Battle of Goose Farm

The Rejects first game of the year took place over the weekend and what a game it was! Postie decided to play something a little 'lite' so he pulled out his French Indian War rules and we played a rather large skirmish battle. Surjit and I played the French and Indians, while Richard had to defend his position with the British. The game went on longer than expected but everyone - winners and losers - had a great day. 

The Setup

The French have approached the edge of a large clearing and across a wide area of open ground, there is a small British outpost consisting of a bridged river, a small farm and crucially a blockhouse. The French aim is to burn the two buildings down, but they have to get inside first! British reinforcements have been sent for but will they arrive in time to stop the French?


Orders of Battle
British
55th Howies Light Infantry (20)
Civilians (3 Rifles, 1 Musket, 1 Pistol)
1 Indian Character & 1 Messenger
   Reinforcements
   Mounted officer (Major)
   44th Grenadiers (16)
   60th Line (20)
   Gorhams Rangers (12)

French
Officer (Major)
  Quebec Militia (12)
  Indian Warband (12)
Officer (Captain)
  Coureur de Bois (12)
  Indian Warband (12)


The Action

The whole table was set up for this game, but in the end, we only used about a quarter of it, focused on the tower, farm and bridge. 

Surjit and I decided to set up on the forest edge and decided to cross the open ground as quickly as we possibly could. We knew this would mean taking fire without firing back (at least in the initial turns), eschewing firing back in favour of additional run moves.  

The British look very thin on the ground, but it didn't take a genius to know the Blockhouse must have been packed full of soldiers. 

Surj and I swarm towards the British positions. Richards shooting in this early stage was phenomenally accurate.  

Our main target. Victory would be defined as burning down the blockhouse and the farm beyond. 

As we close we finally get to fire back. Fortunately, our return fire was pretty good with my troops killing four of the defenders in the blockhouse. 

The British have quite a few rifles in their ranks and seem to be good at picking off our men at range. My Indians (closest in this picture) start to take casualties. 

Again the lack of British troops in the open suggests the Blockhouse and Farm are packed full of men with guns. 

 

My Indians get pushed back after losing three casualties, but my Militia gets right up to the walls and begin firing through the open window slots. Meanwhile, Surjit's troops get around the other side of the Blockhouse and push back the British defending their camp. 

Richard puts up a spirited defence of the camp but the men in the open are forced back by the weight of numbers. 

The French now swarm around the Blockhouse and are finally in a position to attack the door on the far side. We need to break down the door before attempting to set the building on fire. 

 

The first turn trying to break down the door with an Indian carrying a firebrand ready to toss inside. However, defeating the door is going to be tough. The defender rolls 2d6 while the attacker gets 1d6 +1 if supported by another figure and an additional +1 for each turn after the first that they continue to attack the door. Getting inside is going to take a while. 

Surjit has pretty much cleared the campsite and the few British troops that remain are trying to get inside the farmhouse. 

An aerial view shows the whole site is now under our control. 

Finally, probably 8 or nine turns into the game, the British reinforcements arrive. It will still take them at least three turns to reach the battle so the clock is ticking for the French to get inside the Blockhouse and complete our mission. 

Surjit battles the last British colonist defending the door to the Farmhouse while my Militia form up to defend the bridge against the British reinforcements. 

Back at the Blockhouse, the door is still stubbornly closed. We have by now been at the door five turns and Richard keeps rolling low for defending the door...and twice I roll a one and fail to break the door!! We are running out of time! 

The British reinforcements are moving into range with Gorhams Rangers (in white) taking the lead. 

My Militia poor fire into the Rangers then fall back and prepare to do the same again. I'm trying to buy time for the troops at the door to get inside the Blockhouse. 

The door is down! And inside there are two soldiers and a Character figure. Characters are very hard to kill by shooting so while we are able to dispatch the soldiers quickly the Character stands in the doorway blocking our path. 

The Rangers have taken severe casualties but still manage to cross the bridge. The French have decided that there is no longer time to try to destroy the farmhouse so we focus our efforts on holding back the British while we try to destroy the Blockhouse. 

The British Character inside the blockhouse is stopping us from getting in! Dammit, this building has been a pain in the bum! 

My Militia continues to fire back at the British Rangers but we are running out of time. Postie is hinting that night time is approaching. 

Most of the Rangers have now been killed but the Grenadiers are now crossing the Bridge. 

Eventually, one of my commanders gets stuck in and, with some lucky dice, manages to kill the character. At last, the way inside is clear...however our firebrand has been dropped when the Indian carrying it fled - his Warband had had enough casualties and failed a morale check. Can we not get a break! 

As the Grenadiers cross the Bridge, Postie calls the game to an end. Night has fallen and the French decide to fall back before they are overwhelmed. Without destroying any of their objectives this is called a British victory. 

Richards stalwart defence of the Farm and Blockhouse earned him a well
deserved Leadership Award. 

Analysis
This is the sort of loss I don't mind. Surjit and I played as well as we could have and by the end, we felt that we were beaten by bad dice and back luck as well as by Richards excellent defence. 

Ral Partha Sorceress

As previously mentioned I'm going to be playing a lot of Frostgrave with the Padawan this year and have largely been able to repurpose my old Dungeons and Dragons figures for use in this setting. However, she did note that my collection didn't include many (or indeed any) female wizard figures. I did wonder if this was a sad reflection on the nature of figure design in the 80's and 90's (ie lots of chainmail bikini's and little else) but looking back through old magazines I see plenty of female figures that I could have bought. So I guess this 'gap' in my collection says more about me than it does about the availability of figures when I was buying them!

Feeling a little stung by this realisation I decided to see if I could find some suitable female figures online and in particular on eBay (a wonderful source of old mini's) to correct the imbalance. I eventually bought several models, some of which will be featuring later in the challenge. This female sorceress, however, was not only the oldest model in the batch it was also one of the best looking sculpts. The base stamp shows this to be a 1977 Ral Partha figure and when stood next to other '28mm' figures its a perfect example of scale creep over the decades. This magical female is best described as slender, but despite this, there is plenty of detail to be found in the design making it fun to paint.

Given that I plan on using this for Frostgrave, I decided the character needed some additional warm weather clothing and so I added a fur stole across her shoulders. I was going to sculpt this using greenstuff but inexplicably I couldn't find it (must have been lost or misplaced when I moved into my Operations Room). In the end, I used a product I have not used before, Plastic Putty by Vallejo. It's not strictly designed for sculpting but for little details like this, it worked perfectly. I applied a thin layer across the shoulders of the figure and as it dried over the course of half an hour I shaped it with a small brush.

Now if my math is correct this little figure will net me quite a few points. A base 5 for the figure, 30 points for completing the location and a further 20 bonus points because it's a 1970's miniature. I'll leave it's to the umpire to decide if I have also earned the additional ten points for the backstory on how I acquired this figure. So this could net me up to 65 points, and all because my choice of figures from my early days of gaming was a little bit misogynistic! 

Pauravan Javalinmen

Last week I submitted eight bases of infantry/Bowmen for my 4th Century BCE Indian Army and today its the turn of the rest of the infantry, this time Javalinmen. I'm not really sure they can be described as Javelinmen though as these troops carried a weapon that was more akin to a spear than a throwing weapon. 4 Cubits long (about 6ft) with a cane or bamboo haft and a leaf-shaped metal head. These infantrymen also carried a long cane or hide shield, nearly as long as the wielder but not as broad providing a limited degree of protection. 

I've really struggled to find any pictorial sources for these troops online (or elsewhere for that matter) so the only description I have doesn't mention if their standards were coloured or not. I have decided to give each unit a different banner so they can be differentiated but if I find any better information at a later date I can easily repaint the standards. 

As with the bowmen, the 'uniform' of these troops consisted of a white cotton high waisted 'kilt' and sandles so these were pretty easy to paint.

With the infantry now completed its time for me to think about some of the more 'glamorous' units, namely Elephants and Chariots. I'm back to work now so I expect productivity to drop off a bit from now on but I'm comfortably on target with a bit to spare, so thus far my Challenge is going very well. 

Resin Ruins

As previously stated I am making quite a bit of tabletop terrain this Challenge, specifically ruined buildings for Frostgrave. However, I also have quite a bit of resin terrain that I have been collecting over the last few months and two of these are now complete. The buildings come as individual wall sections and I could have painted them as such to allow more flexibility when placing on the table. However when I was cleaning them up if quickly realised that any jogging of the table and they all fall over, so I decided to mount them as whole buildings on foamboard bases. This has the added benefit that I can just pull the whole building from storage and plop it down on the table to throw together a quick cityscape.

The Church building is a simple rectangle, so more of a chapel than a church, but it has some nice features and is quite detailed. The other building in a similar style of brickwork but the walls have clearly suffered the ravages of time (and ice) and are therefore much lower. 

These resin models are made by Debris of War and were very reasonably priced. They didn't need much cleaning up and were pre-primed when I bought them. However I have adopted a paint scheme that starts with a black primer so I re-primmed them before starting on them, and hopefully, they will match the rest of my buildings in colour scheme if not in architectural style. As with my other buildings, I filled the interior with tallus in a range of sizes from large to small, along with a few suitable scaled bricks to represent fresh sections of stonework that have fallen to the ground.

The church is slightly over volume of one terrain square (4"x6"x9.5") while the other building equates to a third of a terrain square (2"x5"x8"). I'll let the umpire adjudicate this but I'm guessing this will earn me about 25 points and get me one step closer to completing my frozen cityscape. The next set of buildings will be more of my scratch-built/bluefoam models, some more complex than others.