Irregular Wars Wargaming

"At Jena, the Prussian army performed the finest and most spectacular maneuvers, but I soon put a stop to this tomfoolery ..."   Napoleon My dear reader, allow me to introduce the sly, yet charming, Kapitän Johan Fuchs of the 1st Jäger Battalion, Prussian army. Known among his men as 'Lucky' Fuchs, the kapitän springs from an old and highly regarded military family. However, as the second son of a second son, he sadly has little money or influence himself. Physically of average stamp, his fairness of face and charm have won him the hostility of many an older husband to a younger wife. While his subsequent evasion of said husbands has proved fruitful training for his own military career, his not-undeserving reputation as a cad has been hard to shift. Fuchs' reputation for der ring-do, and his ability to slip away from his enemies with alacrity have seen him often dispatched on wide ranging missions with men of his Jäger company, far from the main Pru

Continuing our predatory fine-tuning, we turned our eyes to one of the scenarios in the Palaeo Diet rule book - Dances with Wolves. The tribe’s dreamer has dreamed a dream of the most exquisite fruit. Not only that, but his spirit guide has led him to the very spot where it may be found. Unfortunately for the tribe, the fruit tree is at the centre of a territory patrolled by a savage wolf pack. Set up the table with an important resource in the very centre. Place three to five pack predators 1x Medium distance from the resource and no closer than 1x Short to each other. Hunters may be placed within 1x Long of any board edge. To gather from the resource, hunters must be in base contact with it and spend one action. The gathering exercise is successful if at least two thirds of the hunting party (rounding down) manage to collect the resource and make it off any table edge. The individual winner will be the first hunter who collects the resource and gets off the tab

We sat down to do some fine tuning of the predator mechanics for  Palaeo Diet: Eat or be Eaten  this week. The first game saw a hunting party of five hunters and a hound trying to secure 6 'bulk' worth of kills in order to feed the tribe. We divided the party between two of us and decided to roll for character traits for one hunter each.  JB took Bow, the archer, and his trusty hound, Hound. He also had Bow's spear carrying twin brother Rodan. He rolled for Rodan's trait, and discovered that he was a Thinker. Thinkers are useful tribe members and can gift successful activation to other hunters within line of sight. I took Urg, Ogg and Ferg. Ferg carried fire, while the other two were spearmen. Urg rolled for a trait ant ended up Hungry. Hungry hunters make uncontrolled movement towards wounded models and risk breaking cover completely when the first model on the table is killed. We deployed with Bow, Hound and Rodan along one edge (the left of the photo above),

This week, we returned to the semi-wild woodlands of 1750s eastern North America for my second game of  Sharp Practice 2 , the large scale skirmish game for the black powder period from Too Fat Lardies. The game saw a mixed force of French regulars, Canadian militia and allied Indians (Huron probably, but they never got close enough for me to ask) on the warpath. Their immediate target was a British homestead, part of the fragile network of settlements seeded across the woodlands to start the  exploitation of  civilising of the New World. As the photo above shows (taken from the east, looking west), the roguish Captain Hotspur heard of the French threat and hot footed it towards the homestead from the south, leading a column of Inniskilling fusiliers with Indian scouts, while his bookish 2iC, Lt Fitzjames (of the Cherrymount Fitzjames') approached from the east with a second force the same size. While the French regulars slowly approached the farmstead across the open g