawyer showed up to get Daddy's Little Girl out of trouble and back into pleated skirts pretty quick. He got me out too, eventually, and gave me a big bonus for all my troubles. I could have kissed the stack of dead presidents if my lips weren't swollen.


The End (Until the next sequel - there are rumours that the Corps of Rocketmen are planning to mount a subterranean expedition to pursue Calvera and the Molemen. Meanwhile, Dr. Calvera has Ilsa the Nazi she-wolf in his custody - who knows what bizarre genetic experiments he might contrive to breed an army of Nazi Molemen. One thing is for sure, you can read about it in the Pottersville Expositor).