ECW GOES OLD SCHOOL!

As well as my Ottoman work-in-progress, the recent generous donation of figures resulting in other club members obtaining boxes of goodies. Ian bagged a shoebox of 25mm English Civil War figures, mostly a mix of Minifigs and Hinchcliffe. He decided that, in keeping with the era the figures hail from, he wasn't going to do anything too clever, so he simply replaced missing pikes etc, stuck them on new bases, just painted green and flocked. The result was a perfectly presentable army and, more importantly, ready to play and on the table when I'm only halfway through the Ottomans.

He has had a (long) ongoing project to put together 10mm forces to play Peter Pig's "Regiment of Foote", so the new acquisitions were based up for those rules. Technically it's a few stands of cavalry light, but there is just enough to field two armies for the rules, which is what we did at the last club meeting.

My Parliamentarians did very well out of the pre-game marches, so I ended up attacking with 2 of my cavalry and 4 of my infantry regiments at Veteran level, the Royalist is not fare so well, sadly. They also had several regiments and a gun delayed on the march and arriving late.

I put two Veteran infantry regiments on either flank and the bulk of my cavalry on my Right. With the large manor house dominating the centre of the battlefield I intended to ignore that, unless the Parliamentarians attacked through there. Instead the units in the centre would veer around the manor to support either flank. The stone wall made a strong defensive position, so my Right would just hold their ground whilst the Left would attack and try to break through before the late arrival reinforced the Parliament position.

We ran out of time to finish the game, mainly due to the fact that neither of us had played (or even looked at) the rules for some considerable time, so the game moved a bit slowly to begin with. By the end the Royalists had lost 3 infantry regiments routed to the Parliament's single loss, so a couple more turns should have (might have?) seen a Parliament victory.

Two outstanding moments from the game. The first was the Royalist plan of massing all their cavalry on one flank intending to crush that side and then roll up my line, but deploying behind a stone wall because he had forgotten how hard it is for cavalry to cross obstacles (did I mention we hadn't read the rules for a while?). The other was the melee when the Royalists threw a massive 16 dice to my 9....and ended up retiring! All good fun with a good set of rules.

 The Parliament's cunningly deployed Right Flank behind a stone wall.

The Parliamant's Left Flank and centre (awaiting late arrivals).

The Royalist deployment, seen from the Parliament's perspective.

Other games that night were a 28mm ACW game using Fire and Fury, a 20mm WW2  Rapid Fire game and a Wings of War game.