Battle of Winstanton, a Pike and Shotte Battle.

Although I havent posted for a while I have actually been doing the odd bit of wargaming in between jobbing on with real life. Who said retirement was easy.

Anyway I have had a couple of cracking wargames one with Paul Stevenson and one with John my arch enemy.

I am lucky to have known Paul for a lot of years and he has always put on a cracking wargame, his forte is however the American Civil War, who hasnt got his book about wargaming the period. Its a classic. Paul has been working on a set of rules to cover the ACW which has now grown to cover the musket period of warfare. Last week I traveled over to his home to sample his latest developments. He kindly staged  an ACW game using his lovely Perry figures, his armies have grown exponentially since our last battle..  I picked the Union which realistically had better artillery, more infantry and more green regiments. A deadly combination. Paul led a veteran Confederate division with less firepower but better generals. Whoever said the big battalions win? Naturally I lost the battle due to a combination of foolish expectation for my green troops and some poor dice throwing. But the actual game was a cracking affair and in the balance until the collapse of my centre. As for Paul's rules? I thought they flowed well, contained some lovely game mechanisms and as to be expected gave a great feel for the period. I hope he gets them published, they deserve wider recognition.

I then staged a small English Civil Wargame using a scenario from the King and Parliament Black Powder book. The Battle of Winstanton was small enough to allow me to use my part built armies albeit with smaller  units of commanded shot.

I took the Parliamentarians who were defending the crossroads, whilst John commanded a larger scratch force of Royalists with poorer commanders. Strangely that didnt seem to affect the result in the long run. It also gave me an opportunity to field my latest acquisition, a large European church courtesy of E Bay.

The aforementioned church. A West German? creation that I decided was too nice to paint although I will add a light to the interior to show off the stained glass windows.

For the scenario, the Parliamentarians had only two regiments of trotter cavalry and two regiments of dragoons. Being rash I threw my cavalry away very quickly and to add to the insult I also got their commander killed! My commanded shot were made of sterner stuff but were eventually over run by the Royalist cavalry.

 I had painted some small units of shot for the battle using the 'spare' York show figures which are the lovely Mini Fig chaps scattered around the images. They might not be historically correct but they have a definite charm. Needless to say I lost the game when the two brigades went shaken in two consecutive moves. So another loss. At the moment I cant buy a victory but they were two great battles.

In an effort to hurry up the completion of my ECW project I bought some painted figures from Ian Hind. They will need repainting but in this age of conservation what better way to save the world than by giving life to old toy soldiers.

                                      My 'spare' Mini Fig shot unit with spare Rupert standard.