Securing the Road - ACW BatRep

Yesterday evening at TSA I joined in for the first time in the homemade rules by Rudi, to fast play the American Civil War.

Now, with this being my favorite historical period, I was totally pumped up and in character for this of course ;-)

The rules are home made, and revolve around basic regiments of 4 figure elements ranging between 4 to 6 elements per regiment.  The game is written to be fast play, easy to access (I picked up the whole mechanics in about 1 turn of play) and is about 5 pages long, so great for a game on friday night.

Both sides had identical forces for this game, containing of 6 infantry regiments of 16 soldiers each, a cavalry regiment and an artillery battery.  Walfred and Sam took command of the south, while Axel and myself commanded the Union (Tomsche's personal wargame rule #3: under no circumstance ever will I play the Confederacy).  Axel grabbed the cavalry unit, I commanded the artillery (remember my defensive play style article).

The scenario was a straightforward engage and destroy, with a road running through the center of the table.  I commanded our right win, with the cannons deployed on the road itself in order to blast away at any infantry moving up it.

Our infantry started moving forward to put up the defensive line as the Confederacy moved forward en masse.

Union cavalry is going for a move over the far left flank, where they will dismount and engage the confederate infantry in ranged fire.

The confederate cavalry in the meantime streamed over the hills across my line.

My lines deploy and engage the opposing infantry regiments.  Both our sides (mine and Sam) would become champions in passing hopeless morale tests (scoring like 3s and 4s on rolls of 1d10 + 1d6) during the battle, causing the units to be reduced to small straggler forces of 5 to 7 men strong and such in time.

My Cannons in the meantime engaged in an artillery duel with the opposing battery.  rolling 4 sixes to hit in a row, they blasted the confederate batteries to smithereens and then be able to rule the battlefield.  Needless to say, the turn they had free reign they missed everything...

The confederate cavalry sweeps further wide, preparing itself to charge one of my smaller regiments in the flank... so I screened my back by deploying my third regiment in line.

On the other flank, Axel was pushing the Confederate line slowly backwards, slow and steadily securing that flank of the table.

I failed to mangle the cavalry enough though, and they passed their casualty tests, charging into the regiment.  While they mangled the unit causing 6 casualties on it, in retaliation they also lost 4 of their number.  This caused both units to botch their test and become broken...

That`s where the game ended, but it was a Union victory.  Axel`s flank was secured, and while mine had some small units left unbroken on both sides, I still had a totally fresh regiment moving up, and the threat of the cannon battery which could massacre and cause morale tests on the opponent at a rate of a test for each shot...  or even have enough firepower to annihilate the small surviving units on the tableside.

It`s a good and easy ruleset, and I had a blast playing.  Though next time, I`ll bring along my own corps I guess x-D