Organised by Glenn and making use of Rudi's homemade fastplay rules "Brand op de Mason-Dixon Linie" (freely downloadable, in dutch, on the TSA in the Picture facebook page), 10 players prepared themselves to fight for their convictions.
For the South, command was divided against 6 misguided souls in the form of Vincent, Sam, Dave, Ian, Walfred and Eddy. Opposing them where the northern heroes who's naed will go down in history as Richard, Tomsche, Andre and Stefan.
I personally commanded my 5 regiment strong Irish Brigade as part of (our) right flank, and the objectives for the game where to score VP's mucho. A destroyed unit would yield 1 point, a fallen general 5 (and that last one would become very important in the end).
The battle began with the Southern cavalry under JEB Stuart deploying deep and opposing Richard, and it was here that the first fire was done. But one of the cavalry officers, Col Jenkins, had wandered to close and was shot from his horse, becoming the first commander (and in hindsight, only) to fall.
Slowly but surely, the centre of the line came together with their opponents, and battle was joined along this line as well as the North took position behind a fence. On the opposing side was my personal goal: the southern Irish regiment. I had declared it a personal goal at the beginning of the game that those blokes would be my prime target, and once I got in position I poured fire in them.
My most "direct" opponent, Dave, started pulling up all his regiments as my Irish regiments stacked behind each other to fill gaps in the line. Reynold's in the meantime started pulling his troops away from the frontline to reorganise and redeploy deeper, but this did put an awful lot of pressure on the front troops of myself and Richard due to being concentrated on, and we had to prserve what we could.
I did manage to shoot out the southern irish in the meantime, who routed from the field of battle... personal goal secured.
As a heavy firefight broke out in the center, first myself and a turn afterwards Dave, broke out from the light covers we had to close to a few inches from each other. Fire became lethal, and against all odds I only lost two more regiments defending the fence, while the first one that had moved up had been shot apart as well. In return, except the southern irish, he also lost two regiments, so this whole section of the battlefield held out without one or the other yielding a bonus of VP's to the other side with a 3 - 3 balance.
The battle ended around then, having played a dozen turns, and personally I was glad it did. The south would have broken through where I stood, at best I could have bought one, maximum two, more turns to hold them off and splitting our force in two as I was facing by this time 7 regiments with only my 1.5 intact remaining ones...
But it was a victory for the Union, and if you look at the score total of the day, you see why Jenkins became so important when he fell that early in the game...
A great and fun day for sure, and next time there is talks of expanding it to a whole weekend instead...
Side Events!
But the battle wasn't the only thing going on that day at the club. There also was a Bring and Sell where old figures could exchange hands and find new homes. I obtained "a few" items for my 40k collection, which you will see in my Haul Report the coming weekend, but it was a massive stack for very few euro's...
Arno ran a demo of BattleCry, to stay in the setting, to introduce people to the club, the game and the era.
And of course thanks to the lovely girls manning our kitchen and bar during the day, so that we didn't had to die of thirst on this rather hot, 30 degrees summer day...
And now, let's prepare for the next mega game on the agenda I'll be battling in, the Viking Invasion in october.
