Club Night 18th April - Hammerin' Iron

(Bugger! I just accidentally deleted the photos from last nights game... Sean's ships are lovely too!)

Sean acted as a non-playing game master for a session of Peter Pig's Hammerin' Iron leaving Dave to play the Confederates against Keith and myself as the emancipators. Dave had the mighty CSS Virginia and the tiny ram CSS Planter. Keith had the CSS Chillicothe and the monitor Keokuk at his disposal while I just had the CSS Tuscumbia to look after.

Both fleets went straight at each other, though the Keokuk was in a bad position and spent most of the game going around an island to come up behind the 'feds. Planter managed an early ram on Chillicothe but damaged herself almost as badly. She then went on to disable one of Keokuk's turrets but shortly after her guns were all shot away, she started to burn and finally Tuscumbia sent her to the bottom.

The star of the show was the Virginia who focussed fire on the Chillicothe whenever possible in an attempt to even the numbers. Once the Planter had been turned into the latest Confederate submarine all the Union ships concentrated on the Virginia and the battle become one of firepower and attrition with very little movement.

The Chillicothe was soon very battered and in danger of sinking. Keith commented on how none of the light guns on either side had managed to do any damage in the entire battle; shortly before just such a gun sank the brave Chillicothe.

It was too little, too late for the Virginia which was in a terrible state by this point. She switched fire to the other two Union ships finally causing damage to the still fresh Tuscumbia but under a withering fire that would have soon sunk her she was forced to strike and was captured.

Goodbye USS Chillicothe and hello to the new USS Merrimack!

Thanks Sean, great game. Can't believe I deleted the photo's...

Club Night 14th December - ACW

We managed to drum up three out of the four players who started the Black Powder ACW game a couple of weeks ago and so got back to business. This was only the second BP game at the club so things were a little slow.

The basic premise behind the game was that there was a larger battle off to one flank and that a Union corp was going to make an outflanking move which would make the Confederate position untenable. A single advance division from each side had been sent to seize a vital road junction to either facilate or block the outflanking move.

I had high hopes for this game: briefing sheets, victory conditions, time limits, special rules / characteristics for the units, etc. but my printer packed up so we just had two small divisions using the stats from the rule book and played using the standard victory rules. C'est la vie...

The table had a road layout like the letter pi and both sides entered the table in march column, travelling up opposite 'legs' of the pi. The cavalry swept ahead to try to reach the junction first with the Rebs winning the race. There was heavy fighting on the central hill where on the whole the Rebs had the advantage. In the town / junction the Yanks eventually bought superior numbers to bear and looked like forcing the Rebs out.

At close of play both armies had 2 broken brigades and held 2/4 town sectors so we called it a draw.

We used 15mm figures from a number of different manufacturers and used cm instead of inches.

Each side had a General, 3 brigades of 3 infantry regts. plus 1 battery, 1 brigade of 2 cavalry regts.