French vs English larger scale Song of Drums and Tomahawks. Beating the bounds.

A Continental Clash or "let them eat cake", which was nice.  Battle of  Six Cakes?

We've seen several online questions to whit “can I do AWI with these rules. So far we've done small to medium skirmishes. Now here is the big one.

Like all the other games, every troop type is from the book.

Each side has 1 officer, 1 sergeant and 16 infantry. There's no significance to any of these numbers, just what I have available*. Warbases penny bases were used, no doubt they are wrongly spaced, but at least consistent.

There was a choice for secondary troops:
Indian Warleader @92 + 10 Warriors at 30 = 392. Or 12 Warriors @ 360.
British Frontiersmen (there have rifles) 8 x 48 = 384
Coer De Bois 8 x 44 = 352 1 can be upgraded to leader @ 15 making 367.

The game.

 
I kept the scenery as simple as possible, as I was looking for a simple clash of arms. The carpet represents trees. I'm working on new tree bases, but I didn't get them done in time, see next article!

I had the Brits plus Indians, Tony had French plus Coer De Bois. Initiative decided deployment, starting with the loser, the right and one 4-base in. We are not experts on the tactics of the day, so excuse us for any glaring faults.

I set my braves in a long, long skirmish line, Tony came on in a column with his Bois split in two on each flank.

Tony's party met mine in the woods and I got the worst of it. He also let loose with his front rank on my skirmish line, which knocked it for 6. We guessed that interpenetration would take an action and move a base depth forward.

I got within 1 long move and let go (the officers had exchanged pistol fire to no effect) -this was our main mistake, I think. We should have done an exchange of fire with me leading, rather than just me going bang, although it didn't make any difference to the conclusion. We assumed that the leader will yell “shoot” and everyone would obey as a group action.

I killed his officer, which led to a surprisingly uniform withdraw. I failed to follow up, which allowed the sergeant to rally the troops, finally getting them loaded.

I followed up, slowly, with several fails. I “impacted” on his downed troops, one of which has to be mentioned in dispatches as he held out for 3 fights, knocking one of mine down and pushing back another despite being on the deck and outnumbered. They bought time. My sergeant managed to rally a mishmash of braves and then went forward to take out his opposite number. Despite doing a strong strike, he died. Braves departed in search of the god of good dice rolls.

Tony got his left hand bunch of Bois (the left effective, having a leader present) to sneak up close to my rear, shoot me to bits then retire. Forcing me to turn my right hand in defence, having no braves worth speaking of.  This allowed Tony to leave the field in good order.

Conclusion. These rules don't work for larger battles, although they could be tweaked. You need a leader for every 8 or so. The much larger game we did for Giant Rat of Sumatra worked much better. These rules have an optimum of about 12 figures. Don't get me wrong, they're an excellent addition to our Ganesha collection and will see regular service. Hope you've enjoyed these trial game reports as much as we enjoyed playing them.

* The Reds and Blues do English, revenue and Continental troops vs my pirates. I also have some of Rebel's excellent pirate hunters, from which the officers and sergeants derive, plus my greenjackets and a small “better” blue force. By chance I'd bought a pack of Coer de Bois to fill out the lower ranks of my pirate crews. Indians were bought from Irregular Miniatures as Caribbean natives, Cameroon s and tribal Martians.