3rd Ashanti War! Amoaful (1874)

As is traditional, Mark laid on one of his Christmas cracker specials, part wargame, part roleplaying game. The setting was Sir Garnet Wolseley's punitive First Ashanti Expedition in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). I had the honour to be the very model of a modern major-general, Sir Garnet himself. My personal victory conditions relied on holding villages along our route and getting our baggage train into our intended forward base, Amoaful. My two subordinates were Sir Archibald Allison, the rather rash commander of my advance guard, and the untried but enthusiastic George Colley, responsible for protecting the baggage train. Facing us were four Ashanti commanders, one spoiling for a fight, another just out for loot, two others intent either on holding villages or preventing us crossing the river before Amoaful.

Part of Sir Garnet's expeditionary force:

Baccus Gardner guns (standing in as rocket batteries in this scenario)

and 42nd Black Watch by Irregular Miniatures. 

We were slightly handicapped by our Colley player turning up late, so our British team was never as coordinated as we might have been. I must take the major blame though, for too much initial caution. I held back my Fante native troops on the first turn, anxious about our flanks and rear, which meant my command was never fully joined up thereafter. Consequently when the Ashanti attacks came, instead of being driven off by a solid wall of musketry, they were able to attack isolated units. This did not cost us so much in casualties as in delay, as we had to rally after each assault, losing precious inches of movement.

Eventually I was able to combine with Allison's vanguard to take the intermediate objective, the village of Ejinasi. By this time some of the initially huge Ashanti units were much diminished, so we launched charges against the spent remnants holding the pass between Ejinasi and Amoaful. We drove these off, but were then assailed from our left by yet more Ashanti, who captured one of our five baggage columns and wiped out the Black Watch.

Given another turn, we might yet have crossed the river and got into Amoaful with our baggage. Unfortunately, our time had run out. We paid the price for my first-turn caution. The Ashanti players' combined victory points far exceeded our British total for a clear Ashanti win. Nigel earned the individual runner-up medal for preventing us from getting across the river. But the overall winner was Bruce, whose aggressive Ashanti managed not only to get all four of his units to press home an assault, but also put in an additional three charges over and above.

But this was one of those wonderful games where it really didn't matter who won. It was very evocative, with 3,000 or so Brits intrepidly pressing forward through unmapped jungle (the terrain was only revealed to us as we moved through it) against three times our number of unseen enemies (they used semi-hidden movement until we got close). It had all the character of such actions, with Highlanders, the Rifle Brigade, rockets and a naval landing party, native infantry in red fezzes, and of course huge swarms of gaudily attired Ashanti eager to eat our hearts and drink from our skulls. Huge kudos to Mark for a great game for our last club night of 2016.

I have posted 9 annotated photos of the troops and the game in this Flickr album.