Little Big Horn - in the Sudan!

I drove a six-hour round trip for a three hour game. It was 100% worth it. The occasion was the latest of Dr Mark Smith's legendary Christmas Specials, delayed to brighten up January, because that suited everyone's calendar better. (For previous Christmas Specials, use the label search here.)

I arrived to be confronted by a spectacular 12-foot table:

Mark informed us that this represented the Wadi Alqlilkabirbwq, a tributary of the Nile. The situation was an Anglo-Egyptian expedition in the Sudan during the Mahdist War of 1881-1899. The British were trying to capture the Khalifa after the battle of Omdurman. I was 'Al Marara', one of the four players on the Mahdist side, alongside Crispin, Phil and Will. Nick, Bruce, Dave W and Dave T were the infidel British.

Nick and Bruce were Captain Benjamin Young and a German guest, Major Count Betreffnein. Their substantial cavalry columns arrived near our right flank, where my camp was. Figures are Baccus 6mm from Mark's (rapidly expanding) collection.

Dave T was Colonel Armstrong, the British C-in-C, leading another cavalry column dashing along the heights towards the other end of our extended encampment along the river.

All I had on-table initially, apart from my herds, was one contingent of dismounted cavalry, well-armed with modern breechloaders. A couple of moves later I had mustered four units.

Similar story for my neighbour on my left, Maynum Hirsar (Crispin). Our initial mission prioritised defending our camps and our cattle.

Phil and Will (Aswad Nasr and Quadeem Dub) were further along the river, out of immediate danger.

Nevertheless, Dave T made rapid progress along the heights, so Phil and Will had to react.

The central British column arrives, containing all the precious supplies, commanded by Captain Dougalson (Dave W).

As Nick's camelry approached, I moved two units of rifle-armed dismounted cavalry to lurk in the vegetation along the river.

Allahu akbar! Nick duly sprang my ambush. My warriors fired a volley and charged. We drove the infidels back with heavy losses. We mustered more cavalry and followed up.

Taking a long view ... seen from the quiet end of the table, but not for long. Will's force will shortly ascend the heights to take on Dave T.

Order, counter-order, disorder - 3 or 4 turns in, we were each given a new set of personal objectives to replace the ones we'd had at the start. Initially, our Mahdist objectives had focused on defending camps and cattle, while the British objectives were about discovering and capturing these. Now it was all change: having found how strong we were, the British orders had changed to holding the heights, while we needed to take them. This generated a lot of radical changes of manoeuvre! Here we see Nick's and Bruce's columns trying to break contact, cross the ford, and head for Hills 1 & 2 at top right of pic.

Dave W's supply column had made steady progress to mid-table, but Dave was now feeling very much left in the lurch as everyone else hightailed it for the hills, while he was being harassed by Phil and Crispin in front and had the prospect of more Mahdists appearing behind him.

Fortunately for Dave, I and Phil now largely ignored him in favour of dashing across the river to attack the hills. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the Mahdist of them all?"

Apart from Dave W's supply column in the river angle top left, all the Anglo-Egyptians are now atop the hills, while most of our Mahdists mill about trying to ford the river to get at them.

The first layer of hills is edged by an escarpment, scaleable only at the breaks marked by small brown patches. You can see two of these right of pic, in front of Hills 1 & 2 (the crests with white labels). This presented me and Phil with a ticklish tactical challenge: how to get up these breaks, which were in rifle range of the hilltop defenders, and then mount a coordinated assault.

A glimpse of the action at the other end of the pitch. Dave T's camel corps was fending off Will's Mahdists OK. However, Crispin changed axis, ignoring Dave W's supplies, to turn up behind Dave T. Not only that, but a random event gave some of Crispin's men the latest repeating rifles! It went badly for the Anglo-Egyptians here after that. 

A small victory for Will, too, as he overruns a stray baggage column ...

... capturing some splendid victuals. (It was supposed to be a Christmas game, after all.)

Phil and I had managed to negotiate the breaks in the cliffs and get our forces onto the scarp. With time running out, we mounted a massed charge on Hill 1. Note the British commander (the German, Betreffnein) who has fallen over. Random events dictated that he hit the schnapps flask hard and spent most of the battle drunk and incapable.

Our charge succeeded and swept the infidels from Hill 1!

Mark then totted up the scores. The most successful individual players were Crispin for the Mahdists (thanks to his murderous repeating rifles) and Dave W for the Brits (who kept his precious supply column largely intact). Adding up all the individual scores on each side, they came to 9 points each - a draw!

Arguably, Dave W deserved another victory point, because he was the first to tumble to the fact that this was a disguised scenario. I think he spotted it when the objectives changed and the Brits had to bail out and head for the hills. Mark had taken the situation from the Battle of the Little Big Horn and transposed it to the Sudan. If only my Arabic had been better, I'd have realised all the Mahdists' names were translations: Maynum Hirsar = Crazy Horse, Aswad Nasr = Black Eagle, Alqlilkabirbwq = Little Big Horn, etc. There were clues in all the Brits' names as well: Benjamin Young = Ben-teen, Dougalson = MacDougal, and of course Armstrong was Custer's middle name.

Reflections

Disguised Scenarios. I'm well aware of the concept but I've rarely played one. This worked really well, for me at least: I wasn't familiar enough with either the Sudan or LBH to spot the disguise, but I know enough about them to appreciate the conceit. Had we all known it was LBH from the start, of course the Brit/US players would have acted much more cautiously and been better coordinated. As it was, the disguised set-up plus the divergent personal objectives created the right historical situation. Genius.

Changing Situations Mid-Game. The abrupt change of orders/objectives partway through was not only important to create the right situation, it also helped to throw spanners into works and force major new decisions on players. This is a great ingredient in a game and something I've discussed before in one of my "Reflections on Wargaming" essays, "Changing Situations Mid-Game".

A Unique Tactical Challenge. The endgame threw up this unique tactical problem for me and Phil of how to get up the scarp under fire and then assault the heights. This exemplifies how historical scenarios can produce the most uniquely interesting challenges, at least as good as anything I might be able to invent. This is one reason why we love fighting historical battles.

Camels Galore! Exotic troops always enhance a wargames table and camelry are definitely exotic. I don't think I've ever seen so many camels in a game. It was a treat.

Roleplaying in Wargames. Even in regular BBB games, people are generally happy to metaphorically don the right headgear, slip into role and talk like their historical counterparts. In Mark's Christmas games where we all have our individual objectives, it gets really personal and the banter flows. There were plenty of remarks about the infidels' malignity and confusion, aspersions cast on fellow officers, and the like. It all adds to the occasion and the experience.

Roll on next Christmas!

PDF editions of the BBB rules and scenario books are about to be published. As PDF is not subject to the same page limitations as printed books, Mark and I are discussing the idea of publishing his Christmas Special scenarios (which are each very long because of the many individual briefs) as a collected volume. Watch this space! 

Alexinatz 1876 - Serbo-Turkish War!

BBB has enabled us to fight huge and famous battles: Waterloo, Gettysburg, Solferino, Koniggratz, Sedan. It has also let us recreate some similarly large but more esoteric and obscure actions such as Chorrillos & Miraflores, Gura, Domokos, Slivnitsa, Adua.

Monday's entertainment was one of the latter. The Serbo-Turkish War of 1876 was a kind of prequel to the much larger and better-known Russo-Turkish War. Serbia declared war because of popular outrage at the Turkish response to outbreaks of rebellion in the neighbouring Ottoman provinces. Serbia's war plan was a rather incoherent 'cordon attack', advancing tentatively and ineffectually in several divergent directions. The Turks reacted by massing their forces to drive up the main axis from Sofia towards Belgrade. The Serbs had established a line of redoubts around the town of Alexinatz (modern spelling Aleksinac). In a series of actions spread over two weeks, the Turks drove in the Serbian outpost line and attacked first (unsuccessfully) on the Serbian left, then with better fortune on the right. Their lines of communication being threatened, the Serbs were forced to retreat.

While the subsidiary actions taken in isolation may be interesting in themselves, by combining them into a single BBB scenario a much richer and more challenging game can be had. The battle resolves itself into distinct phases, punctuated by night intervals in which the protagonists reorganise and redeploy. The game is no longer a simple attack-defence. It becomes instead a delaying action and fighting withdrawal, so the Serbian players have far more interesting things to do than just rolling their firing dice.

Looking north on the Turkish axis of advance along the River Morava.

The four objectives are marked: Trnjani, Alexinatz, the Sumatovac mountain and Katun.

The photo above shows the battlefield before the Serbian players deployed their troops. They chose to mass their forces centrally in front of Alexinatz and on the plain just west of it, including all their artillery, in the position shown as "Serbian line" in the photo. One solitary brigade was posted forward, just out of shot on the eastern flank, to delay the Turkish advance.

The Turks therefore decided on a double envelopment. On their left the Turks raced through the vineyards in column of march, then shook out into line along the foot of the hills and pushed east. The Serb garrison had inexplicably vacated the entrenchments of Trnjani, so on the second day this key objective fell virtually uncontested.

On the right, the difficult terrain made the Turkish advance much slower, but they mauled the one isolated Serbian militia unit, then on the second day were able to set up a line in front of the Sumatovac and start pounding its defenders. Meanwhile a single brigade pushed up the main road east of the Morava to give the Serbian guns target practice. It was sorely pummeled but managed to recover overnight and join the line on the right.

On Day 2 the Serbs did receive reinforcements, one unit in the NW corner that distracted a Turkish unit for the rest of the game, and three brigades entering from the east edge to menace Katun. The Turks had held back quite a lot of troops to cover this threat, and rather than pick on a weak point, the Serbs chose to march into the centre of a cauldron of fire, with predictable results.

Thus, early on Day 3, the Turks had snuffed out the Serb counterattack in the east and ignored an irrelevant Serb foray in the centre (marked on the photo). Their own rear at Katun was secure. They already held Trnjani. They blew away the remaining Serbs on Sumatovac, leaving it open for them to occupy. This meant they held the key points either side of Aleksinac, and the Serb army had its head in a tightening noose. As the Serbs were so weakened that they had no realistic prospect of a successful counterattack, they conceded victory to the Turks.

Our post-battle discussion identified some significant Serbian strategic errors. Historically, the Serbs had contested outpost lines well forward of Alexinatz. In our game they ensconced themselves in their entrenchments and waited. This meant the Turks could tramp confidently forward in march columns, particularly in the west, and take Trnjani improbably quickly; and could mostly avoid the central position where the Serbs had massed all their artillery and much of their strength, and take a lightly defended Sumatovac with relative ease. A better strategy could have been to post a cordon of infantry units forward initially, supported by artillery distributed across the front. This would have obliged the Turks to deploy and fight their way forward much more slowly, and/or to take more circuitous routes to avoid tough delaying positions. The Serbs could then have used the two Night Intervals to fall back and reorganise their lines, forcing the Turks to renew their advance and close in all over again. With the Turks being Passive and having to cross Difficult Terrain, they could have been kept at bay longer and suffered more, and the Serbian reinforcements might have had more significant effect.

I was actually rather relieved by this Serbian debacle. Before the game I was worried that the scenario was skewed too heavily against the Turks, because of their passivity, the difficult terrain, and the Serbian entrenchments, which I thought might more than outweigh the Turkish 5:4 numerical superiority and superior troop quality. As it is, I think the scenario may be reasonably balanced after all. And whether or not it is balanced, it was definitely an interesting one that offers both sides plenty of choices about how to play it, and the boys are keen to give it another go and try different plans.

As usual, the scenario is posted in the files of the BBB Yahoo group.
It is also on Flickr along with a lot of annotated photos of the game.
For a decent recent book on the war see here.

But for next week our attention moves west to the American Civil War, as we will be trying Andy Bailey's scenario for Chickamauga - one of the ACW's Biggest and Bloodiest Battles!