A Song of Heat and Sand

The British Command Decks

To follow up from the Dervisher command decks I derived the British command decks. I am in the process of creating the Egytian command deck as I appreciate that Baker should probably be considered as an Egyptian general. I’m also short the most obvious candidate;- Gordon.

There is one sheet for the base command deck, this will need to be printed twice for the required 14 cards. Then the other commanders need only be printed once to add their 6 cards to make the necessary deck of 20.

British base Command Deck – needs to be printed twice
Graham General Command Deck – print once
Stewart General Command Cards – print once

A Song of Heat and Sand

The Dervisher Command Decks

I took a first stab at the Dervisher Command Cards, so generated the general set along with a few specific commanders which tie to the Dervisher units I currently have available. As I manage to muster new units (or my friends raise new units to throw into the fray) I anticipate the cards evolving to accommodate them.

I’ve started with three generals as options, which should give enough variation for the early part of the war. Just print these off onto A4 paper – they should all scale to the same sized cards.

Base Dervisher command deck – just print off two copies to have 14 cards
Abdulla Ibn Ahmed General Command Cards – just print off once
Osman Digna General Command Cards – just print off once
The Mahdi General Command Cards – just print off once

A Song of Heat and Sand

The Sudan Intrigue Board

As the start of the Sudan ASOIAF project I created a variant to the politics board. Since the Sudan is hardly a hotbed of politics, the board needed to be revised and so became the ‘Intrigue Board‘. No doubt it will go through additional changes to further fit the theme.

A slight change to the icons, with a more appropriate background.

A Song of Sand and Heat

I’ve recently been playing the Game of Thrones miniatures game called “A Song of Ice and Fire” from CMON with various members of the Swindon And District War-games Club (strangely enough based in Swindon). It is an excellent fantasy miniatures war-game based around the George RR Martin A Song of Ice and Fire books (if you’re a fan of the TV series, then you’ll know what’s going on). I fell in love with the rules after a few games, it enthused me like no other rules system has done for a long time, and it’s currently my preferred set of fantasy war-games rules at the moment.

OK, so like most warmers I started to tinker. Not so much with the ASOIAF game, since I’m enjoying everything that game is currently throwing my way, but rather to see where else I can apply the mechanisms. To this end I looked at whether it would be a nice fit for my recent Sudan excursion. My figures have been deliberately based to support a variety of existing popular rule sets, including ‘The Sword and the Flame, ‘The Men Who Would be Kings’, and ‘Sharpe Practice’. To use the miniatures for these rules would simply mean creating unit movement trays to take the figures. To this end I discussed my ideas with the vary accommodating Simon and Sue at Blotz and in a very short order had bases suitable for my Dervisher infantry and cavalry, as well as more tailored bases for the regular Egyptian and British infantry.

You’ll have seen my progress in getting these units rebased and ready for the table in previous posts. For the Dervishers I’ve now managed to have 6 units of Beja tribesmen (the classic ‘Fuzzy Wuzzies’). as well as 2 units of Beja camel riders, and 2 units of Baggara cavalry. My Brits are somewhat smaller with only 6 units of infantry now complete. I’m in the progress of sorting out the Gardner and Gatling guns, then will need to order some more bases from Blotz for the guns. Next up will be rebasing more of the Brits, as well as organising the Mahdist Ansar infantry. At some point I’ll need to sort out things for British cavalry, along with the Egyptian infantry (and the Naval Brigade, the Indian troops, the Nile Arabs etc. and of course the steam ships…)

Well, back to the rules. I’ve managed to redo the rules for the Sudan, keeping many of the core mechanics, and introducing things which are key features of 19th century colonial wargames. I have a revised intrigue board, and even a series of different sets of generals cards for the two sides. I’m still working on the various unit stats so that I can get the forces to the table. I’ve had to change some of the core principles of the game though due to the asymmetric nature of the two principle protagonists; we have fast moving irregular troops who are primarily vicious close combat types fighting against formed regular troops who rely upon long range shooting to try and keep the enemy at bay. To this end I’ve introduced some longer ranges for shooting, going beyond the 6″ short and 12″ long in the original rules. I’ve also introduced some basic formations for the formed troops (line, march column, and of course square), as well as new unit types such as different river craft, with trains to eventually make their appearance for later period events.

Certain elements of the original rules aren’t really pertinent to the Sudan (or even historical games in general), so those aspects have been dropped. The game modes were dropped in favour of scenarios, but I have attempted to keep these non-specific to allow for the casual pick-up and play games. There are however some specific scenarios to cover some of the more pertinent battles in the campaigns.