Battle report - 2-Apr-2012

The master campaign map as well as
smaller copies.

A very minimal action report, but the precursor of things to come.

This was the start of the club ECW campaign - effectively starting with 500pts a side using Warhammer ECW and the Perfect Captain's "Tinker Fox" campaign rules. Carl was in charge of the campaign admin, with myself as Royalist CinC (again!) backed by Carl and AndyH (in a change from his usual Dark Ages), and Grahame was CinC of the Parliament forces, along with Dewi and Gary.

Carl's still fine-tuning the rules, particularly the interaction between Tinker Fox and Warhammer ECW, and none of us have played Tinker Fox before, so the first campaign day was largely figuring out how the rules worked.

Fawsley - a location card
from the excellent Tinker
Fox (renamed for our
campaign)

Basically, each senior commander in TF gets a 'letter' per turn, which they can use to instruct troops to do various things: plus the overall CinC gets another which he can use to override one of his subordinates. 'Letters' are things like 'requisition provisions from this unoccupied area', 'garrison this area', etc.

Turn one provided a little more surprising than we actually wanted: I (acting for Andy who was unavailable due to a prior commitment to play SAGA - gee, who knew?!) sent a unit of horse and some commanded shot to garrison the same village Grahame had orders to requisition.

The Battle of Fawsley
begins

Result - a battle! The Battle of Fawsley, in fact - a small skirmish that probably felt like many small ECW battles of the early part of the war, such as Powick Bridge.

Tinker Fox's campaign setup provided the deployment rules - essentially the Royalist troops came in on the north road from Canons Ashby House, and the Roundheads from the direction of Blakesley, and we got to deploy 12" down the road. As the commanded shot I'd sent were Forlorn Hope, they got an extra march move, which I used to spread them out across the road in the path of Grahame's horse.

The two units of horse get stuck in.

(Campaign) history will record, that the Battle of Fawsley was in fact very short and sweet. The Royalist gallopers spread out in line in rear of the shot, and the latter opened fire at close range with a full salvo on the approaching Roundheads. Grahame's cavalry charged, without deploying from two ranks deep, and the shot fled, leaving the gallopers to charge into the Cavaliers. Two rounds of combat went, ultimately, in favour of the Kings' men, and that, pretty much, was that.

Which was about the time we realised that it might be useful to work out how to deal with post-battle bookkeeping of casualties etc!

We did play turn 2 of the campaign, and placed orders for turn 3, and... well, more next month!