6/8 SBGC Meeting: Shuffle Off to Buffalo

At this month's SBGC meeting, Pete ran a Anglo Zulu War game using The Sword and the Flame and Stephen ran his Siege of Alesia scenario using Hail Caesar.

I've been wanting to try out The Sword and the Flame so I joined Pete's game. The scenario would be an Anglo column trying to cross Zulu territory in order to resupply Fort Pearson. All players would play as the Anglos while the GM played the Zulu.

For this scenario the GM would determine the location of the Zulu Impi randomly but would not deploy them, it was up to the players to send out scouts and locate the Impi's. The Zulu's were known for using a formation called the Buffalo's Horn, which divided an Impi into 4 groups. One group would be the Left Horn, taking a position to the front left, another group the Right Horn, positioned opposite the Left Horn, the 3rd group would be the Buffalo's Chest, between the Horns, and behind the Chest would be the Rump, the last group. The chest would engage the enemy at the center while the horns would attempt to flank or envelop them, with the rump acting as a tactical reserve.

Because we could expect the Zulus to attack in this formation, we knew that if our scouts located one group of Zulus, we would find the other 3 near by, what would matter to us is which group of Zulus we had found. If we located the chest, then we knew that both flanks would be threatened, if we located one of the horns, then we knew one flank would be relatively secure.

We eventually found 2 groups of Zulu's but were unsure which parts of the buffalo they were. Further scouts were sent out until we found the third group, which confirmed for us that we were engage by the Zulu center.

Luckily the right horn was still behind impassable rock terrain.

Unluckily, the Zulu's had used the rolling hills to appear right in front of us. We had covered this ground earlier with our scouts but they apparently missed the 2 huge groups of Zulus off to their left.

This nullified our greatest advantage, our superior firepower, and the Zulus were on us in a turn.

Additionally, because we thought we were safely moving through area that our scouts had covered, our formation was not the best for receiving contact, and our guns were not able to mutually support each other, most of our units couldn't draw line of sight to the quickly approaching Zulus due to the rolling hills that obstructed our view.

We were only able to get 1 or 2 volleys off before the Left Horn and Chest reached the thin red line, we played several round of bloody melee and tried to move our center and right into a position to support the left, but not fast enough. It was only after one very lethal round of melee, that resulted in Bob Bergman losing 90% of his company, did we figure out that we were playing the melee rules wrong and that far more people were dying than should've been. We did our best to fix the situation and resurrect the formerly dead miniatures, but really, it didn't help much. The Zulus were already engaged in melee with us, and there was 2 more fresh groups of Zulu's marching in. 

We had to end the game before we could play out its conclusion but I think with how things were going, we would've lost.

Over at the other table, Stephen had recreated the attempted Gallic breakthrough during the Siege of Alesia. Caesar had built a huge fort encircling the Gallic city of Alesia, trying to starve the Gauls out. Luckily for the Gaul's, there was a relief force on its way, both Gallic forces would attack Caesar's fort from both sides, trying to reach one another and secure an exit out of the besieged city.

I did not play this game but from what I was told, it played out exactly as it did in history, the Gaul's were initially successful, but after a while their momentum fizzled out and both assaults were eventually fought back, resulting in a Roman victory. 

It was a beautiful table that Stephen built entirely from scratch. I am ever impressed by his ability to craft epic miniature battlefields with just some foam and sticks.

Anyways, today is 6/18, the anniversary of Waterloo and I spent it rewatching Bondarchuk's Waterloo for the twentieth time. This Sunday, the Game Kastle Fremont guys will be running a huge Waterloo game that I will be joining, and I will post a battle report and pictures from it soon after, I will see you then!