Sunday, May 12, 2013

2 x Modified Sharp Practice at Hotlead

Saturday night and Sunday morning I played two games of "modified" Sharp Practice (the Toofatlardies game) with the Kent Essex Gaming Society (KEGS) fellows. About half the players Saturday night were KEGS members, the other half newbies; Sunday's game was mostly newbies. Each side (French, British) had seven players, each with a unit of cavalry, infantry, or artillery (British only). I was the British artillery Saturday night, on Sunday I was an infantry platoon.

The goal of the game was to seize and hold various objective markers on the map, each marker was worth a hidden number of victory points - once you grabbed a marker you knew what it was worth, and there were fifteen points available spread over five markers. The main modifications from Sharp Practice seemed to be that there were no Big Men cards or factors, you moved as your unit was drawn. The play was also streamlined a bit for that many players, although to be honest, it did bog down a fair bit - but that may have had something to do with the fact it was Saturday night and people were more into having a good time than speeding through the game.

As a wild card in the game, there was a British rocket battery under the umpire's control that would fire when its card came up, but where the rocket would go, nobody knew (usually it'd screw the British up, including sending most of a troop of cavalry diving off a bridge!).

Here's the table on Saturday night, my artillery's in bottom right:


I got my artillery into a nice position quickly enough, but sort of buggered my infantry protection in the process (got in their way). I fired off one shot with the field gun at the French light infantry advancing on me, and had a beauty of a shot with the howitzer - right in the middle of the French cavalry - but the stupid fuze failed! Then I hammered by the light infantry and grenadiers, and my guys either died or ran away (but they did come back again eventually!) - here's after running away...

One other random element was that once your unit's card was drawn, you had to roll for a random event - sometimes this meant getting a special card to hold onto (e.g. ammo resupply, fast movement, good shooting) or something weird. In this photo, the officers and NCOs from two separate units are all taking a leak behind some trees!

This is from Sunday's game - my infantry platoon is getting onto a bridge and victory marker. As it turned out, the whims of war would keep them on that bridge the rest of the game, but as a result of having the best marker on the table (5 pts) we were able to tie the French, who had two markers, but only 5 points too!

Some of the action in the town.

More of Sunday's fight around the town.

Saturday and Sunday's games were pretty light, but a nice way to end the convention, particularly as I was on my way down with the flu, and wasn't fully functioning. Can't wait till next year's Hotlead!

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