Cheriton 1644 - A Portable Wargame Demo

Today Wollongong Library had a Games Day as part of International Games Week. Games Week was actually last week, but I guess they didn't want their games day to coincide with Wollongong's big arts and culture festival last Saturday. The library provides games for people to play, and encourages people to bring their own. Last year I thought it would be a good exercise to take a long a miniatures game, either for people to have a go at or, at the very least, act as a demo for the hobby. I took Dragon Rampant. This year I decided to do the same, and decided to show, once again, that miniature wargaming needn't be an expensive hobby where you have to paint hundreds of figures. So I took my paper ECW armies.

And the rules? The Portable Wargame, of course. Or, at least, my ECW variant, which is now coming along very nicely indeed.

I put together a scenario for the 1644 Battle of Cheriton, scattered a few books at one end of the table*, as well as some contact flyers for the Wollongong Wargamers and then set up the game for Catherine and I to play.

I adapted the terrain from a couple of other games I'd seen, plus various maps on the web. The armies are roughly equal in Portable Wargames terms - four foot and horse a side, with the Royalists having some artillery and the Parliamentarians a unit of dragoons. I went for a free deployment rather than forcing the historical setup.

Catherine took the Royalists. She put her foot in a strong line along the northern ridge, and her horse behind it and out to her right. I sent my dragoons to take the woods on her left, massed my foot in the centre and all of my horse on the left.

We both advanced our horse. A cavalry battle to the west was inevitable.

Catherine saw my troops entering the wood, and sent some of her foot to intercept them. There was some low-level skirmishing.

I came off worse in the cavalry fight. A run of good initiative cards saw Catherine able to make a series of aggressive attacks and drive my horse back with virtually no loss to herself.

Whilst my horse desperately hung on, I decided to force her attention elsewhere, and threw my foot forward against her weaker line of foot.

Catherine mopped up the last of the Parliamentarian horse, and turned on my flank.

I got my act together, and managed to turn my line and hold her outflanking move. But it was looking bad for Parliament.

My main attack on the northern ridge went well, though, sweeping away the Royalist guns,and then pushing back the foot stationed there. The entire axis of the battle had now shifted by ninety degrees.

Once again Catherine got a good run on the initiative, and pressed home a final attack. I have a slightly different system for testing when armies have had enough than that in Bob's books. The Parliamentarian army was reaching that point and was very close to breaking. The Royalists were as well, but held on by virtue of being in control of more battlefield objectives (the red counters, if you look closely at the pictures). As it was nightfall brought an end to the battle - I only do four runs through the initiative deck, counting that as a wargames 'day'. It was a draw, although if pushed to it the Royalists had the better of it.

I'd make a few tweaks to the scenario if I ran it again, but the rules themselves gave a close, fun game, and I think are at a level I'm mostly happy with. Most importantly it attracted the right kind of attention from people who looked at it.

We packed away the troops and joined some other games for a game of Citadels which, it appears, I've played before. I managed a win - just

Numbers weren't great at the event. The local games shop seems to have changed ownership and didn't respond to posts about the day; they normally bring along more games and help promote it. And, I guess to avoid disturbing other library users too much, it is tucked away in a corner such that it's not easy to just stumble across it. Still it was a fun morning, and I enjoyed taking the Portable Wargame out into the wild.

*I forgot to take any pictures of the books. I took some of my Featherstones (including 'Battle Notes for Wargames', which covers Cheriton), a couple of Neil Thomas tomes and, of course, Bob Corderey's Portable Wargames books.