Octobers military disasters

I keep trying to get my son interested in wargames but to little avail. Not as exciting as Call of Duty or whatever the latest Xbox fad is.

However to keep his dad happy he agreed a quick game of Crossfire which, I told him, needed the same sort of tactical skills as COD.



Unfortunately the battery gave up on the camera so only a couple of shots of the table before deployment.

A typical Crossfire set up with lots of terrain pieces to move between.

We played a simple scenario with Jack (my son) ordered to assault the village with a couple of Italian companies and HMGs. I held the village and surrounding woods with half the number of French. Jack quickly grasped the simple mechanisms of the game and, with pretty poor firing on my part, had quickly outflanked the French and charged in decisively.

In less than an hour the Italians held the village and the poor French were destroyed.

Perhaps I need to get my own Xbox .

I forgot my camera for my monthly game at Birmingham Wargames Society this month but no doubt there will be questions in parliament.

As commander of a large British and native force it should (in hindsight) have been relatively easy to get a wagon train across the veldt. With a couple of cannon and a gatling gun I naively assumed we could simply mow the Zulu hordes down. There were of course "farsands or 'em" but "we are British Old Chap".

The Zulu plan, I discovered, was to draw us into the valley.

However Blackpowder's command system meant that the British really didn't want to move. Bored waiting in the bush the Zulus attacked. The British sent out the cavalry to hold up the impis but even the lancers had little success. Out in the open there were just too many natives and we were over run.




Not an auspicious wargaming month. At least we live to fight another day.
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