Battle of Ginnis (TSATF) - Hurricon 2018

Here is the Battle of Ginnis AAR that I hosted at Hurricon a week ago.  All of the TSATF events at the con were sold out so we always plan for some extra spots where we can.  This battle ended up with a scheduled 7 but made room for two more for a total of 9.  It was a blast!  So I will explain a few things and then you can browse through the AAR pictures.

This scenario was taken out of the Colonial Campaigns booklet by Tim Tilson.  I made a few changes to some of the suggested rules and tweaked the OOB a little as you will see.

The campaign series uses the optional TSATF small units. I increased the unit sizes from the scenario to 12 man British/Egyptian and 16 man Dervish. We also used one of my models for the gunboat Lotus where we added a main gun on the bow.  Historically, they would have used Gatlings or Nordenfeldts only.  To even that out I gave the Dervish a hidden gun in the palm grove along the river.

Unfortunately I didn't get a lot of pictures of the Lotus in action so let me provide a quick briefing.  Capt. Sikes, commander of the Lotus offered Gatling and 75mm support to the Fort Garrision and 2nd Brigade.  As it was moving along the shore taking its shots, a Dervish gun opened up from the shoreline.  After taking some damage from that gun, he made some slight changes to his course to bring both his bow gun and port side gatling to bear and eventually knocking out the gun.  I wanted to note this separately because we did use the Gunboat & Dhow! rules and procedures for damage and movement which worked out well.

The battle was well fought by both sides.  After my play tests a week before, I thought the British and Egyptians would walk all over the dervish.  But thanks to slow British movement on the Left flank and very aggressive dervish players it made it a very different battle.  The overall mission for the British were to take the Black Rock Hill, each building and camp.  Each of those gave the British a point.  The dervish got a point for every unit they destroyed or reduced to half.

As the dervish racked up VPs on the left flank destroying British units, Lucas, Jones and Sikes took Kosheh and the Black Rock hill to even it all up.  Of course we ran out of time but there was not much either side could do at that point.

Thanks to all of the players that made the game enjoyable for all.  It was good seeing all of my Florida brothers-in-arms.

Last Stand Dan

Scenario
The battle of Ginnis was fought on 30 December 1885 at 0610 hrs in the morning.  The British and Egyptian forces surprised the Dervish when two brigades and a gunboat were sent to relieve the Fort.  This was a historic British/Egyptian victory where they defeated and ran out the dervish forces from the villages of Kosheh and Ginnis along with a dervish camp along the shore.  Anyway, that is what was supposed to happen...