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?

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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 2

 

Today's post will consist of a little short commentary about Little Wars 2023 and the rest will be the pictures that I took of other people's games. I will talk more about my Khartoum game in the third post.

So pull down the movie screen, dim the lights and enjoy the show.

The first game in the lineup is a 54mm La Haye Sainte skirmish level game hosted by Tod Kershner. In recent years Tod has gravitated to hosting games with 54mm plastic figures and I have to say that I've drawn a little bit of inspiration from him. I am hooked on gaming with 54mm figures. Large figures look good, they are inexpensive to buy if you go with plastic figures, and they seem easier to paint for me. Tod also ran a 54mm Three Musketeers game that looked very nifty. See the fourth picture below.

La Haye Sainte

French attempting to break down the gate of La Haye Sainte. The orange
things on the roof of one building indicate that the roof is on fire, or soon will be
after a certain number of hits or turns.

Close up shot of some 54mm British grenadiers at Waterloo.

Kershner's 54mm Three Musketeers game.

Next up is a huge Circus Maximus chariot race game. The scratch-built arena is superb beyond any words that I could use to describe it. The detail in the structure is amazing. Click on the pictures to see it close up.

The next category is WW2 and there were a fair number of games in this era. This is not surprising since WW2 is the most popular wargaming period, by a long shot, than any other historical period. This is based on the annual survey that one of the British hobby magazines does every year. There were three games that stood out in my mind, and I'm kicking myself for neglecting to take any pictures of the Guadalcanal war game. This game was running next to mine and I kept thinking that I could take some pictures at anytime, but I forgot. The terrain for the islands was very realistic beyond belief. There were two other games that I liked: one was a landing on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific theater of war. I think that the figures were 20mm. Again, some terrific and realistic terrain in this game. The other game that caught my eye took place in Normandy in 1944. Apparently the Germans had flooded a number of areas to impede the Allied advance. This was a very creative game.

WW2 Pacific island invasion. I really like this terrain.

WW2 in Normandy

WW1 Airplane Dogfight game, always a convention favorite.

I think that this was Trafalgar. I liked the larger size of these tall ships.

More Trafalgar from a different angle. I couldn't get very close to the table
to take a good close up of the ships, but trust me, the ships were very nice models.

The Extremely Wild West.

Nice looking Western Cowboy game. The buildings appear to be paper buildings (?) that were eye-catching. At least I thought it was a Western, but when I stopped by the game later, there were zombies or space aliens (I forget which one) roaming around the streets of Laredo. It looked like the players were having a lot of fun in this game.

Border Reivers

Scottish border reivers going on a cattle raid. The Scottish tower house is what grabbed my attention. It was apparently scratch-built.

Border Reivers game looked like fun.

I wish that I had a building like this. Alas, it was scratch built rather than
a commercial resin model. So it is not available in the market.

Rorke's Drift

I thought that this version of Rorke's Drift was one of the better looking games at the show. The game judge dressed up in the tunic of the 24th Regiment with foreign service helmet. Nice touch. His modeling skills were up to snuff too as he did a good job on the buildings and the Teddy Bear fur table mat.

The game judge looks the part.

Nice use of Teddy Bear fur ground cover.

Good looking terrain.

Nicely painted 28mm Zulus.

Other odds and ends:

I'm not sure what this game was, but I liked the desert game mat and the bits of terrain (palm trees and ruins).

I think that this might have been a Steampunk aeroneff game. I'm not sure why they used
a canopy to cover the table. It made the table a bit dark and hard to see. Maybe the canopy 
helped to reduce the noise of the convention hall.

And now for a teaser from one of my three Khartoum games. A full report on my games will be done in the third and final part of my Little Wars report.

Dervish prepare to scale the walls of Khartoum.

The Mahdi's army assembles for the attack.

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