The Men Who Would Be Kings Game Prep:
On Friday (tomorrow), I will host my first game of Dan Mersey’s The
Men Who Would Be Kings. Fittingly
enough (in my opinion, anyway!) the game will be set somewhere in the vicinity
of Afghanistan. The scenario will be a
three-way match based on the ‘Get Off My Land’ scenario. The British will be invading to prevent the
Russians from stealing a march on them. The Russians will be invading to
pre-empt any attempts by the British Raj to expand its sphere of
influence. And the Afghans will be
supremely annoyed at the presumption of any foreigners to intrude on their
homeland!
The three Field Forces (as TMWWBK armies are called) are
based off the nominal lists provided by Dan in the rulebook. I’ve modified them a bit based on my own
ideas of how the troops should behave, and also based on my available figures!
The British will have three regular infantry units and one
field gun. My variations to the base list are:
- Highlanders will be rated fierce for +1 point
- Sikhs will have obsolete rifles (Snider-Enfield) for -1 point
- Gurkhas will have obsolete rifles for -1 point and will be rated Gurkhas (surprise!) for +1 point
The Indian army notoriously kept Indian soldiers with rifles
(and other weapon systems) at least one generation behind the weapons issued to
British troops. So, the Highlanders have
brand new Martini-Henry rifles and the Sikhs and Gurkhas have older
Snider-Enfields.
The Russians will have three regular infantry units, one regular
cavalry unit and one field gun.
- Russian infantry have obsolete rifles (-1) instead of being poor shots (-1) - just change one penalty for another!
- My cavalry are Cossacks rather than Russian regular cavalry because I have Cossack models and I don't have . I’m rating them as regulars because it makes the points work out, but if pushed I will argue that these Cossacks are in long-term service, and have drilled as needed to be considered regulars. They lose 2” of movement compared to irregulars but have a better melee value.
In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, the Russian Army figured
out that their Berdan rifles were being outperformed by the Winchesters that
the Ottoman Army used. This initiated a process that would eventually lead to
the famous Moisin-Nagant rifle of 1891.
As we are in 1880-ish, the Russians will still have the obsolete Berdan
rifles, so I decided that obsolete rifles
is easier to justify than trying to figure out if Russian infantry were demonstrably
worse shots than soldiers in other armies.
Russian soldiers throughout history have generally had a reputation to
be good, solid troops but notoriously lacking in initiative. On this basis I accept the unenthusiastic rating as leaderless
Russian infantry will not be likely to act decisively. Because TMWWBK uses leadership for activation
as well as for morale, this means they will be more likely to break, which
would be contrary to their reputation for endurance, but I’m not about to muck
about with introducing different tests morale and activation.
The Pathans will have three irregular infantry, one tribal
cavalry and two tribal infantry. There
should be two tribal cavalry if I wanted to duplicate Dan’s proposed Pathan
list, but I don’t have enough cavalry for that.
Instead, I’ve taken the points for the extra cavalry to give each of the
irregular infantry units fieldcraft. I think the Pathans need fieldcraft to match
their reputation for using terrain, especially to ambush unsuspecting redcoats! Note that tribal infantry automatically have this skill.
- Pathan irregular infantry have fieldcraft. +1 point per unit
No comments:
Post a Comment