C&C ECW reloaded

I’ve been on a bit of an ECW tip lately and have been experimenting with a number of published and unpublished rules. The main thing to come from all this dabbling was the realisation that nothing matched up to Msr Foy’s excellent C&C ECW set. The built in card mechanic suffices as a crude A.I, the game itself doesn’t overly tax my noggin’ and of course there’s hexes…lots of lovely hexes!

Now my original C&C cards are still, I suspect, in La Maziere Aux Bons Hommes, and the only ECW forces I own these days are my 2mm ones, so a degree of work was required to get things up and running. After a four week wait for a new 2ft x 1.5ft game mat and a whole heap of printing…I’m finally there.

Elenderil over at “Small But Perfectly Formed” kindly let me nick a map and set up of his from a 2mm game he ran back in 2018. I’ve twisted it through 90 degrees to better fit with the hexes and altered some of the forces to accommodate the C&C model - otherwise everything else remains broadly the same.

The situation:

It’s 1643 and a Royalist force is making its way out of Wales in order to reinforce the King at Oxford. At a river crossing into the Midlands they find their way blocked by a small Parliamentary army.

Objectives:

The Royalists will earn 3 Victory Banners for each bridge hex they occupy, plus 1 Victory Banner after that for each turn they remain in occupation of it. The Parliamentarians will earn 1 Victory Banner for each Royalist unit they destroy. The game ends automatically with a win for the side that is the first to score 5 Victory Banners.

Parliament’s forces set up first and are controlled directly by the C&C cards, the Royalists set up second and are controlled by me. The Roundheads may deploy anywhere within the first three hex rows, the cavaliers within the first two.

Put yer specs on! 

The battlefield seen from the Royalist left flank.

Elenderil’s original map of Bridgetown

Both factions are allowed four command cards in their hand at any one time.

Terrain: The river may only be crossed via the bridges.

Forces: 

Parliament

3 x artillery - trained

2 x horse (Dutch tactics) - trained

2 x horse (Dutch tactics) - raw

1 x dragoons - trained

2 x foot - raw

2 x foot - trained

1 x C in C

3 x leaders

Royalist

3 x artillery - trained

1 x horse - veteran

4 x foot - trained

2 x foot (small units) - trained

5 x horse (small units) - trained

1 x C in C

4 x leaders

Told you you’d need your specs. Parliament’s left flank deployment with artillery covering any approach down the road.

Parliament centre. The numbered flags indicate which of two units behind the map occupy the building hexes since the unit bases won’t fit between the houses! I’ll use this system for woods as well.

Parliament right flank, with two horse regiments in reserve over the river and a series of enclosures bordering the road.

Game rule tweaks:

No plan survives contact with the enemy: I will initially choose two of the cards from my four hand allowance to support my overall strategy, thereinafter I will make the best use of fresh cards that are drawn from the deck. 

The element of surprise: The Parliamentary player will have his command cards dealt blind and left face down. 1 card will be revealed from his hand each turn and acted upon. Once used and discarded it’s replacement will also be concealed. The status of Parliamentary units (raw in this case) will only be revealed when a unit becomes involved in combat. Status will be determined by die roll - a process that will cease in this particular game once two foot and two horse units have been marked up.

Size doesn’t matter: Small units lose 1 combat dice and have one less hit capacity than a regular sized unit. For example, a normal sized foot regiment can absorb three hits before destruction, a small foot unit only two. Correspondingly, large units can absorb 1 extra hit before destruction, though none are listed as such in this scenario. Note a unit may always roll 1 fire combat dice.

Range reduction: Given the scale of the units, muskets may only be fired into an adjacent hex, not two hexes as per the regular rules, this effectively reduces foot to a melee capability only but veteran units gain +1 combat dice anyway, perhaps reflecting firing by salvee.

Preemptive fire: Trotter (Dutch tactics) cavalry being charged by galloper (Swedish tactics) cavalry may fire at their attackers before they enter into melee - however the attacking unit may not start from an adjacent hex. The trotters (not Del and Rodney) may roll 1 combat dice whose results will impact the charging gallopers before the melee they are instigating takes place. If preemptive fire is utilised then the trotters must deduct 1 die from their usual melee battle back allowance. Note a flag result from preemptive fire will cause the gallopers to pull up short and not enter melee even if a leader is attached to the unit.

Foot and commanded shot may adopt a similar tactic unless raw.

A unit may only use preemptive fire once per turn. 

Since I now have the luxury of leaving this pocket handkerchief sized battlefield out for as long as I want I’ll cover the Royalist deployment and the battle itself in the next post. Hopefully the brief delay will allow you to make a quick visit to Specsavers. Lol.

TTFN

New directions

Bugger me it’s been a year since I started this blog…

Man that went quick.

If you look back at the first few posts it’s pretty clear that a lot has changed for me gaming wise in that short space of time and a few months ago I embarked on a brief reappraisal of what I wanted from the hobby - and what was really possible in my more modern space restrictive environment. 

The long and the short of it has been a move towards pocket sized armies and limited board sizes. The WOTR troops have gone, along with the Wofun flats, 6mm ECW, the Viking and Saxon armies and all of the ship models that were going to be part of my early Elizabethan naval gaming.

Sometimes the enthusiasm wanes never to be rekindled (Viking, Saxon & WOTR), sometimes you can’t find the the right rules, minis or scale, (Wofun & Elizabethan naval) and sometimes you discover that some types or periods of warfare are just not that rewarding to try and recreate, (I’m looking at you cogs). 

Reluctantly I’ve come to the conclusion that for me the days of large armies big tables and deep pockets have probably gone - though thankfully there still seems to be fun to be had!

Branching out into smaller scales and completely new genre’s like VSF has rekindled my enthusiasm and made new projects do-able again. Happily this blogs little band of cognoscenti have been willing to tolerate the drift…so far. 

So, along with 2mm ECW and the ongoing VSF campaign I’ve decided to double down by testing the patience of the blogs readership yet further.

There’ll likely be some 15mm VBCW and dreadnaughty naval stuff coming up in the new year but the projects actually in the pipeline at the moment include these guys…

Igg, Ogg…and Dave, with the Paleo Diet rules 

Roll a 1 and you might get assimilated.

Plus some Star Trek shenanigans - using the old Space Hulk rules.

They all tick the pocket sized, campaign friendly boxes, have established rules …and more importantly are now in the pipeline at Broom towers.

You have been warned, lol.

As a quick bye the bye, I’ve also developed a hankering for this solo card game…

Spearpoint 43 - now with added Russianfrontyness.

so if anyone already has it, or has any views on it - I’d be keen to hear them.

TTFN

No retreat, no surrender!

Sorry miss but the dog ate my homework… 

Actually Margot or Kiki sat on my iPad and deleted the batrep for this battle by accident (well they said it was an accident - but we did run out of cat treats in the week so it could have been passive aggressive payback for that I suppose?). 

Anywhoo I still have the pictures I took of the affair so without much of the usual blow by blow fluff here’s a pictorial explanation of what happened to the brave defenders of Victoria’s realm. Consider it a sort of Broom Battle Picture Library.

Sergeant Hobbes and the wounded Corporal Figgis had escaped the emerging Prussian soldiers (see last vsf post) and had made it to the bridge over the Lud, just east of Peveril. On their approach shouts from across the river alerted them to a rash of freshly dug mounds and an instruction to “get a ruddy move on”.

Unseen but closing fast was a large force of Martians intent on crossing the bridge in order to get at any “food on the hoof” in the nearby town. 

To avoid the pathogens that had wiped out their initial reconnaissance force the Martians had begun herding captive humans into machines that extracted and sterilized their blood. Though a coldly efficient solution whose industrial scale could help sustain the larger invasion force, it faced a completely unanticipated problem in a now vengefully non compliant civilian population - typified by the proud badge wearing members of the “take one with you” movement who would ingest lethal toxins or immolate themselves on the alien energy barriers rather than provide sustenance. 

Suffice it to say there were a lot of Martians now on British soil and most of them were bloody hungry.

Hobbes, Figgis and the rest of the section survivors head toward the bridge, chivvied on by soldiers defending the far river bank. Can you guess what the square markers in each hex represent? Note also the wisps of smoke rising from behind the hill.

On the other side of the river they encounter a scratch force of defenders tasked with buying time for the  civilians in Peveril to be evacuated.

Concealed in the tree line on the riverbank is a 6 pounder and crew covering the approaches to the bridge. The crew have erected their ceramic / asbestos shield in the hope of lasting longer than 20 minutes* against a heat ray wielding Tripod.

Troopers from the 23rd Lancers with lance bourne sticky bombs wait nervously in the tree line for the onslaught to begin.

And here they come!

Remember boys…aim low!

Alien hover / disability scooters…whatever next?

Smoke on the horizon…but lunch awaits just over the bridge.

Spang! The 6 pounder opens up and scores a direct hit on the nearest Tripod. Momentarily dazed the alien machine fires back…with deadly black smoke. Good job the gunners were wearing their gas masks! Around the tripods feet the Martian Infantry swarm forward to suppress the defenders gunfire.

Hobbes spreads his men out into a firing line as the Martian scooters swoosh towards the river bank.

Yup you guessed it. Those squares were mines triggered by a turn end numbered card draw. Mine number 9 goes off too late to catch the “speeding” mobility scooters. Lucky buggers!

But they were not so lucky this time…gotcha!

The Martians had retuned their small arms from the cinematic but useless “pew pew” setting to nundanket’s suggested “zhush”, pinning the brave defenders in place until… what’s that coming over the hill is it a monster?** No it’s a Wobbler! The Bazalgette armoured steam Walker (to be precise) finally makes its combat debut! 

In the nick of time the clanking swaying behemoth stomped its way to the bridge…and broke down.

Casualties begin to mount as the new “zhush” setting on the Martian weapons take their toll. Tragically Corporal Figgis is reduced to ash as he tries to collect a gambling debt from a wounded colleague. Oh yes some artillery bods died too, when their masks stopped working (they’re only guaranteed for 5 minutes in a toxic environment you know).

The two colossi traded shots, the canon on the wobbler scoring solid hits, but the heat ray from the Tripod failing to hurt the brave British artillery men behind their asbestos lined armour. With both armies nearing their “bottle out” casualty levels things quickly came to a head.

The starboard Gatling didn’t jam…but it did turn these purple monsters into something resembling jam, so there’s that.

Charge! The lancers take advantage of the wobblers appearance to splash across the river and hit the  nearest Tripod where it hurts. That’s in the legs by the way. I don’t think the Martians have genitals. No need if you do your reproduction by budding I suppose. Shame that. They’re missing out.

The lancers cut their way through the supporting Martian Infantry and speared the nearest Tripods legs with two sticky bombs. As they wheeled to make their escape they pulled the friction detonator chord and moments later…Kaboom!

Tragically one of the Lancers fell to yet more “zhush” fire but as the Tripod toppled the Martians found they’d had a different kind of belly full to the one they’d been expecting…a belly full of British steel. Resolve broken the beastly aliens began to withdraw. What? Oh bloody hell, go on then…HUZZAH!

The Martians had fancied themselves the natural conquerors of our solar system, but in their hubris they had stirred to life a far more powerful foe than they could ever have imagined, for the most naturally warlike species, the species with the greatest capacity for destruction had always been mankind.

* 20 minute lifespan from deployment to engagement. Apologies to messrs Elton and Curtiss.

** With yet more apologies, but this time to The Automatic.

Broomtown or bust

Just thought I’d post a couple of pictures from my recent play testing of Elenderil’s new rules. It didn’t really require the scenery to be out but I thought I’d do a quick review of things at the same time.

As you can see the roads need lining with foliage and the edges of almost everything need to be darker green to match the mat. The river needs toning down too while I’m at it. I’ll be creating some hedged enclosures next and cutting up the duplicate mouse mat to make the contoured hills. You can’t see them in the pictures but there are a couple of Broomtown residents dotted around the place as well. Lol.

TTFN