The Devil to Pay - Friday Night ACW Game

 It was only three of us, Julian, Rick and me, at Julian's last night, and Rick had never tried the free download Devil to Pay rules, so Julian and I diced off to see who would partner Rick commanding the attacking Confederates, and who would command the smaller force of defending Blue Bellies. As it turned out, I was paired with Rick, and after Julian provided a brief outline of how the rules work for his benefit, we were off.

A slightly blurry image of initial deployment. Union forces behind parapets, one brigade of infantry supported by a battery of three guns. The attacking Rebs had two brigades plus a pair of guns, 

Variable quality units - 4 bases = elite, 5 bases= standard, 6 bases = green

The defending Union brigade had a similar mix, with a very small (3 bases) unit of green coated sharp shooters.

A second brigade would arrive at some point in the game to reinforce the defenders.

The Union position seemed pretty strong.

But in pre-game rolling, I achieved a brilliant commander (3 extra group order pips) Rick and average commander (2 pips) and poor old Julian a bumbling commander (only 1 extra order pip)

Ricks Reb Brigade in column of lines, smack bang in front of the Union battery - nice unit placement, Julian! The two red markers are the organic orders each unit has, the extras for commanders mentioned above are in addition.

Situation after a couple of moves - the initial firing in the first three to four action phases took care of all the guns on both sides. As we started the game about 14" apart, any 4 5 or 6 was a hit, and it only took two hits to remove a base - the Reb guns went first, but the Union ones didn't last much longer.

My brigade shook out into line - one unit (6 base greens) "skedadelled" (a kind of voluntary route) when they were sitting on 6 hits (1 per base) but the other three units lined up and poured fire into the outnumbered Union defenders, as Rick maneuvered his command into a flanking position where the Union battery had originally been.

The small brown teardrop shaped markers are hits on the units. These affect firing, until you have one hit per base, and the unit cannot fire at all. Thereafter, more hits start removing bases - which is why it can be a good idea to play the Skedaddle move if a unit is in that situation (which is what I did with my green unit earlier). The hits can be rallied off with a 4 5 or 6 roll, but only two at a time normally and only in a rally phase, so you have decisions to make all the time.

The one and only view I took from behind the Federal lines - the reinforcements have arrived, but wouldn't you know it, Julian rolled another 1 for the commander rating!

As my brigade pinned the Union defenders in place, gradually whittling down their numbers (I wiped out the elite sharp shooters!), Rick developed his flanking attack.

My dice rolling was at the least average all night - this one was a bit better - four hits on a unit of Union troops already carrying a hit on each base - this roll wiped them out completely!

A three to one advantage plus extra orders - effectively, if the correct tiles emerged from the action bag, my three regiments could fire five times in a move, compared with only three for Julian's (based on the extra command pips of the officers)

All the units of the first Union brigade were either destroyed or forced to make the voluntary skedaddle move to avoid that fate, and my brigade moved up to the defensive parapet, which now gave me protection from what remained of the second Union brigade.

We called the game here - I think Julian requested we play one more round just to see what happened, but he had minimal hits on our guys, and when we fired back, every base in his remaining two units took a hit!

The final situation - definitely an overwhelming victory for the stars and bars!

I really enjoy these rules and am thinking I could easily adapt them for solo play AND for any period. The actions are absolutely generic - fire, move, rally, charge - plus 4 "Carpe Diem" tiles where you roll off to be the player who decides which of these four actions will apply to the next phase. One of the advantages we had in the game was, the Carpe Diem tiles came out more often than any other, and we won 90% of them, so if it suited us to fire, we could, or if it suited us to rally off hits, we did that.

Julian and his wife Jane are off to the UK in a few days for seven weeks to visit their daughter who is a medical researcher based in Oxford, along with her partner, who is in a similar line of work, so, no more Friday games in Remuera for a couple of months - might have to look at some alternative to get a few games in!

Thanks for visiting and I encourage anyone who has read this far, to leave a comment!