1885 North West Rebellion

 Last weekend, Doug invited Arthur and me over for an 1885 Northwest Rebellion game between Canadian Government forces and a combined army of Métis and Cree riflemen.  Arthur and I took the Government forces while Doug took the Métis and Cree.  The rules for the scenario were Dan Mersey's The Men Who Would Be Kings, with special rules added by Doug.  The main element added was that successful hits add pins to the receiving unit, but each hit only has a one in six chance of causing a casualty. In addition, Métis and Cree had limited ammunition - Doug knew how many shots each of his groups could fire, but the Government forces could only guess based on the amount of fire they were receiving. All figures from Doug's collection.

The North West Mounted Police, who were deployed as mounted infantry. 

Louis Riel, whom the Government forces are trying to apprehend.

Canadian column, with York and Simcoe Battalion, supply wagons and the Gatling Gun and limber.  You can find some photos of the York and Simcoes in 1885, including images of them in their 'home service helmets', at this website: https://greysimcoeforesters.wordpress.com/2016/04/13/york-simcoe-battalion-1885/

Métis sharpshooters open up on the approaching column.

The Gatling gun slowly deploys.  The Gatling was great fun - it took forever to get it in place, by which time it was no longer needed!  Once, I managed to deploy it, only to find it was out of range, so I needed to limber up and move again on the following turn.

Cree warriors fire on the advancing Queen's Own Rifles on the other end of the front.

Undeterred, the QOR continue their advance...

And engage the Cree in close combat.

The way forces were set up, the Government forces were poor shots but had better close combat skills and, importantly, number (generally twice as many men in the Government units as in each warrior group), so there was an incentive to push forward to contact rather than get caught in a firefight.

At the other end of the battlefield, the Yorks and Simcoes capture the Métis rifle pits.

Finally, despite setbacks as many of the Government forces were suppressed by fire from the Métis and Cree, the Mounties apprehend Riel!  This was a great redemption for the Queen's Cowboys as they had fled early in the game but rallied and came back to capture Riel.

Women's Battalion of Death

 As I noted in my recent post for my WWI Russian Army, the force includes a few members of Maria Bochkareva's Women's Battalion of Death, from Siberia Miniatures.   The figures however are big, beefy soldiers, who tower over the regular soldiers. While I want a full platoon of the Battalion of Death, I decided that the majority of the woman soldiers should be closer in size to their male counterparts.  However I love that at least a few of the women soldiers satisfy the stereotype of the big, strong Russian peasant woman!

Fortunately, Wargames Atlantic's digital shop includes STL files for 3D printing the Women's Battalion of Death (WBD from now on).  Now, I don't have a 3D printer, and the WGA shop has a pretty strict licence attached to STL files that it sells, so I decided to purchase printed models from WGA's partner, Only Games.  Naturally, I couldn't purchase just the WBD figures, so I boosted the order with some Viking shieldmaidens, French female resistance fighters and Queen Zenobia of Palymira.  When my order arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I received 9 French partisans, instead of the 5 I was expecting, and 5 Zenobias instead of 2.  Look to see these all painted up in a future blog post. Today the attention belongs to the WBD!

The 20 figures came loose in a bag.  OnlyGames did a good job of stripping the supports, which I imagine was quite a lot of work. I still needed to do some minor cleanup but what was left for me was quite minor, not much different from metal or plastics.

The figures are well proportioned, no exaggerated boobage.  In fact, as long as figures clothed, women soldiers don't really look much different from men in 28mm!  One thing that did stand out for me was that the women's heads all came with hair nicely pulled back into a tidy bun.  However, the recruits into the WDB all got the standard Russian army head shave, as can be seen in photos of the WDB soldiers.  

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Ruk_genskii_battalion_1917.jpg/473px-Ruk_genskii_battalion_1917.jpg?20131018092953

My solution was to cut off the buns.  It was too much to completely shave the heads, besides the hair would gradually grow back as the soldiers completed training before moving to the front.

The women took some assembling, about the same as with multi-part plastic figures.  Plastic cement is no good but CA glue worked well.  They are mounted to 1/4" washers, same as the WGA Russian men.

And here they are painted to match their male counterparts.

Here are a couple done up as officers, including the only one that was allowed to keep her hair in a bun!

These three are intended to serve as NCOs, probably as Yefreiters (section leaders, equivalent to corporals).

A firing line!

Here is a comparison with WGA on the left and Siberia Miniatures on the right.

And another comparison, WGA WBD, WGA man and Siberia Miniatures WBD.  The WGA woman's proportions are not extreme, and match well with the male soldier.  Of course both are shrimps compared to the Siberian WBD!

I've now got 25 members of the WBD plus Maria 'Yashka' Bochkareva herself!  I have a scenario ready to go, but of course it calls for 31 WBD figures :P  So I will still need to make up some numbers with men, but as they match closely I don't think it will be obvious as long as I screen for beards and moustaches!

Through the Mud and Blood - Patrol

 Lisa came by last night for the second of the four scenarios following Maria Bochkareva's experiences in the Russian Army of the First World War.  The scenario was a night-time scenario featuring an encounter between a German and a Russian patrol.

The two patrols were nearly identical, each with three squads and an officer.  In the scenario as written, the Russian forces seemed to have a bit of a disadvantage, as the Russians were rated 'green' and only had two corporals for three squads, compared to the Germans rating of 'regular' with a corporal (gefreiter) for each squad.  All forces started off on blinds, and there were two dummy blinds for each side to add to the fog of war.

Blinds are able to move and attempt to spot other blinds.  Blinds can move faster than deployed troops (typically three dice instead of two for deployed troops).  With the penalties for spotting in the dark, the blinds ended up getting quite close to each other before being spotted and being forced to deploy.  Note the poker chips visible to the right of the Russian blinds - we used these instead of cards for activation.  Chips worked well, but an improvement for next game will likely be to customise them a bit further.

Here you can see some of the troops deploying after their blinds were spotted.  Germans into the ruined house and Russians ready to contact them.

Russians charged the Germans in the house...

and then they were repelled with excess shock.  However, they managed to grab the German gefreiter as a prisoner of war!  This success was offset by leaving behind one of their own privates with the Germans.

Germans in the house held their position and their prisoner as the other Russian squads poured fire on them.

The German leutnant brought more troops to support the troops in the building.

The rest of the battle saw firefights back and forth between the two patrols.  The Germans were gradually being worn down, so they voluntarily withdrew with their prisoner.  Both sides claimed victory as each had a prisoner.

Swan Knights of Dol Amroth

 Assembling the forces for our attempt at Gondorian Infamy last weekend, I found that the Roman Auxiliary Cavalry list called for two groups of 6 cavalry, but my Middle-earth collection only had 5 knights of Gondor, plus Aragorn and Boromir on horses.  As a quick solution, 6 light horse will conscripted from my El Cid-era Spanish force.  However, pride dictated that I needed another 6 horsemen specific to Middle-earth's kingdoms of Men.  

Arthur and I took a trip to Imperial Hobbies, where we found they had knights of Gondor in stock, CAD$55 for 6.  However, they also had Fireforge mounted sergeants, CAD$44 for 12. Parsimoniousness beat out brand loyalty, and I quickly assembled 6 caparisoned horses along with suitable riders.  I didn't really like the head options that came with the sergeants, so I found a few replacements in the Russian foot box.  Then I slapped on a quick paint job to set these riders up as the famous Swan Knights of Dol Amroth, who were among the soldiers mustered to protect Minas Tirith during the War of the Ring.

 

Infamy, Infamy in Gondor - village raid

 A couple of weeks ago, Doug and I had a chat about different types of rules, specifically rules where players need to learn specifics about how the rules work in order to get the most of them, as opposed to rules that are more intuitive.  These intuitive rules can be overly simple, and as a result they can sometimes be less effective at representing finer details. Inspired by this conversation, I pulled out Infamy, Infamy from Too Fat Lardies.

TFL's idea in writing I,I was not to present rules for big battles, but instead to recreate the challenges of a Roman centurion or barbarian chieftain in detail, with decisions about when to hurl pila, or how best to inspire the warriors to charge.  To mix things up a bit, I decided to change the setting from the frontier of the Roman empire to Middle-earth, and represent soldiers of Gondor moving to challenge an orc raid into their territory.

Arthur and I went through the pregame setup from the I,I rulebook.  We chose a village raid by the orcs, set somewhere in 'civilised territory'.  The random terrain generation process gave a few hills in quadrants 6 and 3 plus a smaller hill in quadrant 1, a marsh in 3, a big forest across 4 and 5, and a small settlement in quadrant 4.

The Gondorian forces used the Roman Cohors Equitata list, with two groups of cavalry led by a Status II leader (Boromir)

Plus three groups of foot soldiers led by Status III Boromir, supported by Status II Faramir, and a group of archers with a supernumary leader.

The orcs used the standard German barbarian list, with a level III warlord with supporting Level II leader commanding 10 elite warriors and 20 regular warriors, plus a level II chieftain with 20 warriors, plus a group of archers.

The two main warbands moved into the open ground.

The cavalry and archers went for a flanking move through the settlement and around the forest.

The main Gondorian force formed up in close order.

Cavalry continued their flanking move.

We had a back and forth battle between the two main forces, lots of effort for the orcs to build up fervour and spend signa cards on aggressive attack, while the Gondorians used their signa cards to hurl javelins and brace shields.  There's lots of stuff to keep track of, and the number of available attack dice (and defence dice too) must be recalculated each turn as fervour drops, conditions like 'braced' and aggressive are removed, shock and casualties come into play.   Unfortunately, no matter how many factors are considered, it still ends up being a buckets of dice resolution, and a slow one due to the need to revise the dice count each time.

Anyway, here is a shot of the cavalry lining up a charge against the secondary German force.

The main battle gradually petered out, with Boromir and Faramir still alive (Sean Bean's character going against type and surviving the battle, however!).  Buckets of dice visible in the middle of the table, though! 

Meanwhile, the cavalry got beat up by the second German force.  It was at this time we decided to call it.  Gondorian morale was down to three, the forces were badly reduced, and while they could have inflicted some more harm on the orcs, a Gondor victory was probably going to be out of reach.

We had a quick after-game discussion.  Arthur, Craig and Doug were all in agreement that the game is not very satisfying, so I don't think I will convince them to try again.  At least the lembas bread was popular.