Last night we played a game of SDS set in Napoleonic Spain. If you've not played SDS, after a few games now, I can certainly recommend it. It is available
here and for $8 is a helluva bargain. Get the supplement too! Frankly, you could play SDS with any horse and musket era skirmishing miniatures...pirates, French and Indian War, American Civil War, American Revolution, Plains Wars, whatever.
I wanted to play again so I asked Dan to throw down some games with me at our Friday night meeting. Also, since we're hosting three tables of SDS action at the December meeting, it was an opportunity to get a few of those players introduced to the rules.
We laid out one large table and divided it down the middle with a strip of blue felt. The two battlefields are not linked in any way and are fought as two distinct battles. One table featured the church and the other table was a hodgepodge of builds and walls and stuff. Then we divided up the players and went at it since Dan had already per-generated a handful of 400 point forces.
We kept it at 4 players per table. In SDS, only one player is "active" at any one time, so with 4 players that keeps the downtime to a minimum. Even with another player or two it would not be terrible, since a player's turn can complete very quickly.
Anyway, we all had a lot of fun - I didn't get a ton of pictures at all the right times - as I was busy driving my British riflemen forward (and sucking at doing so). The Church battle looked fun...there were big actions
inside of the builds! The padres have a little "clean up on aisle five" before they can hold the next mass...
On my table, Jeff and I were two groups of British riflemen. We faced Colin and Larry. Larry ran a group of dismounted dragoons and Colin ran a mixed group of Frenchmen. In his group he had a couple of fusiliers and voltigeurs and even 1 Old Guard grenadier!
As Jeff moved alongside the main roadway, I chose to move through a field surrounded by a fairly high stone wall. This was not so bright. The delay caused me in this maneuver meant that Jeff bore the brunt of the enemy's action. By the time I got to the fight, Jeff had lost three good men, including two chosen men!
So by then it was all about trying to cover Jeff's retreat. In the last turn of the game, my men dropped two Frenchmen, including that Old Guardsman and Jeff's remaining men dropped a dragon. So we lost 4 men in all and caused 3 enemy casualties - but the French most certainly won the skirmish! Nice job Larry and Colin! Jeff, sorry about the lack of timely support - I'll do better next time!
Onto the pics...
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