Old Collection, 'new rules' (ACW 15mm)

Years ago we lived in a apartment condo during an occurrence of many fires damaging suites, I told The Wife that should we encounter such an emergency to grab the two large duffel bags of my 15mm ACW and throw them off our second story balcony.  Her “what about the wedding photos?!” was dismissed.  Priorities you know…..

But yes, this was, and still is one of my favourite my wargame collections.  Not having brought it out of the bags for many years, I decided to layout my terrain to see what was still needed. In a rather interesting coincidence KevinA emails me that very day with his new ideas for averaging the huge swing the Fire and Fury ACW Rules d10 rolls can produce.  I was intrigued and so with terrain already in place, PeterM joined us as the Union defender against KevinA’s Reb attack. The existing charts using the ‘weird’ d3s, low-average dice, and troop quality modifiers had the game move along in a more realistic manner rather than the ‘I have all the advantages but you rolled a bleeping 10 to my only a 1!!’ situations were avoided.  Leaving the terrain on the table (how real life can get in the way) we played a second, continuing scenario with Craig joining us as "Stonewall" using more of the table for a good game.

(for the record, I decided require better fields but have enough trees. I used only 1.5 of 3 boxes.  One does need many trees for a 19th C. American battlefield.)

The table set up including the fun little additions in my collection including an observation tower (center), and balloon (right center) and solid wood buildings and fences.  Must get some more farm animals; the sheep (lower center) gives a cute accompaniment.

while in the Canadian 'West'....

 Well, the Lardies are at it again with a new rule set with "What a Cowboy!".  Not surprising given the title, it is a variation on the popular "What a Tanker!" style of rules.  As the original set has been popular, WillB, invited GordC, CraigM, and myself (to complete the alphabetization, DougH if you haven't already known) to a game set in the Canadian frontier during the same time as the ubiquitous "wild west" was occurring in the United States. Rather than sheriffs, marshals, or rangers, we had the NWMP, the North West Mounted Police, which handled the duties in the western part of the country.  By the turn of the century it will merge with the police forces of most of the eastern provinces to form the famous Royal Canadian Mounted Police. [ as an aside, they recently provided King Charles with one of their specially bred black horses ]

WillB's scenario had the boys in red serge defending a trapper previously arrested from a rescue party of friends. The action can be seen on WillB's blog link . 

GordC and myself did the service proud as our policemen successfully defended the accused - and ourselves truth be told as the trappers did not care about the welfare of our boys in red - and shot two of the scoundrels at which point the others, and presumably the moose, left in haste.  

Sgt. King uses a chair as cover while waiting for other trappers to come into line of sight. One of the trappers is already dead near the creek.

Constable Fraser doing stellar service with his pistol. His slight flesh wound would be only any of the Mounties would take during the game.  Figures and terrain by the host WillB.

We were all very pleased about the rules and thinking it was a better "feel" than its WaT 'father'.  In other words, the action dice worked much better as an individual skirmish game than a tank command surprisingly.  As many of us have MANY different gunslinger shootist rules and had no satisfaction with any (I have one which is some 86 pages long!), and being a style to which we are very familiar we picked up on this quickly.  While we did keep it simple for our first go at it, we did have a "Bonanza" occurrence, an allowance to break the current players turn to do an abbreviated action which is a neat twist.... my Sgt. King character used it to put a lucky hole into one of the trappers with his winchester rifle).  The rules have many more additions for characterization (and role-playing...) and as many of tabletop games now are getting smaller and, frankly, shorter in duration, this style of game will be popular.  

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