SCW Republican Raid Part 3

Republican Raid - The 3rd and very final part

Well I was hoping for an exciting write up detailing the cut and thrust of a Republican attack, the lines flowing back and forth as both sides battled for supremacy, sadly that's not what happened, one word covers it and that is massacre.

View of the Killing Fields, a Legion unit with deployed LMG wait the advance on a rooftop.

The Anarchist group currently elected to suggest things for the troops to do, but to suggest them in a none confrontational manner whilst realising that they are no better than the rest, look the other way towards the Legion and Carlists.

This bad boy took the Republicans roughly from behind without even buying them a meal and a drink first.

Those of you familiar with the TooFatLardies rules will recognise this card as the Tea Break card, for the SCW we spent hours coming up with a radical new name for the card for our game and settled on Siesta ;-) Those of you unfamiliar with the rules may not know the significance of it. Basically each turn is run by an activation deck, each unit has a card in the deck, when the card is drawn that unit can fire, move or reserve its fire until the end of the turn. However if the Siesta card comes out the turn ends, any unit can move towards the nearest cover or fire (if it passes a morale check) if its card has not come out.

The start of the ill fated attack, the Anarchists in the foreground have already been pushed back.
The Republican plan of pushing units forward to draw fire so other units could use the cover of the woods to attack the less heavily defended redoubts just didn't work, every turn the Siesta card came out early, always after the Legion had fired and usually leaving one or two units out in the open to get shot at. The result was unit after unit getting wiped out, the Republicans unable to co-ordinate the attack due to bad luck with the cards just died in droves in the killing ground.

The Republican casualty pile from the attack. Not a pretty sight.

And that was that. No one was sitting round the camp fires celebrating singing 'Viva la Quince Brigada'

One of the things I like about the TooFatLardies card system is the unpredictability of it, however it makes it extremely difficult to co ordinate a large attack involving a large number of units, just like it would be in real life. In the 4 or 5 years we have been using these type of rules this has been the worst outcome as a result of the way the cards were drawn. I'm also still not sure about the card activation system for larger games, it leaves some people who don't have their cards drawn out of the game. It works well for a couple of hour club games but the larger weekend games I'm not sure yet. In the back of my mind I'm thinking about having cards activating larger bodies of figures, maybe having two Siesta Cards with the turn ending on the second card or using separate decks of cards for different zones on the battlefield. Any thoughts or solutions would be gratefully accepted.

So that was the end of that. Next up we travel back in time to the AWI, a new game starting Sunday using British Grenadier.