The Odds Stacked Against Me, or a Williamsburg Muster 2017 AAR

As it often does, life has gotten in the way of more regular posts, but things are starting to stabilize, so I'm hoping to get a few things up in the next week or two.

Memorial Day weekend I traveled down to Williamsburg, Virginia for the Williamsburg Muster. Typically, the local game clubs host two small shows a year in town - the Williamsburg Muster (usually in February) and the Guns of August - but in an effort to breathe some new life into the conventions, it was decided to run a single show this year at a new venue and to invite some of the boardgaming and RPG groups in the area, too.

Besides being the site of many family vacations in my youth, Williamsburg was were I went to university and where I had my first full-time job, so any trip back is always welcome. The town was also where I really dove into miniature wargaming with a local club, the Williamsburg Legati (see the link to the club blog in my links section), and with the urging of my old clubmates, this trip fell into place.

Unfortunately, in the days and hours leading up to my arrival, my plans started to unravel. After months of anticipation, I was scheduled to pick up my WWII 20mm figures from my painter at the show, but he informed me that due to new projects he'd taken on with his full-time job (a wargaming company), the completion of my figures would be delayed...c'est la vie. At least the terrain is all ready to go once they arrive. Then, shortly after I departed Friday morning, I heard from my friend Peter, with whom I planned on running a pick-up trial of The Men Who Would Be Kings on Saturday, that he had thrown his bag out and would not be able to attend.

After running into some traffic, I arrived at the convention (at the Doubletree in Williamsburg) late on Friday afternoon, did a quick walk through of the dealer area, and met up with my friend Ron, who was running a game I hoped to play that evening - a Chain of Command scenario set during the Arab Revolt of 1916-18. This particular set-up was based on a scenario for Too Fat Lardies' "Through Mud and Blood" that appeared in the Lardie Christmas 2010 Special and featured a joint Arab-Imperial raid on an Ottoman supply depot. Hidden inside one of the four buildings in the Turkish compound was a supply depot (the other three were marked as barracks). To win, the Arabs needed to find which building had the supplies and bring one of their senior leaders to it, to oversee their capture (or destruction, I suppose).

Being designed a for different scale game, Ron explained how he had to some of the rules to make it fit Chain of Command and since he had been unable to playtest it beforehand, he wasn't sure how it was going to turn out. The biggest change would be in the forces involved. The scenario originally called for a platoon of Arabs and a platoon of Indian infantry on the Allied side and a platoon of Ottomans and a surprise reinforcement platoon of Germans on the Central Powers side, but since we only had two players, Ron decided to start us out with just the Arabs and Turks and only add the others if we really needed them, Nevertheless, it had the makings of an entertaining game and since I already knew about the possibility of the surprise Teutonic reinforcements, I offered to play the role of Johnny Turk,

The pregame set-up showing the Ottoman (my) supply depot in the top left corner and the hordes of Arabs (commanded my opponent) waiting to enter from the right-hand side of the board.

Besides troop levels, another significant modification in the scenario was in the handling of the patrol phase, an element unique to Chain of Command. To represent the surprise nature of this midnight attack, Ron allowed the Arab patrol markers some free moves, which meant that two of my patrol markers were locked at the sandbag wall before I even got a chance to move them and my third was locked on its first move. This point my jump off points back within the buildings and left me hoping that I could get to the sandbags in time to fend off the marauding irregulars.

We rolled for force morale and my Ottoman infantry wound up with a 10 and the Arab raiders got an 8, a promising start for me, but fortune was fleeting. The Arab player won the first few phases and before I knew it, three of his sections were up near the sandbag wall. We were playing with night fighting rules (visibility was 18" unless the target had fired previously and everywhere on the table was considered one level of cover higher), which meant I wouldn't have been able to shoot much farther beyond the barricade, but I was certainly starting to sweat a bit. My concerns were further multiplied by the fact that, to represent the surprise to my garrison, I started out with only one command die and would only receive an additional one each turn after the alarm was raised. When I finally got a chance to act, I deployed a Maxim team which caused little damage before it was wiped out (thankfully my force morale only dropped one point from the loss of these two men). I was also able to bring up a senior leader and infantry section rather quickly and positioned them on the rooftop of the northern-most building. From that position they exchanged a few rounds of fire with the approaching raiders, but thankfully did not suffer any serious casualties. They were, however, unable to stop the advancing enemy section, and before I knew it Lawrence himself was leading a section of Arabs in an assault on the building. This was one of the times in which my opponents' inexperience with the rules left its mark on the outcome (I say this having only played one or two times before). To conduct effective close assaults in Chain of Command, the opposing force must be seriously whittled down by casualties and/or shock. My section was almost completely in tact and only had 2 or so points of shock. Considering my advantage in numbers and the benefits of defending the higher level of the building, the odds for the Arabs did not bode well. In what I assumed was a brief, but ferocious melee, we both took heavy casualties, and all the junior and senior leaders involved received some type of wound, limiting their abilities. The "Bad Stuff Happens" tables were consulted and both sides wound up with equal levels of force morale. Though I had paid dearly for it, a serious threat to the compound had been blunted. For the remained of the game, pot shots would be exchanged by the remnants of the sections, but no more serious action occurred on that flank.

Elsewhere, the rest of the raid quickly lost its steam (partly due a string of three consecutive phases for my Turks) and something of a stalemate took shape, with the Arabs pouring fire into the compound from behind the sandbags, while my other sections and machine gun team clung to the rooftops on the other buildings. A few men fell on each side, but fortunately for me, the two enemy sections on the southern flank were rated "green" and lacked the Lewis guns of the other two "elite" sections in the attack, which gave me the edge in the firefight. While a moved one section up to occupy the building where the failed assault had taken place (and where the supplies the Arabs sought were hidden), my other section and Maxim team laid heavy fire down on the enemy squads, eventually destroying one. With more than half of his original platoon gone, all of his remaining leaders wounded, and his chances of completing his objective dwindling, my opponent decided to pull his forces out of the fight. A surprising victory for the Ottoman garrison caught off-guard. Thanks Ron for a fun little game!

The situation shortly before the Arab withdrawal.

Without the game Peter and I had planned, the next day passed by rather uneventfully. I spent some time chatting with vendors and made a few purchases (a copy of the Blood and Plunder pirate rules and a long OOP Flames of War Irish Guards dice set - not that I'm a FoW player, but just because the dice are cool and it was a good price). Midway through the afternoon, Chris and I played a demo of fantasy game called "Chronicles" that will launching a Kickstarter soon. I don't typically play fantasy games but the GM crew seems nice enough and the figures and materials looked great, so I decided to give it a try. There is a very elaborate backstory for the game's universe and some well-written specials rules for various characters, but it wasn't my cup of tea. Instead of operating part of a unit, each figure moves and fights independently, which means the game can quickly devolve into a giant, bloody rugby scrum. We didn't even play through two turns and both had suffered probably close to 2/3 or 3/4 casualties. The rules are still underdevelopment (and we were ignoring the shooting rules), so I can't cast serious judgement, but if you're in the market for a new high fantasy game, keep your eyes peeled on Kickstarter.

Beginning our demo of "Chronicles"

Sundays at gaming shows are usually not the most exciting of days, but the Williamsburg conventions have the added bonus of a free flea market in the morning, so I came back early the next day to see what was being offered. Though I was unable to move the painted French Napoleonic infantry I had brought along, I did sell some storage trays I purchased to hold some boardgame components I sold a few months back. This gave me enough cash to make my last purchase of the show - a starter painting set...we'll see where that leads me.

Though not as eventful as I had hoped, the Muster made a nice weekend with good friends and (if anything) a nice refresher of Chain of Command as I anxiously await to get my own WWII games up and running.

Stay tuned for some scenery reviews in the next couple days.