Debutantes at the Cotillion…

The first game of Regimental Fire and Fury went off well. I’ll do a ‘first thoughts’ quasi-review post at some point in the near future. In the meantime, here’s a half baked after action report based around a few photos from the game.

The first turn-I neglected to take a shot of the initial setup, but this is what things looked like after the first movement phase. I ended up defending this hill.

We didn’t have  a scenario, nor did we have any real terrain intended for the ACW.

We DID have a terrain mat made of muslin cloth, acrylic caulk, sand, kitty litter, and flock material which I had made for 28mm Old West gaming. It’s a bit too arid looking for the ACW, but is going to work great for some upcoming Peninsular War gaming I plan on doing.

I brought along some of those awful Woodland Scenics trees that I had made up way back when I first got interested in this hobby. At this point they look like the fleabitten calico cats of the wargaming world, but with some felt provided by my opponent (who we’ll call The Scarlet J from here on out) did serve to delineate some woods.

We played at a local gaming store (hello Gamer Utopia), which has a Warhammer playing contingent. We borrowed some of their terrain pieces to slip under my mat and make hills and ridges. Before long, we had a semi-credible looking battlefield.

I was the Confederates and The Scarlet J took the Union side. We had a three regiment brigade each, with an attached battery. Units of note included a small 5 stand veteran regiment on the Confederate side, and an 8 stand unit of Zouaves for the bluebellies.

First Contact and The Wonders of Pillow Stuffing

The Scarlet J’s Union forces pushed hard against my right the entire afternoon. I put my regiment on that flank into extended line, which helped make them a bit more resilient, but they took a good bit of damage over the course of the game, and ceded quite a bit of ground. However, if my left had done a better job the right could have been considered as being quite successful at holding up the bulk of the union brigade.

The Leftists

Above we see the two regiments holding my left flank. TSJ pushed pretty aggressively on this flank, too, but our preponderance of fire did quite a lot of damage to his single regiment. Those are my veterans on the right, and some mishandling on my part brought them great harm later in the game.

The fighting on the right was hot and heavy the entire afternoon…

We don’t have a full complement of miniatures markers painted up yet, and these brightly colored blocks were used instead. Yellow means disordered. I think my artillery had done some damage to those bluecoats at the top, though they were rather ineffective the rest of the game. Those Zouaves were a menace!

You can see how the Zouaves bent my line…

My strong forces on my left flankmanaged to route these New Yorkers to the back of the table. They did eventually rally, but didn’t get back into the fight before we called the game. Those Parrott rifles were almost as bad as the Zouaves.

At the end of the game…

We played for about 4 hours, before we had to quit. I bet we could do a game this size in about 2-2.5 hours next time. We ended up calling this a draw, though if it had been up to me alone, I would have been tempted to call it a minor Union victory. The Scarlet J pushed my forces around all over the table, but he never took an objective (nor did I!), and losses were relatively even on both sides.

I had a blast (pun intended)!