The Battle Of Cross Keys

There's a lot of Real Life going on at The Stronghold at the moment, so planning and playing games is taking something of a back-seat, but I did manage to get down to the club this Thursday for a game of Black Powder, part of a continuing ACW mini-campaign covering Jackson In The Valley.

This time the battle was Cross Keys, and here's the setup, with the Union on the left and Confederates on the right. The troops were simply on the table and not in their initial deployments. Objectives were the crossroads at the top and three along the ridge-line to the right of the picture.

Once again we were using the lovely ACW Epic figures from Warlord.

Here's the Union deployment (since I was on the Union side). Most of our troops were massed on our left, ready to take the crossroads and also prevent the Confederates from leaving the board in that corner, something which earned them victory points.

A view from behind the Confederate lines.

We sent forward a brigade in the entry to take the objective here. I had a brigade on our right which was tasked with attacking the ridge near Cross Keys itself but really just ended up tying down Confederates in that area whilst everyone else did the work.

Here's my brigade, stuck in some woods. I never managed to extricate theme during the game.

Most of the fighting was around the crossroads and saw the Union steadily push back the Confederates

They captured the crossroads.

But that was it. The Confederates retained the other three objectives and exited some units, so have a commanding lead going into the final scenario (Port Republic) in a few weeks.

Thanks to Ralph for putting on an entertaining scenario. The Union have plenty of troops but lack the command ability to use them to completely overwhelm the more motivated Confederates. We almost captured the objective in the centre, but just failed on the last turn. As ever, we just needed one more turn ...