Mythical Worlds – The Wargaming Erratic

Narrative

The Corinovans are in retreat, “B” division has been destroyed holding the coastal city of Viana and now inland, “A” division is dangerously exposed to isolation by the rampant Gombardian forces.

Remnants of “B” division and elements of “C” division in retreat, continued to try and intercept Gombardian thrusts on “A” division’s eastern flank.

My previous Fauxterre post covered the strategic situation that lead to this action.

The game

Essentially this is an escalating engagement and I simply used the scenario from Neil Thomas’ “An introduction to wargaming”. His World War Two rules reflect his simple yet interesting approach you can find in his more popular books like one hour wargames, C19th Century European warfare or ancient and medieval warfare.

The rulebook offers four scenarios

Encounter

Frontal assault

Surprise assault

Escalating engagement

I opted for an escalating engagement action reflecting the chaos of a rapid advance experienced by both sides.

I took the real world unit lists in the book and came up with two slightly different lists for the Gombardians – plenty of armour like Germans while the Corinovans were more likely to field infantry like the French.

I used my own table for observation – everything had an observation rule to help cause friction that’s required for a solo game.

The scenario set victory conditions based on three shared objectives – the winner having two or all three at the end of the game. I had a count down variable tracker but this had not expired when one side patently had run out of forces.

The three objectives were the

Town

Sawmill

Orchard

Both sides quickly acquired either the sawmill or town.

It remained simply to fight it out for the orchard.

As the table was created first before selecting the scenario it was also the case that the opposing forces diced for arrival points.

Each side had 9 units and deployed 3 units to start but I also applied scenario requirements that all six remaining units arrived on an improving odds dice throw each turn.

Here is some of the key action.

The base cloth can use its grid but today I am using Neil Thomas rules with measured distances

The walled orchard – soon to be the centre of attention

In the distance an old sawmill nestles beneath the hill

The action now centres on the walled orchard

The gombardians are beginning to wear down the Corinovans in the orchard

The battle moves toward a conclusion

The gombardians are now driven back to the town area

A few Corinovans hold the orchard and so have secured the “two objectives” orders. The gombardians have failed and decide to withdraw leaving the town in the possession of the Corinovans.

The Gombardians had arrived with armour which fits the scenario of a fluid front in the campaign situation. But they did not have enough infantry to take on the Corinovans in the congested orchard area.

The army lists therefore helped create an asymmetric game and the armour heavy force on this occasion lost.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_-_How_They_Met_Themselves_%281860-64_circa%29.jpg — https://dantisamor.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/how-they-met-themselves-pre-raphaelitism-and-the-double/

What happens when you meet your doppelganger?

Actually it is best not to.

In my case – creating a Mythical Realm is not normally a problem because I tend to invent some totally separate location that just happens to have the same oxygen, societies, nature, science and warfare of the period I want to plunder.

And then occasionally real history just cries out to be used. Italy is a regular case in point for me. Most recently I was on a Normans in the South (NitS) splurge before crashing into Faux Napoleonics by Renaissance Troll.

One thing has led to another and one minute I was on the Wars of the Italian Unification (WotIU) – kepis, garibaldi and kettels, next I am thinking how to do Napoleonics without Napoleon, Wellington or Blucher etc.

Well I have solved the problem – it is a Vardoger Planet – ok maybe it is a sort of doppelganger.

The story is this.

Once upon a time there was a planet – called Earth and in front of it so to speak was another planet called Earth which experienced everything just that bit earlier. And so the worlds trundled along except that one day there was a small ripple and it was a very small ripple.

No one noticed because no one knew. Well I guess someone knew because I would not be telling you this.

We live on the first planet, or lead planet. The “Vardoger” one. Now our following planet is just slightly different.

Welcome to “Fauxterre” where things are just slightly different.