Picket’s Charge

Last Saturday saw me once again round Des’ for another bash at his Longstreet’s Attack scenario. I would be playing with Per again and this time we were joined by John, a real life former General and a fantastic bloke to boot, and we would have also been playing with Dave Brown too but he had come down with Covid so had to drop out. Due to Dave dropping out Des joined me on the Confederate side and we got to it. This time round all the tweaks that we had discussed from a month of playtesting the scenario, and a Zoom call Des had with Dave, were put into place and it made a very nice difference to the game. As Des is planning on writing the scenario up for a possible magazine article or to post somewhere I won’t go into them here but I can assure you that it is a scenario that is well worth playing, this was the 3rd time for me and I had a blast each time.

Again I won’t do a blow by blow account as the day was pretty full on and I didn’t make any notes during the game. By the time we finished off the game Des’ second wave had just managed to gain a foothold in the Wheatfield and he was gearing up for another assault on the ridge in the centre after the first attack was successfully repelled by Per (whose dice rolling was on fire all day which helped considerably!). To the right of this however, his Texans had been wiped out in their attempt to take the ridge and next to them my Georgians had finally managed to take Devil’s Den but at an awful cost and were just about to be counter attacked. There was no way that they would have been able to survive this as all the remaining units were very near dispersal and that would have opened up a huge gap on the right of the line here which the flood of reinforcements the Union side were receiving could have exploited given time. Meanwhile over on the extreme right, my Texans had been wiped out in their attempt to turn the Little Round Top position but the Alabamans had very handily kicked the Federals off of the feature and were preparing to advance on the new, frankly terrifyingly strong, line that John had prepared to meet them.

As usual it was an absolutely cracking days wargaming, played in the best spirit and with tons of great fun moments in it. Anyway, here’s another large selection of eye candy to enjoy – remember if you click on a photo it enlarges!

Last Sunday saw me round Des’ again and once more taking on Per in a ‘training’ game of Picket’s Charge rules. Des is running this game a few times over the next few weeks so this was a shakedown of a ‘light’ version of the full the scenario (with a reduced OOB) to see if any tweaks were needed to it and to enable us to get a handle on the rules for the big, multi-player game in a few weeks time. Once again Des had put on a stunning looking game, in fact both Per and I stopped and said ‘Bloody Hell!’ when we first entered the shed!

I won’t go into a blow by blow of the game as it was just a training game but it was lots of fun with both of us suffering at the hands of the dice gods, I lost 2/3 of my off table artillery support but Per rolled bad in melee and testing for morale which hurt his sides performance quite badly. My Rebel force did have the upper hand at the end of the day’s play having taken the Devil’s Den and successfully kicking the 20th Maine and their mates off of the Little Round Top as well as completely smashing the main Union line. However all these gains might have been temporary as a large Union reserve force was bearing down on the victorious Confederates at the Devil’s Den and there would have been more arriving if we were playing with a full OOB. A cracking game and I’m looking forward to another go on Sunday and the big one later in the month. Cheers to Per for being a top opponent as usual and Mr. D for inviting us to play, it’s an absolute belter!

Anyway, here’s a lot of lovely eye-candy to get your mince’s round…

(All images are clickable if you want to see them larger)