And again I have always wanted to do something like this. It was inspired by Sand Pebbles, The Wind and the Lion and other great movies that had some cool evacuation scenes. And of course my good friend Sgt. Guinness who over a year or so put on The Wind and the Lion at a convention which got me thinking. Thanks.
So some notes on the rules around Regular units or just Regulars. In the rules the Free Actions, meaning you don't have to roll against your Leadership value to perform are firing and Standing to. We did this in the first game and although they had a great 5+ to perform that movement using 2d6 we must have had over 6 or 7 non movements throughout the first battle. We also only completed 8 of 12 turns and the Dervish just swarmed them and blocked their escape path to the awaiting gunboat. The same for the rescue forces coming from the boat. We had a number of stalls. So with all that said we gave Regulars Move as an additional free action. They are running for their lives right? So in the second battle it worked out great.
And yes I made the Egyptians Regulars in this second revolt. But only the Egyptians had to roll on the random leadership tables. That was interesting and added some very reluctant and very eager Egyptians to fight next to.
The mission was to evacuate the Governor General and his staff from the Government House to the Cairo. His staff has a British unit as an escort (Grenadiers in battle 1 and Highlanders in battle 2). The rescue force has three commands. Each having either a Naval, Grenadier or Royal Marine unit with an attached Egyptian unit.
The order or movement was borrowed from Western Gunfight rules. Each leader is dealt a playing card and highest card goes first, etc. Jokers were wild and did not shuffle the deck each turn. We just ran through the deck and it worked out well.
Other conventions is that the rules state that you can only fire at one unit and any units in a melee, everybody fights. Well, how many Colonial Street fights do we see in our games? So in this scenario, a unit can split their fire if in Open Order and if a unit is charged with half of your guys outside then only those poor souls fight the attackers.
Same for firing. You can only fire and target what you can see. So if three guys are sticking their heads out coming around a corner and you are firing 8 guys then you can only kill the ones you can see. When defending a narrow door, similar to the close order melee rules, you can only fight two wide and two deep. So if you have a unit defending or blocking a door, then the fight will be 4 vs 4, so not everybody fights. We figured that you may be several soldiers holding your ground in a narrow doorway or alley and a mass of warriors is trying to push their way in. We had this happen a couple of times and it worked out great.
Also in the rules if you take a casualty you roll for Leader hit. And if you lost the melee you rolled again for your pin. After a while we started just to roll once if you lost. If you rolled double 1's your leader is killed and you probably get a pin. Anything else your leader is okay and you fall back and you may or may not get a pin based on your leadership with that one roll. Did that make sense?
Dervish Insertion Rules
So I borrowed this from Mr. Carpenter's Ambush alley. I placed ten (10) Hot Spots on the board. I also created a Dervish insertion schedule for each turn. The Dervish are able to place their units on any spot that is not in sight of the infidels and is still active. Active meaning that if an infidel comes into contact with an insertion point it is removed. This is not to say that there is anything to kill there but think of it as a Dervish gathering point and it was broken up by just their presence there or they locked up a door etc. So there is a tactic both sides have to take into consideration, one how do we get the Governor out and two how do the Dervish intercept and kill him. Sounds easy? hahahaha (evil Mad Guru laugh).
So the two battle worked out great. Each battle in the future will fight out differently and there are some tactics that I want to try as the British that I will not give away here.
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Thanks again to all my friends and colleagues that helped out. I will blog about the building of the town next time. For now its pack this all up and get my boatyard up and running again. Our Colorado Military Historian (CMH) Club's Vet Wars is in two weeks here in Denver, Colorado. Should be a good one. Hope you like the annotated pictures of both of these battles.
Last Stand Dan
Please forgive all my typos.
