Sharp Practice French and Indian Wars British v French

Continuing our French and Indian War Sharp Practice games Dave and I took the British this time against Jerry and Richards French with Indian allies. The scenario this time was a simple encounter.

British Line appear and move towards the fields:

Colonial Rangers head towards the woods on the left:

Some French militia skirmishers appear in the distance, open fire and cause the first casualty of the encounter:

More French skirmishers have moved through the woods and engage the Rangers:

The British Line starts firing it's famous volleys. Although the skirmishers are hard to hit the British fire is very effective:

Losing the firefight the Rangers charge the French skirmishers:

A much smaller force of French Line infantry arrives:

The British waste no time in starting to blast away at the French:

Indians charge into British Rangers:

More Indians threaten British Grenadiers:

The Indians charge:

The Grenadiers are wiped out:

Some of the British turn to face the Indians:

By this point the British Line had devastated their French equivalents forcing them to quit the field. British morale had taken quite a hit as well so it was a close game.

Good fun again and showed the power of large groups of Line infantry firing volleys and using the 'Sharp Practice' ability to great effect! 

LaSalle British v Italians

Two years after buying the rules Gordon and I finally got around to playing Sam Mustafa's LaSalle 2nd Edition! I used my Peninsular British army while Gordon had his Italians. We used the introductory scenario with 200 points of troops each.

The army enters the table in march column:

On the left the British deploy into line:

More British advance towards the town while the cavalry cross the stream:

The Italians have their cavalry on the British left facing infantry and artillery:

Firefight in the town:

British lines open fire as Italian infantry advance towards them. Italian cavalry lurk in the background:

The Italian cavalry charge home. I thought I could make an emergency formation change into square but was sadly mistaken on this point and the British line routs!

The two armies battle it out:

British Heavy Dragoons attempt to emulate the Italian cavalry's success against Italian infantry in mass:

The attack fails miserably and the Dragoons are repulsed:

Long lines of British infantry:

On the left musketry abounds:

The Dragoons have left their attached RHA far behind:

The Italian cavalry are forced back and withdraw to regroup:

The Italians have captured the town but lost an infantry battalion:

The Italian Guard Dragoons charge into the British line infantry who promptly disintegrate again:

The British are making progress on their right though:

Charge! The British attack:

One Italian unit breaks, the other stands firm:

Night falls with the battle still undecided:

The British had lost two quite expensive battalions, the Italians three somewhat cheaper ones. As the Italians held the town it was probably a minor Italian victory, mainly down to their cavalry being so successful!

One reason we hadn't played before was that the rules from an initial reading seemed a bit confusing, they are superficially similar to Blucher but in fact quite different! Once we had played a couple of moves though things became easier and the game moved quite quickly.

They are similar though in that how you use your 'momentum' to carry out actions is the critical part. Unlike Blucher both sides know how many MO they have for the turn but that is somewhat complicated by the individual turns actions passing from side to side via 'interruptions' which really makes you think about when to attempt to move, shoot, rally and change formation. Higher momentum gives better options and more flexibility whereas if you have a turn of low momentum you have to keep things simple! 

As ever with Sam's rules much to think about especially if we add in the advanced rules and definitely worth exploring further.

Sharp Practice AWI British v American

An encounter battle saw my British taking on Pete's Americans on a fairly open terrain in another Sharp Practice game.

First to arrive were the Queen's Rangers faced by some American skirmishers across a field:

British Line quickly followed in support of the Rangers:

Remarkable shooting from the Rangers sees three of the American skirmishers out of action in one round of fire!

Inspired by their success the Rangers charge across the field causing the skirmishers to flee behind some Continentals. Militia lurk in the walled field as well:

The Light Dragoons arrive and spy some more Continentals in the distance:

The Dragoons gallop towards them but don't quite catch the skirmishers shielding the Continentals:

The Continentals get a volley in but it isn't as effective as they had hoped:

One man down and five shock, the Dragoons gallop on!

They crash into the Continentals!

The Continentals are wiped out!

Meanwhile the Americans have been exchanging fire with the Rangers who are slowly taking losses:

The Dragoons move on to the second group of Continentals but come off much worse:

The Dragoons flee:

The Rangers regroup into a single unit:

Fire from the British Line routs the American skirmishers breaking their army:

A bit of a different game on a more open than usual table where the quality of the British units paid off. Pete was very unlucky though with the dice with his initial skirmisher unit and failure to dent the Dragoons before they got into combat.

Sharp Practice Northwest Frontier British v Afghans

Having tried MWWBK for our second Afghan war armies Gary and I decided to give Sharp Practice a go and see how that worked. After some consideration we went for rifled muskets for the British rather than breech loaders so my force consisted of three groups of Sikh infantry, two of skirmishing Ghurkhas and a mountain gun.

We went for the encounter scenario around an Afghan village:

The Sikh's advance onto the table:

In the distance vast hordes of Afghans appear:

The Gurkhas occupy a gulley and open fire. Hitting on 3's their fire should be devastating but is in fact ineffective:

As the Afghan cavalry attempt to outflank them the Gurkhas continue to shoot badly: 

The Afghan cavalry are now a serious threat and the Ghurkhas are under pressure: 

They are charged by some Afghan Ghazi's:

The Ghazi's are repulsed but several Gurkhas go down as well:

The Gurkhas are down to half strength and barely holding on:

The Gurkha officer reorganises them into a single group:

Fire from the Gurkhas when they were not fighting off the Ghazi's and a group of Sikhs has given the Afghan cavalry more shock than they can cope with:

The rest of the Sikhs press forward to support the Gurkhas:

Masses of Afghans charge home:

They are repulsed by the Sikhs:

The mountain gun finally arrives:

More Afghans pour through the village:

The British attempt to halt them with firepower:

The fail to and the Afghans muster another charge:

Again, it is repulsed and Afghan force morale fails giving the victory to the surviving Sikhs and Gurkhas:

A game which showed that the Afghans are very different to the Dervishes I've used when playing Dave. While the Dervishes fight well and shoot awfully the Afghans are more balanced, shooting quite well but not doing so well in close combat.

Gary's wonderful village didn't in fact do the Afghans any favours as they would probably be better off using their numerical superiority to engage in firefights, because of the buildings they couldn't use much of their firepower and were outshot by the Gurkhas and Sikhs.

The other thing the game really showed was that the biggest issue with SP is that there is little point in moving for groups with decent firearms once you can shoot at something, the British hardly moved from their initial deployment and just shot away at the Afghan attackers. I'm not sure which set of rules I prefer for this war at the moment!