ACW mayhem

Well, Mexican Dave knew this post was coming, on Saturday the pair of us decided to revisit our ACW ruleset, Peter Pigs Civil War Battles. So I made up the army list, checked that the neccessary troops were packed up and trucked it all along to the Angus wargames club.

Dave's luck was on its usual form on Saturday, anyone whos played a Piggy ruleset before knows that there's always an attacker and a defender and while both armies will be equal at the start of the game, the rules can be very cruel to the defender. Dave's pre-battle dice rolls as the defender saw him trying to keep a few units on the table and losing stands from each one. Trying a different approach and trying not to lose any more stands saw most of what he had left being shunted of the table to his re-inforcement area.

Anything close to the edge of the table was what Dave tried turn after turn to get onto the table, we had roughly a foot of table either side that wasnt in play. At the end of each turn saw Dave desperatly trying to roll a 9 on 2d6 for each missing regiment or gun and failing. Even my friendly advice didnt help "try bringing them on via the road, it adds +2 to your roll" saw Dave fail roll after roll. He was even rolling miserably on the countdown rolls (In Piggy games, there's a countdown to the end of the battle) he kept rolling 1s, the defender is usually wanting to make the battle as short as possible as it gives the attacker fewer turns to take objectives. The countdown for this game started at 21, so had he rolled a few 6s, the game could have been over in 4 turns. What made matters worse was Dave had managed to roll 2 good division generals and a brilliant Corps general, while I had saddled myself with a right bunch of numptys, those units that you can see trailing quite far behind my front line, just kept trailing further and further behind for the whole game, due to my numpty generals not being able to communicate with them, so I was really fighting with about half my army.

Long story short this was the situation when Dave finally raised the white flag, all those rebs at the top of the piccy, just ignore them, theyre dead, and there were a couple of my units closing in from the bottom. Result was, well we didnt bother calculating it, all the objectives were claimed by the Yankee invader, with very few casualties. But the Gallant Gennelmun of the Sowth were indeed heard to declare that "The South WILL rise again!"