A House Divided

 As I seem to be on an ACW phase at  the moment I thought I'd dig out my old copy of this:

The mighty 'A House Divided' by Frank Chadwick and published by GDW. Released in the era of mega games, this was heralded for its simplicity, yet it was very bold in covering the entire American Civil War in monthly (!) turns. It has subsequently been re-released a number of times and there is extensive coverage on Boardgame Geek of course: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/701/a-house-divided-war-between-the-states-1861-65

According the the blurb, the full campaign takes four hours to play and the shorter one year campaigns just ninety minutes. I'll just play the introductory ten turn 1861/62 one for now which ends in June 1862.

Breaking it open again, it doesn't look that simple any more to my 21st century eyes. It is still a glorious thing to behold though.

The map is a joy of point to point movement. and many of the areas have very familiar names (Fredricksberg, Gettysberg etc). The areas are joined by roads, railways and rivers which have varying movement effects for different troop types and each side as the Union naval superiority affects riverine operations. There are also a number of port cities scattered around and the Union (only) can conduct naval invasions under certain circumstances.

The critical areas are the cities with recruitment numbers against them, as the sum total of these controlled determine the maximum army size each side can have. If the rebel total ever exceeds the Union, they win (along with capturing Washington which is an immediate victory), so there is an incentive for the South to conduct forays into the north to deny critical cities.

The blue squares are Union controlled at start and the the grey ones are Confederate. There are some white neutral ones in Kentucky (?) - sorry my US geography is terrible and unhelpfully the state boundaries are marked on the map but not their names.

The map itself in this edition is card mounted and has a strange 'jigsaw' type fixing system for its four sections rather than being hinged.

The counter mix is pleasingly small, a little heap of units of varying. quality (militia, veteran and crack) and types (infantry and cavalry) for each side with no attempt to identify specific real formations. Equally the rule book is nice and slim in a very pleasing large typeface. No telephone book sized rulebook here, and magnifying glasses are not required to read it. 

The rules are pretty simple, in a very Frank Chadwick way, although there are rafts of optional rules to add some more realism. For this play through I just added in the optional supply and command limit rules as I think they are the bare minimum needed. While the rules are short, they are perhaps a bit DBA like and it is easy miss some stuff, and some sections aren't hugely clear particularly the critical rules on how units get upgraded. Naturally there are pages of clarifications on BGG.

The starting setup is pretty simple, the Union has 12 militia units and the CSA has 8, all with preset starting points. The Union troops are in an arc across the north in various cities with a concentration around Washington, while the CSA only has four units to start with in the north, three along the Potomac and one way out west.

These militia units are crucial as each side can recruit 1D6 worth per turn (up to the maximum army size) but the counter pool is limited to these 20 counters plus one militia cavalry unit each. To free up militia counters you need to get them upgraded to veteran units by winning battles or (as I interpret it) you can also upgrade one unit for free per month.  Each April the Union gets another four militia units added to its pool as it drafts its immense manpower reserves, so by 1865 its manpower pool is going to be vast and deep. In this ten turn scenario the Union will get one draft of four more militia in April 1862.

The other four CSA militia are in the south, three of them are holding ports (Charlestone etc) but Wilmington is still unguarded. These are all 2 production cities so the CSA needs to defend them against Union naval invasions, but I can see significant forces being tied up for the whole war defending the coast. There is one unit available inland as a mobile reserve, but really it needs out head out west. As we know, the real war was won and lost along the Mississippi, whatever heroics Bobby Lee got up to in Virginia.

So, rather like chess or go, simple to learn, hard to master. On the first turn both sides can make two 'marches' (ie activate one stack) instead of rolling on the command table. Union to go first. My head promptly exploded at all the choices I could make.

Washington seemed well defended so instead I moved a couple of big (well, two unit) stacks down towards the Mississippi, partly looking at those nice neutral places in what I'm going to call Kentucky. We will see how that goes. The CSA moved its central reserve unit up towards Kentucky as well. Normally you roll 1D6 on the command table (optional rule) which allows you to activate from 2-4 stacks in 1861. The results improve as the war progresses. In the basic game it is like DBA, 1D6 activations per side with a minimum of 2.

The other CSA move was to attack the Union unit at Harpers Ferry! The rules have provision to reinforce from adjacent sectors, so I figured it was a low cost way to win a battle and upgrade the CSA units in the area.

You can just see the attack at Harpers Ferry west of Washington, the unit at Manassas (SW of Washington) can reinforce on the second round of combat.

Battles are a bit like Victory in the Pacific. Units line up and shoot at each other needing to roll equal to or less than their combat value (with a few simple modifiers). Both sides fight until one side is destroyed or one decides to retreat. The first couple of rounds went the Confederate way and two Union units are reduced (they take two hits each). Of course I hadn't calculated on the Union sending reinforcements from Washington, and each round more bluebellies turned up until the Confederates were heavily outnumbered.  

Lee managed to rout one of the Union troops but both Confederates were now reduced...

And finally both rebel units were destroyed. Well that was a catastrophe! It did however put two rebel and one union militia unit into the reinforcement pool to be re-recruited. The Union also got to promote one of its units to Veteran as they'd won a battle.

The battle ended with Richmond looking rather vulnerable. The various roads and rivers preclude an early Union descent on the Confederate capital though. This is always one of the hardest things in ACW games, both sides capitals being just a few miles apart....

After that initial clash both sides focussed on defending Washington and Richmond in the east. I made heavy use of the rule which allows both sides to promote one unit for free per turn and recruited the militia cavalry units too so gradually both sides increased in size and quality. After the crapshoot of Harpers Ferry I didn't fight any more battles and focussed mainly on manouvre. There was some tussling in Kentucky over various resource cities but I must have made a mistake with the Confederates somewhere as suddenly the Union was piling down the Mississippi and took Memphis!

By this time I'd been going a couple of hours and frankly lost the will to live as I found the decisions every turn overwhelming and I didn't really know what I was doing, which didn't make the experience very enjoyable. Interestingly Captain Kobold had much the same experience a few years ago https://hordesofthethings.blogspot.com/2022/11/a-house-divided.html but stuck with it for rather more hours than I did. I cant see on what planet you'd get through ten turns in 90 minutes, let along all five years in four hours. There don't seem to be any useful strategy guides and I probably need to play it with someone who does actually know what they are doing.  I dimly recall it taking ages to play back in the 80s too, but I had a sharper mind and more energy then. It may be something I get back out and try again, but I need to be in a more enthusiastic frame of mind I think.

'

Fort Fisher at Shedquarters

 I was very honoured to be invited to a games day at Grahams mythical 'Shedquarters' in Northamptonshire.

The shed itself! Although today we were playing a lawn game.

Tim was running the game and as I've done this sorts of thing before, I was helping out. We've actually done Fort Fisher before, the Union naval assault on the fort in 1865. some wikipedia background here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Fort_Fisher

The fort itself was built on a long headland (seen above) and commanded the approaches to Charlestone.

The Union 'secret weapon' was this captured CSA blockade runner, packed with 300 tons of gunpowder and to be employed rather like HMS Campbeltown at St Nazaire. I was in charge of this as a player-umpire.

The extensive fortifications were largely earthworks with various gun batteries dotted along them. This is at the river end.

The central portion of the fortifications. Chris K and Richard ran the Confederate defenders.

The mighty Union fleet. Chris A was the Admiral and Kevin the land commander with a reinforced infantry division available (four Regiments and a detachment of sharpshooters) plus three other subordinate commanders.

The fleet disposed of three ironclads, two battleships, four transport ships and a bomb ketch.

I was particularly taken with this monitor and 'Gene Kelly' dancing on the foredeck.

We had to come up with a cunning plan to assault and capture the fort, the complication being that the army was responsible for the land bit and the navy for the water bit. Each transport ship could carry a regiment, but only had enough boats to transport half a regiment at a time. After some negotiation we decided to attack the fort at the river entrance, after the naval bombardment had disrupted the defences and the bomb ship had blown a hole in it.

The fleet set off along the coast, Ironclads in the lead, battleships behind and transports out to sea. This turned out to be an error as the ironclads proved somewhat unreliable and kept drifting off course. At least we'd left enough sea room to avoid accidentally beaching any of the wayward ships.

Meanwhile, the bomb ship had beached itself at the river mouth and I lit the fuse and rowed hurriedly away. The CSA sent a scout to investigate.

Meanwhile the fleet was busily shelling the defences as they sailed along, mainly destroying the embankment to the east but not hitting many of the defending batteries.

The bomb ship eventually detonated, but was of course too far away to do significant damage to the battery, although it did damage the earthworks.

Meanwhile I was busy rowing away pursed by a shark.

But eventually made it to the safety of an ironclad which I gratefully boarded.

Where I discovered to my surprise that apparently the Army had decided on a different plan and were starting to debark right in the centre of the defences. The Army claimed to have told the Navy about this. but neither myself nor Chris were any the wiser.

The transports started to unload offshore, so it would take a few turns to row ashore. Unloading right in front of the strongest defences which hadn't even been shelled by the navy didn't strike me as very wise.

View from the far end. The beach visible in the foreground had been attacked in the First Battle of Fort Fisher, so was now heavily mined by the Confederates. The damaged section of embankment was the orange coloured section nearest the camera.

The first boats made it to the beach under heavy close range cannon fire. The real tragedy for the Union was that by this point the Confederate artillery only had a couple of turns fire left, if they had just waited a bit longer, the CSA gunners would have been defenceless.

Tim supervises proceedings. The prone position is required to fire the matchstick firing cannon. After weeks of drought Graham provide us with headless matches to mitigate the fire risk, but they had very interesting ballistic characteristics!

The Union infantry did get ashore in some numbers but rather than waiting for successive waves just advanced piecemeal against the defences with predictable results. They did make an attempt to get through the damaged section of embankment late in the game, but it was all too little too late and after a while it was fairly obvious the attack had failed.

In real life (and the previous two games) the Union blew there way through an undefended bit of the defences and then rolled up the fortifications from a flank, but the command confusion was just too great in this instance. As Clausewitz said, everything in war is simple, but the simple things become very difficult. Never has there been a better demonstration that you don't need complex C2 rules,  just lots of players.

That was loads of fun and everyone had a good go at firing matchsticks all over the garden. As we'd finished a bit early, Graham organised another game (Asculum with Neil Thomas Ancients) but sadly the jet lag had caught up with me and I headed for home instead as it was a fair way to Sheffield and I didn't feel great.

Many thanks to Graham for hosting and to Tim for running the game. I'm looking forward to a return visit.

Guards Counterattack October 1942

 More Tigers at Minsk, and onto the next scenario in the Fireball Forward rule book. This one is titled 'The Guards Counterattack', and is obviously inspired by the classic Squad Leader scenario so many of us cut our teeth on in the late 1970s. There was a Crossfire version of the TGCA, and I'd say that this scenario is largely based on the Crossfire one rather than the SL version. Looking at it, the German OB in this iteration is slightly different but the Russian OB is identical to the Crossfire version.

Battlefield from the east. The Russians are trying to break through to relieve the Tractor Factory which is under siege off the top of the table. The Russians start in the bottom two rows, and the Germans are in the building complexes in the central area bounded by the roads. Each side gets 1VP per enemy unit destroyed, and two VP per building hex in the central area controlled at the end of the game.

This is my best effort to convert the scenario terrain in a TaM hex grid, the original has a lot of multizone building complexes. In the setup above, if there are contiguous model buildings, it is a building complex and units can move (or assault) from one hex to another without being subject to opportunity fire, but if there is a single building or a gap, they can be opportunity fired as they move between building hexes.

I know it wasn't particularly snowy in Stalingrad in October, but I used my snow boards anyway. The buildings are a mixture of my Timecast Russians buildings and I used my wooden block buildings for the complexes. They dont look too bad grouped together, although the red roofs aren't very Russian. I managed to fit the layout onto an 8x7 grid.

The German defenders. Three rifle platoons and a pair of HMGs. The Crossfire scenario has an extra rifle platoon. There are a lot of squads in this scenario and not much space, so I'm using one base per section instead of two.

And the mighty Russian horde! Twelve rifle sections, eight SMG sections and three Maxims. In the original scenario (both Crossfire and Fireball Forward) these are grouped into large four squad platoons which tbh is just silly in late 1942. I'm going to run these as two weak rifle companies with three platoons of two sections each, and a stronger SMG company with two platoons of three sections and one of two sections. That is more like a battalion in 1942 terms.

The rifle sections have poor morale, but the SMG sections are Guards and have average morale (by the time Id factored in leadership etc).  The main problem for the SMG sections is that they only have a range of one hex! (120m)

The Germans have to set up in the central BUA. I've got MG posts supported by rifle sections covering the front, and otherwise I just tried to cover all that horrible open ground around the buildings. There are two sections held back who are intended to dash to buildings at the top to cover the streets on either side, just like the city fighting manuals say. If the Russian first move goes badly, they should be able to make it in one bound, I can't risk the getting caught in the open.

The Russians have to set up in the buildings in the south, distributing the rifle sections along the front (there need to be at least one section in every building). The Guards SMG platoons are a hex further back. I'm weighting the Russian right as the long building on the right looks the most vulnerable, but I'm also going to try and get some troops into the row of buildings on the far left to open up the frontage a bit. At the moment everyone is terribly bunched up.

I have to say it doesn't look hugely promising for the Russians, but there an awful lot of them.

Last bit of admin, the German breakpoint is six and the Russian breakpoint is twelve. The game will last 60 minutes.

Russian C2 isn't bad on turn 1, two groups out of command and I push some of the SMG sections further forward.  The Russian prep fire is dire though, every single shot misses and in the end I push some rifle sections out in the street to try and draw the German MG fire. Naturally the German MGs don't fail any of their ROF rolls and half the units in the street are pinned or shot down by opportunity fire. 

In the German turn, the flank cover sections dash for the buildings in the rear to cover the flanks and everyone else shoots up the Russians. All the surviving sections out in the open are pinned or killed.

At the end of that turn the Russians are down three sections and have not advanced an inch, while the Germans have improved their position. That didn't go very well did it? The Russians have at least managed to get all their Maxims into the front line.

Next turn the Russian C2 is just dire, no less than four groups go out of command, ending any sort of attempt at manouvre. The pinned section left out in the street is able to retire to cover at least. The three MG positions are all in command however, and supported by the rifle sections, open a devastating fire on the Germans. Between them, the three MGs rolled five sixes, two of them ran out of ammunition but combined with the rifle fire, managed to destroy no less than two German MGs and two rifle sections. Ouch!

All the Germans could do in return was open fire and make sure all the approaches in the open were covered.

The Russian commander recovered from his surprise and all groups bar one were in command this turn. Devastating prep fire knocked out two more German sections, forcing morale checks on the rest. On the left an SMG platoon took advantage of gaps in the defensive fire to run across the street and into first building on the left. On the right a rifle platoon supported by an SMG section made it into building complex on the right.

All the Germans could do was either fire or shuffle their sections around to shore the position up. Unhelpfully the section in the top left went out of command. By now the German sections were setting up on the far side of the buildings to avoid the covering fire.

Another command disaster for the Russians as almost every group west of the road went out of command. The two assault platoons (one led by the Commisar) were OK though.

The SMG platoon on the left cautiously moved out into the street, but the German opportunity fire missed. On the right the platoon in the building assaulted the Germans  holding the far end, which provided an opportunity for the only other mobile rifle platoon to dash across the open ground.

Outnumbered 3:1, the Germans in the right hand building were overwhelmed although they did pin one of the attackers. That forced another morale check and all the remaining Germans fell back a hex. Amazingly they were still winning on points (11 vs 10), but only because the Russians hadn't occupied all the buildings yet.

One plucky German section reoccupied the four hex building complex. 

But the Russians were able to rush forwards from all sides, largely untroubled by defensive fire.

A random event produced a minefield in one open hex (those three green blobs) but it was all too late as the Russians overran the last German section in the buildings. There wasn't any hope of the Germans retaking them, so a crushing Russian victory!

tbh after turn three, I don't think the result was in much doubt. Both sides had outrageous dice rolling in the first couple of turns, after which it settled down to more average results. The 'forward defence' is always a bit of a problem for the Germans though - it covers all that open ground but leaves them open to crushing prep fire once the Russians get rolling. Perhaps defending the line of building hexes further back is the way to go, but then it allows to Russians to get in close. Decisions, decisons.

Anyway, that was good fun and captured the flavour of the original quite well, but I didn't feel any great inclination to replay it.