Thrown Back Again.

Last week I had my second game with the American Civil War figures I prepared. In fact I ended up in overall command of the Union army on this occaision. My two suboordinates leading the attack on the Confederate held hill, whilst I brought forward the reserves.

The battle was a historical refight, but other than being very early in the war, the rest of the details escape me. The Union forces firstly delivered two fairly weak brigades against the Confederate right, with orders to concentrate only on that sector, in the hope of breaking it early. It didn't take much to draw the 'Rebs' out of their favourable position (walking towards them, as ever, was enough). We had high hopes of being able to turn their flank, but the rebel cavalry proved ridiculously effective on the day (in fact the Union won only a handful of the melees in the game, out of some 30+ played through). We were bounced back repeatedly and with reducing numbers our left became a case of damage control.

General Simmons lamentable dice rolling certainly didn't help, the fact that his men lasted the battle, given his propensity for rolling a '2' on a d10 over fifty percent of the time (a remarkable feat in other circumstances, I'm sure) was cold comfort for a brave but ill coordinated attack.

Early in the afternoon the reserve brigades began to arrive, we had parity of numbers now, and on our right outnumbered the poorly equipped Confederates. But they were able to out-gun us locally; concentrating battery fire in support of their infantry, by focussing on our strung out advance. On reflection it would have been wiser to spend a turn preparing a coordinated attack.

The worst shortcoming however was that where we finally had a cavalry superiority, we were still unable to beat the enemy. In fact after several rounds of jostling, the union Cavalry gave up the fight, allowing the Reb's to charge down our guns.

In the centre we were beginning to make way, but as night fell, the union morale seemed to break and the attack was called off; mostly withdrawn in good order.

In short the Union got pasted, whilst the Confederacy added to it's reputation as a superior fighting force.

Elsewhere there was the usual selection of 'Warhammer' games, but Pat and John from the Harrogate club made one of their occaisional visits too to play Blitzkrieg Commander; Here's a snap of John's Para's flanking the German lines...