South Carolina Campaign - British Victory

The battle of Guilford Courthouse

The Crown forces prevailed in our 1780 South Carolina Campaign as it came to a conclusion at the end of Turn 12.

The British finished the campaign with 22 Victory Points (VP) to 13 VCs for the Americans (or rebels, depending on your point of view).

The campaign achieved its primary purpose, which was to generate battles for the American Revolutionary War in the Southern Theater of Operations. There were a total of 12 battles, both big and small. The British won 7 battles and the Americans won 5 battles. One common denominator was that British general Lord Cornwallis never lost a battle in four tries.

Here is a list of the victories, with the winner shown in parentheses. I have also included the links to the battle reports for the battles that I played. Some of the really small actions were done with dice instead of actually playing a game, so I did not include these engagements in my links.

BRITISH VICTORIES:

Cornwallis and Tarleton confer before the start of a battle.

Winnsboro (Cornwallis)  Battle of Winnsboro
McDowell  (Tarleton) Battle of McDowell - Part 1  Part 2
Georgetown (Maitland)
1st Cheraw (Cornwallis) 1st Battle of Cheraw
Hillsboro (Tarleton)
Kingston (Cornwallis) Battle of Kingston
2nd Cheraw  (Cornwallis) 2nd Cheraw at SYWA Convention 2019

BRITISH VICTORY POINTS (22)
Battles Won - 7 points
Captured Leaders - 2 (McDowell and Gates)
Prisoners - 8 regiments
Forts Held - 4 (Granby, Watson, Motte and Georgetown)
Occuppied towns - 3 (Charleston, Savannah, Cheraw )

BRITISH STRENGTH POINTS = 30SPS

AMERICAN VICTORIES:

While Nathaniel Greene did not participate in the campaign, this command vignette could have
been used for  Baron DeKalb, the principal American commander in the campaign.

Fisher's Crossing (DeKalb) Battle of Fisher's Crossing
Capture of Augusta (Sumter)
Siege of Ninety Six (DeKalb) Surrender of Ninety Six
Hobkirk's Hill (DeKalb)  Battle of Hobkirk's Hill
Westbury Plantation (Marion) Ambush at Westbury Plantation


AMERICAN VICTORY POINTS (13)
Battles won - 5
Captured Leader -1 (Cruger)
POWs - 3 regiments
Forts Held - 1 Ninety Six
Occuppied Towns - 3 (Augusta, Camden, and Winnsboro)

AMERICAN STRENGTH POINTS "SPS" = 20SPs

The victory points, as you might glean from the above charts:

1 point for control of each named town with map dot
1 point for each opponent's SPs captured or removed from the campaign from attrition
1 point for each captured leader
1 point for each fort controlled

To control a town, at least one Strength Point (SP) must be occupying the dot on the map. I suppose that either side could have made a sprint to occupy the most number of towns on the final turn, but they didn't do it so as to keep their armies consolidated.

Conclusions
I thought that the campaign mechanisms worked fairly well and I did not find many glitches or loop holes in the campaign rules. The major mistake that I made was not keeping track of SPs that were captured or removed from the game. I had to go back through the previous turns' blog reports to find the missing information.

I had a lot of fun with this campaign and I think that it helped that there were a finite number of game turns (12 turns, each representing a month of the year). It was fun to have battles created by the campaign, with the small battles of McDowell and Westbury Plantation being among my favorites. The battles also forced me to paint some additional regiments for both sides to meet the needs of the campaign.

The next step is to write down the campaign rules as a rough draft and then farm out the campaign to several play testers. After a little more play testing, my goal is to publish the campaign rules as a downloadable PDF. The PDF will feature maps, pictures from actual games, and some original artwork created by Chris Gregg