Gaming ACW - Pea Ridge

 Our normal last Sunday of the month meet up saw myself and Roy playing the small battle of Pea Ridge with Roy’s first outing taking a side command . He chose to be the Reb commander .

 

The Rebs start top right and get a division of reinforcements top left . The Union are all in the bottom area all around Sugar creek apart from one division in front of Reb force on the right . 

 

I was taking the Union and had everything set to march up the road to reinforce the lead division and try and pin the advancing Missouri Guard in position. The Rebs had been hard marching and would be weakened in strength and not able to shake off fatigue . 

The Missouri Guard bear down on Carr’s division , but being tired made it difficult for them  to prevail 

 

The Reb reinforcement division turned up and chased off  my division . I got lucky rolling high against Roy’s cavalry - which should have won l but I got away with it . 

Roy did really well  rallying the Rebs when I had whacked then - and kept me working for it 

 

Another good AOF game .

Terrain - Orchard, Fences and Lutheran Seminary. ACW

 The paining mojo is having  a holiday , so I am working on  bits of terrain . We are going to put on a 10mm Gettysburg later in the year - hopefully at The Other Partizan . We have most of the troops already but it’s needs some terrain work so that is this weeks focus .

I found myself in a model shop at York last week and found a supply of small trees by Gauge Master   and I picked them up to make into the Peach Orchard . This is on an A5 MDF sheet with some added Blotz picket fence. I have added magnets to the tree bases so they can be moved around to get troops in . 

 

I had picked up 120cm worth of stone and rail fencing from TBM along with a 6mm Lutheran Seminary.

This will give around 6 meters of fencing , enough for most games now I think . 

 

The footprint of the building is about the size of sabots we are currently using so it’s decent size even at 6mm . It’s an iconic building for the battle 

I have taken delivery of other 6mm buildings for Gettysburg made by Leven . So they may be next weeks project .

Gaming - Chancellorsville using AOF

 This weekends game saw us back to ACW with a play out of Chancellorsville . The May 1863 battle sees an outnumbered Lee and Jackson springing an outflanking manoeuvre on Hookers  Union army in the heavily wooded Wilderness area around the small settlement of Chancellorsville. 

We had the use of two tables pushed together at the Pendraken miniatures shop. So 8x6 . All our kit is Pendraken. We used all 5 boxes of my trees and some from IanW who wasn’t playing today 

 

We were using Altar of Freedom rules again once more . The generally poorly led Union Corps are in the middle with the Rebs pincer about to bite. However the Union heavily outnumber the Rebs , have terrain on their side and 6 turns to survive before nighttime, then a 2nd day of 6 turns before news of the Confederate retreat from Fredericksburg would see Lee quit the field regardless of the result  . Roy and I were Union. Stig and Bren Jackson , and Martin playing Lee. The Rebs had to kill 12 Union units by an end of any turn to get a major victory 

Turn one the Union forces  are caught by surprise and cannot move any of their divisions - though can do generals and individual brigades using saved command points in the turn end phase. As we couldn’t use our command points for division movement we spent the max we could on owning the turn clock . This would allow us to try and run the 12 point turn clock down early within each whole turn . This became our strategy for the first 3 turns. Not moving divisions  , owning the turn timing and then filling in holes etc with individual brigade movements in the end phase. It also turned out Stig had brought his poor dice day along and Jackson’s troops were just not carving through the poor opposition at the start . From there we decided to use Sickles Corp to arrack Lee and some manoeuvring of Howard , Couch and Slocum to shore up Howard’s under pressure Corps

Jackson’s flank march 

 

I was rolling well , and despite Howard losing infantry brigades and artillery I was able to rally them at the Corp HQ area with the +2 for corps and army commander helping . This meant the Reb victory was as far away as ever by turn 4 . In addition Sickles attack has killed 2 Reb units - which had failed to rally . If the Rebs lost 9 then the Union get a full victory .

Couch;s brigades advance to,slow Jackson 

A division from Slocums Corps sits in road reserve able to move upto 20 inches  

Jackson’s troops pressure the outnumbered Howard’s 

Sickles attack moves forward 

A battery of Sickles artillery on the road in front of Chancellorsville. Lee didn’t threaten them 

Lee’s troops behind cover - in this case we used fences to represent some hasty earthworks / defences 

By the last twilight turn after Stigs dice continued to let him down the Rebs had decided to not play on into the 6 turns of day 2 , especially as a further Union Corps under Reynolds was arriving . 

This was a tough game for the Rebs - they just weren’t generating enough violence to kill units quick enough - then we were rallying the ones they did , so they would have to do it again, I think the choice of entry point for Jackson made life more difficult as it lost a turn from the game and resulted in a traffic jam on the road. The Union turn strategy did work and with some good dice it was even better . 

Historically the bloodiest fighting was in the second day , and that is what brought a historic Reb victory . However the guys wanted to call it - it ended as a straight draw , so we will take that as a victory !

Playing at Pendraken HQ was great as usual , with the crew helping out with tea , coffee , snacks etc - and you always find stuff to buy! 

Next ACW will be a smaller one I think .

Terrain - Quarry

 I needed to knock up a quarry terrain piece for the D Day game . I based it on a piece if A5 MDF and built up 4 layers of 10mm XPS to the shape I wanted - I little bit of carving with a knife and the job was done. The usual PVA and sand mix to texture . 

 

It only took an evening to build and another to paint up so pleased with it . I think I will do a larger version based on an A4 sheet at some point 

Gaming - D Day Gold Beach

 With the long holiday weekend we took the opportunity to set up a full days gaming down at Pendraken HQ in the games room . We took over the full thing , giving us a 6 x 16 table to play with . As it’s the 80th anniversary years of D Day we are going to be doing a few invasion games . This time we chose Good Beach , King Green sector with 6th Green Howard’s attacking inland towards Crepon. This also covers the site of the actions of CSM Stan Hollis VC . 

A bulk of the terrain stuff is mine with all the miniatures being from JamesM’s collection . 

  

Ready for the storm

 

Table represents approx a mile wide by 2.5 deep

The first of the swimming DD’s arrive - only one squadron
 was launched like this by the guys 

 

A Coy 6th Green Howard’s arrive - tasked to take WN35 on the beach front.

The defenders get ready 

AVRE breaching teams are in the fray .

    

LCT with more 4/7th DG arrive

WN35 is broken into 

German artillery hits the beach 

The mines still take out AVRE’s 

 

 

The assault moves on the battery at Mont Fleury 

 

By close of play - the objectives have been achieved 

It was a fun game with 7 of us playing - and we also had a number of visitors popping by to look too .

There should be another D Day game next month .