A Visit to the Marketplace in Khartoum

 

A gentleman from Belgium is searching for some curios to take home.

I set up several vignettes inside my model of Khartoum and experimenting with various styles of picture taking and composition. I like having civilians participating on the periphery of the table top game. It is very difficult to find 54mm (1/32 scale) Middle Eastern civilians to populate Khartoum. Fortunately, a company called King & Country (based in Hong Kong) makes a figure range called "The Life of Jesus" and some of the characters make suitable stand ins for 19th Century civilians. Granted the locals probably would not be wearing colorful robes, more likely all white clothing, but the figures seem to work just fine. Another company called John Jenkins Designs also makes some suitable stand in civilian figures.

Trips to Michael's Stores and Hobby Lobby have been a treasure trove of little knickknacks to use in my scenario. The oriental carpets, the baskets of fruit and vegetables and a few other items have come in handy.

The rug merchant 

A citizen with his hookah is taken to task by a couple of
members of the Khartoum Chapter of the Temperance League.

Overview of the market place

My Khartoum terrain is pretty much finished and ready to go for this year's Historicon games. I had everything that I needed in time for my games at Little Wars, recently. After that show, I set up the city terrain on one of my game tables to see how things were looking. I identified a few things that I want to add before Historicon. These include the expansion of the Governor's Palace to include a pair of building wings (DONE), the town arsenal, and a mosque. Maybe a couple more corner towers for the city walls would be a nice addition if I can find the time.

My Historicon Games Are Entered in the PEL

 

Major General Charles Gordon contemplated the world with disapproval.
He reached the conclusion that it was no place for a gentleman. 

CLICK ON ALL PICTURES TO ENLARGE

Yesterday was the deadline (for inclusion in the Preliminary Events List or "PEL") for submitting game events at this year’s Historicon Wargame convention July 19-23, 2023 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I entered my Khartoum game three times (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) and I added the Battle of Abu Klea for Friday evening. I felt the need to add the fourth game to sort of justify the amount of floor area and table space that are required for my game.

The wargaming world is excited to hear about the number of games
that Der Alte Fritz is going to run at Historicon 2023 in July. Everybody's 
talking about it.

The other day I set up enough figures to form two squares, one British Camel Corps and one made entirely of Egyptian troops. Each square has 32 figures on each face of the square for a total of 128 figures per square plus artillery placed on each corner of the square.

British square in the foreground, Egyptian square in the background.
Dervish everywhere else.

The Egyptian square.

The British square.

Taking stock of the of the figures that I have already painted compared to what I might need to stage the Battle of Abu Klea, I determined that I was in pretty decent shape for the game. The Egyptian square only needs a pair of Gatling guns. The British Camel Corps square needs an extra 16 to complete one battalion and another 32 figures to complete the fourth side of the square. A pair of Gatling guns will also be required to complete the British square.

So I placed an order with Armies In Plastic for the needed 54mm British infantry and Gatling guns with crews. AIP's service is exceptionally quick and so the figures arrived within 2 business days.

Recently arrived reinforcements from Armies In Plastic

I organize my British and Egyptian regular troops in groups of 8 figures per movement tray (from Litko) and 6 movement trays constitute a "regiment" of 48 figures. For my Abu Klea game, however, I plan on using only 32 figures for each side of the square with a Gatling gun or a 7 pound cannon in each of the four corners. When I paint the figures I work in groups of 8 figures at a time. Thus one painting grouping fills up one movement tray and my method gives me a sense of getting things done since it only takes 8 figures to finish something. This works psychological wonders for my mind. I can generally finish painting 8 figures in one or two days, depending on the amount of time that I have available. I am retired to I have some control over how much I paint each day.

The picture of the unpainted plastic figures, above, illustrates 8 sections of 8 figures or 64 figures in total. I generally do not use the running poses, which I consider to be somewhat useless for my units. I don't like figures standing on one leg. The picture shows the contents of 5 boxes of figures (16-18 figures per box), less the running poses that I have removed from the scene.

With respect to my three Khartoum games, I plan on adding some new buildings to the city. I recently finished two one-story wings to attach to my model of the Governor's Palace in Khartoum. You can see part of this improvement/renovation in the first picture at the top of this post.

Stay tuned, more to come shortly.

Little Wars - Day Three

Image from the 1966 Khartoum movie poster, from the author's collection.
Charleton Heston as Gordon and Laurence Olivier as The Mahdi.

I have been saving the pictures of my Khartoum games until the end of this series of posts about Little Wars convention this year.

The Dervish swarm the Governor's Palace inside Khartoum during Game Two.

I ran three games (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) and each game was sold out with a capacity of 12 players per game. I did squeeze in a 13th player for the Friday game. The Dervish won the first two games rather decisively, as one would expect. General Gordon died a heroic death in Game One, but managed to escape on the last river boat leaving town in Game Two. The latter was a disgraceful performance that will not play well in the London newspapers.

However, the third game was a convincing Egyptian victory. The Egyptian players decided that fighting the Dervish on the walls of the city was a losing proposition. Their strategy was to fight on the walls until the Dervish were on the ramparts. Then they would fall back into the town where they had stationed some reserve troops. There they were able to concentrate their forces and level some withering volleys on the Dervish as they attempted to jump off the walls and onto the ground inside the city.

I divided Khartoum into two sections: the forward walls of the city were placed
on the middle table, while the rest of the city was placed on the back table,
behind the players on the left. This provided an aisle in which all of the players
could use to facilitate the movement of their figures during the game.

Assaulting the City Walls with Scaling Ladders

There is nothing more fun in war gaming than attacking some walls, setting up some scaling ladders, and then climbing said ladders to get into single hand to hand melee with your opponent. The two pictures below show the ladders pushed up against the walls.

Attack from the front

The following pictures provide a panorama overview of the Dervish assault on Khartoum's walls. The weak point is obviously the corner bastions, which the Dervish attacked from two sides.

Tod Kershner appears to be having fun attacking the walls.
Tod wanted a command that would be quick and bloody. He got his wish.

Combat within the walls of the city

Down by the river wharf. Dervish disembark from their dhows and attack the lightly defended backside of the city.

With victory imminent The Mahdi enters through the city gates to encourage his followers.

Let's all head to the Governor's Palace. It looks like a safe place to stay!

Dervish over run the market place and turn towards the Governor's Palace.

Gordon makes a run for safety accompanied by a young lady.
He abandoned her to save his own skin. Was this really Harry Flashman rather than Gordon?

The Egyptian Last Stand

It's not looking good for the Egyptians who are making a last stand inside 
the Governor's Palace.

The Rescue of Gordon (or was it Harry Flashman?)

A small British relief force arrives via river boat. Troops are towed in 
barges behind the paddle wheel boat.

The paddle wheel boat turns up river to attack the Dervish in their dhow boats.

British relief force lands outside the city in river barges. The paddle wheel steamer that towed them
has let the tow lines loose and continued on towards the town to rescue Gordon.

A small contingent of Camel Corps and Staffordshire Regiment soldiers disembarked 
from their barges and provided a safe zone for anyone fleeing the city.

A small group of civilians were able to escape the city and seek the protection
of the British relief force, which arrived via river boat.

Gordon legs it out of Khartoum and takes the last river boat leaving town.
The Egyptians had the first movement initiative so they were able to make
the boat pull away from the dock before the Dervish could jump onto the decks.

Conclusion

We had three very good games and I appreciate all of the people that played in my games. They were good sports all.

The rules worked well to my satisfaction especially in the last two games. We had worked out some irregularities in the wall scaling and melee part of the rules during the first game on Thursday evening and these changes carried over nicely into the second and third games.

Now that Little Wars is over my next stop will be at Historicon this summer in July. I will be running the Khartoum! game at least three times, maybe four. So I encourage everyone to preregister for the games when the registration goes live. 

I will see you all at Historicon!

Are you up for a trip to Khartoum at Historicon?

cccc

A New Square In Plastic

 

Armies In Plastic British and Egyptian soldiers in square.

I set up all of my Egyptians and British from Armies In Plastic on the game table to see how they look in square formation. Each side of the square has 40 figures with Gatling Guns in the four corners.

I will be doing some more rules testing and I wanted to know what my readers thought about some of the firing results. Firing ranges are short range (1-16” hit on 4,5,6); medium range (17-33” hit on 5,6) and long range (34 -48” hit on a 6). I’m finding, through several dice throwing iterations, that British are knocking off approximately one figure per figure firing over the course of a Dervish advance and charge starting at 48”. In other words 40 British are killing 40 Dervish before the Dervish contact the square and start a melee. Thus a 100 figure Dervish war band loses 40-50% of its figures before it closes with the British square.

Does this seem like a reasonable outcome or are the casualties too severe? Mind you, once in melee the two sides seem to chew each other up considerably.

One thought was to make any casualties at Long Range only count for half a figure. So if 6 Dervish are hit at long range only 3 of them are killed.

What do you think? Please leave a comment.

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/