Display Game at Claymore, Edinburgh (3 August 2024)
Report by Conrad Cairns
For several years, until The Plague, DWG used to take a display game to the South East Scotland Wargames Club event on the first Saturday of August. Now we have revived what I hope will be a continuing tradition.
The game was a recreation of one of the many very close-fought and bloody battles of the First Carlist War in Spain, 1833-1840. The battles were small enough for all units to be depicted, although here, due to the unusually high proportion of mounted troops, we slightly lowered the number of squadrons.
The gamers were Simon Bauduoin, Richard Phelan, Mike Snape and the writer; the scenery from the private collection of Colin Ashton, and DWG; the figures 28mm from various makers. Perry do a suburb and comprehensive range, but as my regiments were partly raised before these were available, there are quite a lot of Santannista Mexicans and British and French Waterloo men, which are just right with the correct painting and sometimes a little Miliput.
Our rules were Black Powder, which were devised to include this very conflict. However, since the majority of Black Powder games seem to be of the Napoleonic era, we had to make one change. Cavalry is fielded not in regiments, but individual squadrons, six men each (battalions are 24 figures). These are catered for- the rules just call them small units. They fight, and get exhausted soon. However, we altered the infantry square rules, as foot did not always form square, and it did not always work. We just diced to see if any unit charged did do this, with a good chance of the body not succeeding-or not wanting to.
As this was a display game, we just used one of the “special rules” provided in the book, with a minority of units “Elite”. All the infantry were Tough Fighters, to encourage them to get in with the bayonet as their real-life counterparts did. We all forgot to use this, and as all the players used suitably aggressive tactics it did not matter.
Most of the fighting was done with columns. There was a lot of skirmishing in this war, but with a dozen battalions a side it looked better and was neater to keep the blocks solid.
The real battle ended with the Carlists defeating the Government attempt to take their position and weaken the army. Here, the Carlists won on both wings, and the Government were doing better in the centre, but my this stage their army was spent by heavy losses and so would have to pull back.
