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Friday, June 08, 2007

Memorial Day War of 1812 Skirmish

Miniatures Games

Over Memorial Day weekend, our group played a War of 1812 game using 28mm figures and a set of homebrew rules written by Dave Dalton.

The War of 1812 is a favorite period of our host, who when he’s not playing miniatures, does War of 1812 re-enactments. And in truth, it’s a fun period to game. The uniforms are colorful and varied—generally Napoleonic, with quite a bit of frontier American thrown in. And the battles, while not the epic clash of nations in the European wars, were often brutal skirmishes.

Dalton’s rules, I think, do a good job of capturing the unpredictability of frontier warfare.  Each turn, the players draw from a deck one card for each unit on their side. The commander then assigns one of the cards to each unit. A joker or ace gives a unit three actions; a face card, two; any other card, one. Actions are move, fire or reload. Each side has the option of reshuffling at the end of any turn, or continuing to exhaust the deck.

Drawing and assigning cards gives the players a series of critical decisions each turn, regarding which units need to take multiple actions, and which can get by with just one. The cards also tend to result in short, unpredictable bursts of action. It’s not unusual for one side to get their high cards in bunches, allowing them to move energetically, only to be shut down by a series of low cards.

Combat is decided in a fashion reminiscent of the Warhammer rules. Ten disded dice are rolled to hit, and the hits are re-rolled to determine casualties. Melee is resolved on a stand-by-stand basis. Morale is checked as units take damage and are reduced in size.

Our particular battle was a generic meeting engagement as British and American forces were arrayed across a field in roughly equal numbers. The objective was simple: drive the enemy from the field.

Most of the games that we’ve played with this rules set have been near-run things, with the outcome not being decided until late in the game. This, however, wasn’t one of those times. The British players got a run of good cards early, and kept reshuffling to get those cards back in the deck, only to come up with another good run.. Their luck with cards continued throughout the night. The Americans (my side) on the other hand, had rotten luck with the cards, never drawing more than one face at a time. That simply wasn’t enough to get anything going.

Our luck with the dice was just bad as we did minimal damage to the enemy. Worse, we failed easy morale tests and watched nearly full strength units flee the field. First our left collapsed, then the right. As units were destroyed or driven from the field, the number of cards in the draw also were reduced, cutting back on the chances of getting multiple actions with any unit.

Even a deus ex gamemaster set of reinforcements couldn’t save the day. The Americans couldn’t get enough face cards to get them into combat before the the rest of the army was vaporized.

You can see some photos of the game here.

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