10/14 SBGC Meeting, The Siege of Delhi and more!

October 15, 2023

10/14 SBGC Meeting, The Siege of Delhi and more!

At this month's SBGC meeting I played in Stephen Freedmen's Indian Mutiny game: The Siege of Delhi.

Stephen provided all the miniatures and terrain. The mad lad actually made this recreation of the Red Fort in Delhi himself. It's incredibly impressive.

I played on the side of the Indian mutineers, controlling the forces of Tipu Sultan (pictured above with his tiger, don’t they look awesome??). The scenario was simple, British forces had to enter the inner fort with 2 units, and keep them there for 2 turns

I controlled 2 houses on the left wing, and was positioned the closest to the attacking British forces, far ahead of the Red Fort and the rest of the Mutineer army. I would have an ally move to relieve me later, but he didn't enter on the first turn.

Due to my forward position defending a fortified village, I was able to keep the British forces back on the left and center, but on the right, the British had created breaches with TNT and cannon fire, and were assaulting the walls with ladders.

The assault rules made defending the houses I occupied very easy, the British lost many units trying to take them in melee. After a few turns of failed assaults and many routed British squads, they decided rather than try to fight for the houses hand to hand, they would sit back out of my musket range and just shoot at me and chip away with their more advanced guns. This was slower, but more effective.

On either the 3rd or 4th turn, the final off board Mutineer unit arrived. A bunch of cavalry riding in from behind the British lines. Hopefully they'll do something useful!

On the right, the British tried to take the fort several times, I was not always paying attention to what was going on on that side of the battle, but from what I gathered, it was just going back and forth with the British controlling the walls one moment, and then the Indian Mutineers controlling it the next.

Remember that Mutineer cavalry I mentioned that arrived on the 3rd or 4th turn? Well they did not end up covering themselves in glory this day. The British cavalry was waiting for them. Above is a picture of the Mutineer cavalry leader deciding to make a last stand. Theres only 1 opposing British cavalry unit in the picture, but there are more off screen.

After several turns of getting slowly chipped away at by British fire, I realized that my troops would have to do something, or else we'd just be killed slowly. My ally had gotten close enough to provide some support. I had the feeling in the back of my mind that he wasn't quite close enough, but he had already been waiting to fight for several turns. He had entered the table on the 2nd turn and had waited a long time just moving his units from the edge of the table to my position, he was really eager to get into the action. So with an ally that was chomping at the bit to get into a fight, and with my own forces being slowly eroded by British muskets without being able to shoot back, my ally and I made a very risky all out charge with everything we had.

I really wanted to let my ally get closer, so that we could avoid attacking one force at a time in a piece meal fashion, but I misjudged the distances we could move and that is exactly what ended up happening. I lost pretty much my entire army, and my ally could only reach the houses that I had just charged out of. Unfortunately, I really should have waited a turn or 2 before launching my attack. I was effectively out of the game, and my ally was in the same position that I was in before. Luckily his muskets were more advanced then the ones I had and would at least be able to fire back at the enemy.

Like most games that have 8+ players and run for 5+ hours, we didn't get close to finishing the match. The British HAD breached the walls, and had been working on scaling it, but we decided that they had taken too many casualties trying to take take them, they'd never be able to take the actual fort itself with the forces that remained. Of course we will never know because we didn't get that far! It was a great game though, with beautiful scenery. Stephen's always got the nicest looking terrain and he always puts effort into small details, like including paintings inside his houses.

We also had Greg Guth's Operation Epsom pt 2. I believe the British ended up winning this one. From what I gathered, the Germans had to capture 8/10 houses, but by the end of the game had only captured 7, and needed to make an important roll in order to capture the last house on the last turn, but they flubbed it and lost. Sounds like a really close match, bet it was fun.