Huzzah! 2025 Convention

 Last Saturday I drove down from Georgetown to the convention in South Portland, signed in for the game “Between Two Fires”. The scenario was based on the British withdrawal from Concord along Battle Road. The rules were Fistful of Lead: Bigger Battles. The original Fistful of Lead were western gunfight rules that have since spawned a number of period variants. Last year a scenario based on fighting outside Bastogne in 1944 was played at the convention. I wasn’t fast enough signing up. I’ve never played any of the Fistful of Lead (FOL) rules, so this was my maiden voyage.

I ended up commanding a company of British grenadiers and a weaker light company. The other British player, who had once played FOL before, had a similar command and the Lt. Colonel in charge. The rebels had three full strength companies, one of them being light infantry, all irregulars. We were attempting to clear the road to Boston for the rest of the force behind us. 

We didn’t have a plan beyond that. My ad-hoc improvisations ensured that I suffered severely as a result. FOL proceeds by card play using a standard deck of cards. My light infantry activated first and filled their cartridge boxes. I should have activated the grenadiers first and saved the lights for later. My grenadiers blocked the road when the other grenadiers activated before them. It was a sign of things to come.

 

Next, I had my grenadiers move over the wall to their right, where I discovered how slowly they moved in the dense woods. A fairly large party of enemy light troops was in the woods and my light company crossed over to help deal with them. My grenadiers next got back into the road, formed in a formation that looked like a column, though all units on both sides were in a loose mob.

 

Now this apparent column on the road faced a rebel unit in a loose line behind a wall. My ingrained column-loses-firefight-to-line kicked in. In truth, all my figures could fire, so the firefight wasn’t as one-sided as it appeared.   But that’s hindsight. At the time, I marched into close range, hoping their first fire would be unlucky. Instead, they rolled a tad over average, shooting a number of my lads down and putting a lot of shock on them. The Lt. Colonel used his special activation card to remove three of their four shock markers. Thank you, Lt. Colonel! My next activation was a wild card, used as a queen of hearts. This brought two of my casualties back, crying “I’m not dead yet”. I decided to charge, hoping the rebels would run from cold steel. Wrong, they stood and beat me back into the road. Another rebel unit then fired into me and caused the remaining grenadiers to flee into the woods. My next activation saw the real queen of hearts bring back one more casualty and my grenadiers stayed out of the line of fire for the rest of the game.

 

Meanwhile the two understrength British light companies slowly whittled down the tenacious rebel light troops in the woods. As the game wound down Crown forces obviously had not cleared the road to Boston. We had lost much more heavily than the rebels and most of our losses were my poor grenadiers. Promotion was not in the cards for me, unless my parents could pony up the funds for a serious purchase. 

Hindsight says I should have moved up the road rapidly with my light company covering my left, peppered the rebels, drawn their first fire at long range and then tried to roust them. It would still have been a hard row to hoe but hopefully better than the disaster that I perpetrated.

 

The table was gorgeous and the game master had done a great paint job on his Perry miniatures. We had played 7 or 8 turns in a tad under 3 hours. Of the five players, only two had any experience with FOL rules. Well done and the conversation around the table was agreeable.

 

Now for my take on the rules. First, let me say that I only speak for my taste, each to their own.

 

I am not a fan of various types of dice in a single game. This used D12, D10 and D8 dice. The card activation sometimes kind of died down. Each unit gets a card, and each officer, including the company commanders. If their unit doesn’t have shock to rally (and possibly some other things that I’ve since forgot), when their card is drawn, they have nothing to do. Waiting at the tail end of each turn for officers to activate and then do nil slows the game. On the other hand, the card activation creates some chaos, which is always a good thing. I liked the scale of the game but am not sold on all the mechanisms.

 

The fellow across the table who shellacked me was Nathaniel St. John, who has published a set of American Civil War rules called The Devil to Pay. The rules are available online for free https://www.thedeviltopay.com/ . Each player is a brigade CO, with 3-5 regiments and a battery. It uses D6s solely. There are only 14 cards played in a turn. I’d use chits since that saves shuffling. Toss ‘em in a cup and shake. When troops activate, all players on that side activate. Not knowing what phase comes next ads to the chaos, which, as said before, is a good thing.

 

Possible drawbacks are the number of markers needed to indicate orders and hits. I’ll make some small and discrete ones. Also, every base (not yet hit) rolls a D6 needing 4+ for a hit. Some turns might see serious damage. On the other hand, it should give a fast game.  Like Loose Files and American Scramble, once a unit has a hit for each base, any additional hits cause lost bases. The rules do allow units to skedaddle before the next card (or chit) is drawn, at the cost of becoming disordered.

 

I hope to give these a try. Been looking for a set of rules where the base units are regiments (battalions) and batteries. We’ve been playing Bloody Big Battles where the base units are brigades or divisions. Excellent games for whole large battles, but sometimes you want to know the 114^th Pennsylvania is going in.

 

Here are some pictures of other games I saw, lovely tables and figures.