VBCW in Northumbria

Our mate Bill Miller was up from London so Colin Jack put on a VBCW game for him to take part in as he had never fought the period before although is always full of great ideas.  All the toys and terrain are from Colin's vast collection so there was no need for me to get my militia out of their box plus they would have been fighting on the other side.

This game was set on the coast of Northumbria and involved both sides aiming to capture one of the local villages which was notorious for smuggling, the plan was to capture the goods and get the smugglers to join your forces.  The government force was a mixture of BUF forces supported by a womens Royal Naval detachment, a police unit, a unit of Belgian Fascist volunteers, a mixture of armour and the chance of some air support.  The bad guys commanded by Bill was an Anglican League force made up from a motley collection of regulars in the form of American volunteers, regular army tank corps, communist milia and even the local school boys and Hexam Morris dancers and also a chance of getting an aircraft.

This is the BUF command group

The Anglican command had a cunning plan

The navy hoped to get involved but only the female sailors made it into action

It wouldn't be a Colin Jack game if it didn't have at least one unit of females in it.

I believe these beauties are by Hinterland Miniatures.

But Colin decided the BUF needed two females units,

I'm not sure if he's trying to say they are just a big bunch of girlies?

Fortunately I had some decent troops as well as the Belgian Volunteers land onshore

The Black Prince promised much but didn't live up to expectations and hardly hit anything all day

although it did some damage on the Anglican Lanchester armoured car and forced the Communist Militia to pull back out of range.

Both sides advanced troops as quickly as they could as the objective was to take and hold as many buildings as possible, each of which is worth an unknown number of points.

The Anglican's moved their tanks up on their right flank and Communists on their left through the mine workings.

Both sides managed to get aircraft on quite quickly and a dog fight soon ensued...

...with victory going to the BUF, unfortunately that was about the highlight of their performance.

The Anglicans soon brought on another plane which then spent most of its time trying to avoid my ace pilot and had only suffered four points of damage by the time the game ended.

By the final move of the game my forces, or what was left of them had only managed to occupy 5 buildings whereas the Anglicans had managed to occupy 6 or 7 but when the points were totalled up we had both scored 24 which should have been a draw but I had so few men/women left that it was definitely a win for the bad guys.

The Triumph and Tragedy rules that we use work well, it's just a pity that my dice didn't perform the same.  I managed to get plenty of hits but often failed to kill or damage anything.

War is hell!!