The Fight at Cordery Manor

The first test drive of the Upcycled English Civil War collection with TPECW rules has been completed and a good time was had by all. Which means me, since I played this game solo. 

I called this game "the fight at Cordery Manor" in homage to Bob Cordery whom I've had the pleasure to meet via the Virtual Wargames Club and whose blog I frequently visit. There are a lot of great ideas on his blog and I highly recommend a visit. 

But on to the game....

I gave each side six units, not the whole collection, I know, with the Royalists having four foot regiments and two horse regiments. The Parliamentarians had two regiments of horse, three of foot, and one of dragoons. I don't have artillery yet, and I felt I wanted to keep things generic for the first game. 

Random dice rolls led both sides to start at the short side of the board, which meant a number of turns would be spent getting forces into position. I could have fast forwarded that part, but I didn't.

Within TPECW rules there is a mechanism to use an Initiative Value number, in conjunction with a D6 roll, to see how many units could be activated per turn. In this case, each side would be able to activate between 2 and 4 units per turn.  

I also stuck to my usual 15 turn limit that I use with gridded games and used my card draw for activation, red for Royalists and black for Parliamentarians. 

Eight turns later, everyone FINALLY got into position....maybe I'll speed that up next time. 

First fire by a regiment of foot! And it caused....no casualties. In fact, most shooting resulted in no effect. Pretty awful dice rolling, considering this was a solo game... 

The close combat phases were interesting and went back and forth. I used small dice to denote the step losses for each unit. Foot regiments could take four hits and horse and dragoons three hits, before being eliminated. 

That Royalist horse regiment on the right charged the regiment of foot in the upper right hand six times and hardly dented them. For the most part, charging frontally led to rugby scrums that eventually had one side or the other bounce off, but with little damage. Probably like the real thing. 

Turns 12 and 13 held promise to be decisive, with the Parliamentarian horse suffering a number of reverses and one regiment being eliminated. 

End Game. Turn 15 comes to a close and whilst the Parliamentarian dragoons hold Cordery Manor, the vital crossroads is still in doubt. Each side lost one regiment of horse, but the Parliamentarian foot was in much worse shape than the Royalists. I call it a draw. 

I played the game over the course of three days, with the last two turns being done Saturday afternoon, though I could have squeezed them in Friday night, had I felt motivated. Which I was not. I like the rules. The Alan Saunders version functions quite well. 

Things I would do differently: 

1. Use the long side of the board instead of the short side. 

2. Use ALL the units I have completed. 

3. Put name tags on the stands. I realized that it's hard to do a play-by-play narrative, if one cannot tell the units from each other. Five of them are "Blues" after all. 

4. Finish the two regiments of horse on the painting table. More mounted units are needed! 

I liked the rules and the game so much, I started thinking about another game using very similar terrain but setting it in WW2 Italy and using the Original PW rules. I might add an orchard and such, but the board will be basically the same. 

That being said, I've two research projects to finish in the next ten days and drill weekend next weekend, so I think the game will have to wait.