Tag Archives: SAD Wargamers

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

For the Kingdom

A variant for Richard Borg’s Battle Cry covering the English Civil War, which will also be familiar to player of the Commands and Colors games and their variants.

The Swindon and District Wargames club was invited to run a game at the annual Devizes ‘Attack’ Wargames show. Given that Phil and I have fairly extensive English Civil Wars armies in 28mm we thought it would be a great opportunity to dust off the figures for a game.

I suggested that we keep the game simple, with the view to being able to run multiple games to conclusion on each day whilst being able to talk to anyone interested and perhaps getting them involved. There are a substantial number of rules readily available, but few really seemed suitable for these key criteria. I proposed to use a the Richard Borg mechanisms from Battle Cry and develop an informal variant for our English Civil War project.

To keep up the interest across the two days Phil suggested running the games as a series of linked battles in an ongoing campaign, and duly set to work creating a nice simple campaign system to generate the battles. Using the game’s banner board Phil created maps where forces were shown moving as battles were fought. The campaign system was elegant in its simplicity and allowed us to play over 12 games on the two days.

Dead Mans Hand – down at the Morden Corral

Phil and I get the old Western toys out after a long hiatus and had a go at Dead mans Hand using the Legend supplement lists.  It was an opportunity for Phil to use his US Cavalry whilst I wanted to get my new buildings and fencing on the table. My recently constructed 4Ground Undertakers, along with my beautify Blotz painted church and my just constructed snake fencing.

We managed to fill most of a 6 by 4 table with our buildings and wagons and it was a delight to behold.  We decided to play one of the campaign sets, and opted for the Quick and the Lead.  I took Pinkertons to give them a try and as mentioned Phil had the cavalry.

The first scenario was simply a duel which was meant to be done using t a Black Jack related theme.  Unfortunately Phil managed to get a modified 22 on the first roll of the game so killed my duelist without having an opportunity to respond. So we moved on rapidly to the second game.

this followed immediately from the first game with the two sides deploying around the town in pairs.  the victor would be the first person to take out two of the opposing side.  Our gangs were reduced in size, effectively omitting the main boss figure.  The game proved to be a good teaching exercise as I found that my dispersed pistol wielding Pinkertons were easy prey to the carbine armed cavalrymen.  It wasn’t helped by us not having the rules for the carbines so had treated them as rifles with the improved range.  That was little excuse though for my general poor performance as my men were slowly whittled down as I attempted to close into pistole range.

So with two games to Phil we entered the third game with a full 21 points of figures.  this time it was to be played to a gang breaking.  this time I played it more cagy.  I tried to keep most of my Pinkertons close together with limited rifle support from a couple of Nightwatchmen.  I was able to rapidly close onto elements of the dispersed Cavalry and gradually bring my local superiority with a pistol to bear.  Unfortunately we had to call the game to a close due to time (we were chatting far to much which isn’t really a bad thing).  this was a far closer game and I like to think that I was in a far better position than previously.  Well there is always another time, and perhaps next time we will be able to fight over the moustachery…

Useful Links

Dead mans Hand is available from Great Escape Games http://www.greatescapegames.co.uk/deadmanshand.html

Blotz can be found at http://blotz.co.uk

4Ground can be found at http://www.4ground.co.uk