"One Hour Wargames" - Scenario 13 - "Escape" - Game

Captain Lucien Verbeek, Belgian observer for
his majesty King Leopold II of Belgium
(and his horse Teufel ) [clicky].

..and what a cracker it turned out to be...

So just a quick re-cap - six British/Empire units enter the table on one side, and a minimum of three of them need to exit the other side within 15 moves. They are opposed by twelve Dervish units whose arrival time, location, and type, will be diced for apart from a small blocking force comprising one unit of spear armed foot, and an ancient muzzle loading cannon that sits astride the road between the British and their exit point...

Turn two or three (probably the latter), picture following - DG as British/Empire player has his Egyptian Battalion on point - the Bengal Lancers on the road have already been badly handled by the venerable old muzzle loader (the Dervish must have given the Egyptian gunners a particularly good beating just before firing!)...  on the far left of his flank the Gatling is about to open fire on said muzzle loader..

..and this was my view of them..  

You'll note in the picture following that there still appears to be very few Dervish about... their  arrival was diced for on a percentile dice, 80%+ on move one, 70%+ on move two, etc etc. Suffice to say that DG had an open road until at least move 5 or 6 as my dice rolling was atrocious, and even when I got a successful rolled for an arrival the subsequent roll for number of units turning up was also low....

A magnificent fighting retreat - the Dervish rolled a statistically unusually high number of cavalry and camelry units for this game - from memory I think I ended up with at least 6 -  in the following (about move 11 or 12) the British regulars are deploying to face the camels while the Egyptians and the Sikhs are taking on the blocking force..  the Bengal Lancers have bravely sacrificed themselves to allow the Sudanese infantry in the distance to break away...

Penultimate move and the British regulars have become something of a 'Dervish magnet' as the Dervish commander scents victory... they may have arrived late but six Dervish rubs of troops are converging on them as DG now only has two units (the remains of the Sudanese, and the Sikhs) at the exit point...  alas it was not to be as two of the Dervish units were rifle armed, and in the very last moves of the game did for the regulars and deprived DG of the victory...

Post match analysis:

• My oh my it was close.. 
• The new shooting mechanism worked well and speeded up play while not (to me, anyway) detracting from the simulation..  for the next game I need to figure out a way of also speeding up the casualty calculation (it's a two stage mechanism, dice to hit and then from the hits dice for kills)
• The mechanism for handling the Gatling was also good (I decided to lose the second stage and all hits were assumed to be casualties) and I also adopted the mechanism that the target unit immediately has to take a pluck tests for the morale effect..  a very clever idea from Paul O'G one of the poor benighted fools who seems to find value from this blog!
• Drinks on the evening were Adnams "Ghost Ship" ("At 4.5% abv, this Pale Ale has a good assertive pithy bitterness and a malty backbone. It is brewed with a selection of malts – Pale Ale, Rye and Cara – we use Citra, and a blend of other American hop varieties to create some great citrus flavours") and very refreshing it was on a somewhat warm and sticky evening in the loft...  speaking of warm and sticky, essential body salts were replaced with the assistance of a bag of salt and vinegar Kettle Crisps...!