Little Wars - Day One

 

So this year's Little Wars convention is over and I have to say that it was one of my best game judging experiences that I have had in over 30 years of running games at conventions. The HMGS-Midwest staff, led by Kevin Cabai, were great and they helped make the running of three games run smoothly. Game judges were also given a goodie bag of candy, chips and homemade brownies to tide them over whilst running their game. That sugar jolt of energy was a good thing.

I ran three games: Thursday evening, Friday morning, and Saturday morning and I was honored to receive the Duke Siefried award for Best Game at the convention. More importantly though, all of my games were sold out with 12 players per game, which really made me happy. I extend my thanks to everyone who played in the games, fine fellows all, as well as the many folks who came up to me just to talk about the terrain and figures and how I put everything together. I also reconnected with a number of gamers that I hadn't seen in quite awhile and phone numbers and email addresses were exchanged, leading to more wargames in the future.

Old Fritz (on the right) recieving the Duke Siefried award.
He's looking a little bit "alt" rather than "jung".

DAY ONE

I packed up my wife's Volvo SUV the day before so there was no panic or hustle and bustle to get my gear packed. When we ran several play tests of the game at Kieth L.'s house it had taken me two trips to haul everything to his house. I was going to rent a larger vehicle to get everything to Lisle, but the car rental company wanted $200 per day, or $1,000 for the whole long weekend. Yikes! So I turned to Plan B:

Mrs. Fritz loaned me her Volvo SUV

I looked at all of my packing containers and saw that they were a melange of different sizes and shapes that would inefficiently fill and overflow the available storage space in the vehicle. So then, drawing on an idea from the Gribauval System of French artillery, I decided to only use stackable plastic containers of the same size. This was more efficient because it reduced the amount of "dead air" space in the various containers. The next step was to purchase a couple of the large containers at The Container Store (the smaller containers were stackable on top of these as well. Finally, I put all of the empty plastic containers in the SUV and worked out an optimal arrangement of the various boxes. I decided that if something couldn't fit into all of these boxes then it wasn't going to go to Little Wars. The extra storage in the roof pod was also a necessity.

I arrived at the venue for Little Wars (Sheraton Hotel - Lisle, IL) around 2PM and found that the hotel staff were still setting up the game tables in the main gaming room. I was the first person in the room to set up my game and it was a good thing too because I had three 4ft by 24ft tables and I needed the tables to be 6ft wide. So I did a little refiguring of the tables and the hotel staff brought in three extra tables so that I ended up with two 6ft by 24ft tables and one 5ft by 24ft table (as a staging area for the Dervish troops, so it didn't need to be 6ft wide.

The game hall prior to setting up all of the table.

All of my terrain and figure boxes on one table.

It took me about three hours to set up my terrain and place all of the figures on the various tables. It was getting a little tight on the time because my game was scheduled to start at 6PM. Fortunately I finished the set up with 30 minutes to spare. Phew!

A view of my tables showing the aisles in between each table.
This allowed access to the inside of the city of Khartoum, which I split into two halves.

The main part of the city on one table...

...and the front walls of the city on the middle table. In the distance (upper right corner)
you can see a part of the third table which was the Dervish staging area.

A full view of the vast expense of area over three table. The Nile River is on 
the end of the tables on the left side.

A little bit of marketing promotion can't hurt either. A full size reproduction 
of the original movie poster from the Khartoum! movie.

The Thursday evening game started on time and without a hitch and it was full with 12 players. The Dervish eventually swarmed over the walls and hunted down General Gordon in the Governor's Palace. 

New Rules

I decided to write a completely new set of rules for my convention games this year. Our group normally uses a Colonial version of Bill Protz's B.A.R rules and we have played them enough that they become second nature to us. However, the rules sheets are a bit chart heavy and can be hard to follow for someone who is playing the rules for the first time. So I made a "light version" of Bill's rules, taking out many of the modifiers and slimming things down. However, the light version of BAR still seemed a little bit daunting. So I decided to go in a different direction and write up own set of rules with a mind of keeping things as simple as possible. This turned out to be a great decision.

I used a variant of Buck Sudru's Colonial convention rules that had been given to me by Bill M. over on the No Stress Miniature War Gamers Facebook page. I added some hand-to-hand combat skirmish rules that Bill Protz and I worked out awhile ago and tacked these onto the tactical part of the rules. Basically, we use Sudru's rules for regular actions out on the desert, but when the Dervish start climbing up the ladders and fighting on the parapets of the walls, we shift to Bill's rules for climbing and toppling ladders and hand to hand melee (you and I roll one D6 and the highest die roll wins the melee). In a word, there were really two sets of rules in play.

There were a few inconsistencies and kinks in the skirmish hand-to-hand rules part of the game, but one of the players was particularly good at identifying the loopholes in the rules and we got the rules sorted out after which things ran more smoothly. I took the lessons learned from this game and made the necessary rules adjustments for my other two games. Particular kudos go out to Paul P., Brian V. and Earl C. for helping us get through the rules.

I don't want to give the impression that my rules had not been play tested; quite to the contrary we had run several full scale games, but you can always count on other wargamers to come up with some new wrinkle that you hadn't thought of. I say this in the most positive manner.

PICTURES FROM THURSDAY EVENING

Here are some pictures of my game. Read the captions for the story. And click on the pictures to enlarge your view.

The Dervish dhows sail up the Nile towards the back side of Khartoum.

The Dervish attack begins. They instinctively focus on the corners of the fort, 
which is the most vulnerable part of the wall.

Close combat rules: allows for a maximum of 3 figures on a ladder and no more
than 3 indivual hand to hand melees per turn on each ladder. Once the Dervish touch the walls, then we shift
over to the skirmish hand to hand rules. The Dervish ladder goes up when they touch the wall. The Egyptian 
defender immediately gets an opportunity to tip over the ladder. If not, then up to three attackers can 
scale the ladder and fight up to 3 defenders on the parapet.

The Dervish have made it over the wall and now they will pour through in great numbers.

The Dervish blow open the main gate with a powder keg.

The Mahdi makes a triumphal entry into the city to the cheers of his followers.

The Egyptian paddle wheel boat comes to grips with on of the dhows
while the other dhows head towards Khartoum.

It's about over for the garrison and Gordon as the Dervish run amok through 
the streets and alleys. They break through the windows of the Governor's Palace 
to enter the building.

Small groups of Egyptian soldiers gravitate to the Governor's Palace, where 
they make a last stand. Alas, Gordon died with all of his men.

DAYS FRIDAY & SATURDAY REPORT - TBD

This blog post would become way too long if I included the full report of the rest of the convention on Friday and Saturday. So stay tuned and come on back here in another day or two to hear the rest of the story/