The Great Antipodean Adventure (Very Australian Civil War) Rules Update!

Botanic Gardens Sydney 1932, A Crossley Truck Armed with a Lewis Gun prowls the park!

We have played several games covering the 'Very Australian Civil War' in our Great Antipodean Adventure Campaign using modified A World Aflame Rules. These games have gone well as essentially AWA gives you a good sandbox for Inter-War gaming but our they have shown the system still requires a bit too much record keeping (even with my changes) so time for a change! BUT AWA has some really good stuff we don't want to lose (see my earlier review of them)! Right enter a set of rules based on ones we've played and enjoyed, the Men Who Would Be Kings, well the WW I version called Foch! Lets take the good parts from both and Frankenstein them together into something very loosely called 'The Men Who Would be Premiers of A World Aflame'...the final title is yet to be determined!

The playtests have been really good we just need to include a final test game with armoured vehicles (we have included soft skins already)!

So from TMWWBKs;

Units are similar but using points you can make them larger or small the normal being 10 figures.

The options to upgrade and downgrade Units have been updated gain to suit the period.

The basic Actions have changed a bit to reflect the period.

The Arms Table has been updated with period weapons (yes the ranges may look short but I believe in effective ranges rather than weapon ranges!). Importantly to keep it simple there's no Pistols, Carbines, SMGs, bolt action rifle, single shot rifles etc Just 2 basic types of arms, rifle based units and mixed arms nice and easy!

Close Combat is used as written.

Pin and rally Tests are as per our modifications we already use in TMWWBK normally already

A Basic Force Morale Rule has been added.

From the A World Aflame;

Vehicle Obstacle Check

Anti Tank Firing minor class change the system is as is.

Small Arms fire against Armoured and Un-Armoured vehicles with very minor changes.

Close Combat versus Armoured and Un-Armoured vehicles with again minor changes.

This is what the Rules look like at two pages in length and in a good sized font (unlike my FUBAR VSF set now moving into three pages!), I just have to figure out how to include the section on the Vehicle Obstacle Check (which I think needs to be in all rules including armed vehicles to stop them running rampant!);

And here's the basic Unit Templates, the Vehicle ones are in red as testing with those continues!

Here are some pics of Government Forces versus some unruly Unionists during testing!

Another ECW AAR - Baroque Rules

We played our second ECW game using Baroque rules last November (so yes I am a bit late with this AAR!). It was another balanced scenario with two sides of 600 points using the rules army lists as we were introducing George and Al to the rules, we'll get a bit more fancy next time!

Maurice adjudicated, George and I were the Royalists and Alan and Dave were the Parliamentarians. I was busy playing so we only have a handful of pictures from the night!

Hidden deployment was used and surprisingly both sides set up with infantry in their centre and left and all their cavalry on their right, an interesting situation. The picture below shows the royalists on the left  and the Parliamentarians on the right.

The Royalists went ahead with their plan to roll up the Roundheads line and their horse charged forward, interestingly the Parliamentarians decided to abandon their plan and moved their horse across the front of their line to engage the Cavalier's cavalry! One Royalist Horse Unit pushed hard and it can be seen in a position to flank the Parliamentarian infantry!

The Cavalier cavalry where overall (but not totally) successful and began to roll up the Roundheads line!

Overall view of the battlefield point...

...and a close up of the main area of action, the successful Royalist cavalry can be seen massing to the left, there is less Parliamentarian infantry and the Roundhead horsemen can be seen still redeploying to come to grips with their opponents!

Cavaliers face off against the sole Parliamentarian infantry unit to survive the initial Royalist surge!

There was some desultory fire between the armies infantry units in the centre before the Roundhead infantry was trampled under foot!

But the Royalists inflicted enough losses during the cavalry clash once the Roundhead horse redeployed to break the the Parliamentary army which withdrew even though the actual cavalry clash was a very even fight!

A Royalist victory, thanks to their rampant cavalry!

I wonder if the Parliamentarians had kept to their plan and used their cavalry to push the Royalist left whether the result may have been much more interesting, as it was while the Roundhead horse wasted time redeploying the Cavalier horse used the same time to trample many a foot soldier gaining the Royalist a big advantage!

Anyway another good ECW game ensued on the night and it played out in a timely manner! We got the rules pretty well spot on this time and Al (with no initial knowledge of the ECW or the Pike & Shotte period) and George were across them by the end of the night. Overall these rules are really easy to pick up, as mentioned last time the combat system (the same system for firing and melee) takes a bit to get across it but once you do know the process to follow it works well! Units can become brittle and once they are at that stage can break quickly so force management is important! Next time I'll look at the ECW scenarios we have on hand and play one of those for some variety!