10mm ACW AAR + Holiday snaps

Hi folks,

Nothing new painted so far, having been away from home for a week. I've hit a bit of a lull in my motivation again. I've decided I'm going to just focus on clearing my painting shelf of the stuff that's been sitting there all year...

This weekend I went to the Old Guard Wargames Club over in Northallerton and we played a largish game of 'Black Powder' using our 10mm ACW collection.

We played something of a meeting engagement, with the objective of catpuring the three junctions in the road which ran roughly along the middle of the table (closer to the Union side, but us Reb's started a bit further into the table).

The Rebs had 3 brigades, of which I had 2. The Union forces had two large brigades. We pulled a little strategic deception and myself and John swapped ends of the table. John's brigade was to defend and contest the junction in the village, while I was to go for the other two junctions and combat Stu's brigade. Martin was facing off against John. Both sides had a similar number of units, with the Union having a few more while we had a couple more guns.

The opening turns for the Rebs went poorly, with a large part of John's brigade blundering and falling back to the start line. My own brigades were slow to move forward, while opposite me Stu's union troops surged forward and secured the junction. One of Martin's units got into the woods to protect the middle junction.

Stu decided, in his usual aggressive style, to surge forward and try to catch my slowly deploying units before the rest of my force moved up. Unfortunately the fences and a poor order roll left his troops sitting on the road - the limit of his advance. In the mean time his cavalry unit sat on his baseline, having failed every attempt to order it forward.

Thankfully, my orders roll was good and the remains of my force surged forward. So began a close range slogging match. Stu drew first blood with my biggest unit running under artillery fire, but I had deployed to be able to get 3 units firing on one of his, while his front line masked the rest of his army. This gave me a tactical advantage, as I could deploy more firepower against his units. I also managed to get my cannon up to help out.

On my right, one of my guns and two units took on one of Martin's big units. It would eventually flee, leaving a massive gap in the Unions centre.

As the close range slogging match continued, the difference in cover began to tell. My troops in crops and light forests had better saves, while the union troops on the road had little cover. On Stu's left, I decided to make a move as his large unit had hit max stamina. I aimed to charge him on the flank (top of the picture above). My reasoning was that more than half my unit would hit his flank, but he correctly argued that the rules mean I had actually charged his front (I hate geometry in these games,  if a unit would fold round the side of a unit, why wouldn't it? The outflanking 2/3rds are hardly just going to stop). Anyway, I snapped a little bit, as it seemed a bit of an irrelevant argument at the time - I certainly would have accepted it as a flank attack.

I passed the order check and decided to commit my other two units, one of which was small to the same attack, forcing a split of the defensive fire. The Reb charge went in and wiped the unit out, forcing it's support back as well.

An even bigger gap was blown in the Union line, and my troops began to move forward into the space. John's troops had also moved up, fighting Martin's Brigade in the town itself. On my left I had moved out my uncommitted unit, flanking Stu's line and through weight of fire eventually removing the two units on the road. At that point we called it quits, accepting a Rebel victory.

An interesting game, which gave us an idea of how the game we will run at the Stockton show will go. The game also looked decent, which is important as well. The terrain was Dave D's, as were some of the figures.

Holiday wise, I spent the week in Scotland with Amy, celebrating our 2nd wedding anniversary. I got to visit the Scottish Museum of Flight at East Fortune - a really interesting site set in the 'technical' part of what was a WW1 airship/WW2 training and coastal command base. The buildings all have placards on them saying what they were, there are splinter proof bomb shelters scattered around and all three of the hangers are still present.

RAF Matador

Late mark Spitfire 

Rolls Royce Merlin engine

Bollingbroke/Blenheim

Meteor

Better view of the Spitfire

Parachute drying building - how cool would that table be for a wargame...

We also visited Saint Andrews on our one sunny day:

And other than that it rained, hard, constantly. I did get two WW2 prints of Spitfires attacking German bombers over the Scottish coast, and a couple of DnD books. I've also ordered a FoW Spitfire cos I fancied having one in invasion stripes for my Normandy games. I took models to assemble but didn't get them out of the bag, watching far too much 'Critical Roll' and working on stuff for the DnD game I've just started running.

Hopefully I'll have some painting to show off sometime soon!