Sunday 16 May 2021

A Very Hot Dispute

 After a nearly year long layoff from playing games face to face, Murdock and I were able to resume our campaign series from Partizan Press' English Civil War Campaign Scenarios, Vol 1. After Stoke Lane the next scenario in line is the Battle of Monkton Farleigh.

With the Royalist army advancing on Bath and controlling the main bridge over the Avon at Bradford-on-Avon, Waller had a bridge built across the river near Claverton and sent a flanking force across it led by Col. Robert Burghill. He deployed the main body of the army on Claverton down (I should note here that Google maps has Monkton Farleigh just under a kilometre and a half to the east of the Avon and Claverton to the west whereas the map in the scenario book has them on opposite sides of the river. Given the distance from the Avon to the village, you could play this game without the river or the outskirts of Monkton Farleigh on the table.)

Although this is an attempt at an ambush by Burghill's force, the Royalists are aware of it and have sent a force under Prince Maruice with Col. William Godolphin supplying reinforcements. 

The view of the Prince's army from Monkton Farleigh hill:

The bulk of Burghill's infantry and 2 light guns set up in a strong defensive position in a walled enclosure:

Early on the Royalist skirmishers are sent packing and the horse of both sides on the Royalist right eagerly rush forward into contact while the Earl of Carnarvon issues orders (mounted figure on the extreme left):
 Col. Trevanion's regiment of foot leads the way taking the bulk of the fire from the defenders:
Eventually they are forced to retire, allowing the newly arrived Godolphin's foot to take their place. They soon suffer much like Trevanions:

With Godolphin's and Hertford's foot stalled, the combined regiments of Col. Buck's and Prince Maurice's moves out to the right, forming a semi circle around the defended enclosure and the light gun is unlimbered. In the distance the Royalist horse have forced their opponents back, however, despite repeated charges, they are unable to inflict enough damage to force them off the table or break the command. Instead it was the Royalist horse that was spent:
Still, the defenders hang on; 
 Parliamentarians continued to rally off Shaken markers and fight Disorder while the Royalist large veteran regiments soaked up the hits and use their Elite status to shed Disorder. With only two turns left it came to the final push; the Royalist infantry closed in on the defenders:
Alas for the Royalists, despite their best efforts they failed to make any of the defenders run and in their turn the Parliamentarians finally managed to force the pride of the Royalist force to retire, immediately followed by Prince Maurice's and Col. Buck's. With that, the foot battalia was broken and could not fight anymore. 

A different outcome from the actual battle. In reality, the Royalists forced the Parliamentarians out of the enclosure, back across the Avon capturing their guns in the process.

Right up until the last two die rolls of the game (both Break Tests which were promptly failed in spectacular fashion) it felt like the Royalists could drive the rebels off. I never got to fire my ordnance as it was continually masked by my foot regiments so I could have done better there.  

For those that are interested we used Warlord Games Pike and Shotte rules with unit stats from the To Kill A King supplement. Standard units consisted of 6 stands (24 figures); Small units of 3 stands (12 figures) and the Large 9 or 10 stands (36-40 figures).  All 4 of the Royalist foot regiments were Large. The horse on both sides were Small as the horse regiments involved were broken down into two divisions each.  The units marked out as Veteran in the force listing received the Elite 4+ and Steady special rules, Units marked as Raw got the Wavering special rule. The Parliamentarian Dragoons had Firelocks.









24 comments:

  1. Great that you are back playing games face to face after such a long time. Hope to get back to it here too in the near future. Exciting sounding game. That is a great campaign book and I’ve wanted to to try playing it through for some time, so it will be great to read your progress through the battles.

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    1. Thank you. It was a fairly close game. The info in the scenario books is fantastic but they do have to be modified for your rule set. Sometimes there are discrepancies between text and map or the force lists but easily worked around.

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  2. A great-looking game with some lovely figures. I'll have to have a look at that campaign book as it sounds very interesting.

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    1. The scenarios are linked together in a very loose way, leaving it up to you work out the effects of one game on another. For example, as the Parliamentarians had retained their light guns from the Battle of Stratton, they were able to deploy them instead of the frame guns. Also, their commander of horse was a casualty at Stoke Lane so he was unavailable for this game.

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  3. Awesome figures and terrain - very inspirational!

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  4. Thank you guys- it was great to get figures out on the table again.

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  5. Your battle looks superb! A return to F2F gaming is a real joy. I enjoyed this!

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    1. Thank you JF- it did feel like a real treat.

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  6. Welcome back to F2F gaming and that was a good way to start. Very nice looking.
    And I do appreciate the info at the end of how you crafted the units and such. The warlord games are pretty open structure and it’s nice to see how someone else sets all the dials. 😀

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    1. Thanks Stew. We tried representing Veteran troops with just Elite 4+ but on one too many occasions they bolted off the table early so we added Steady. At first our Raw troops had Untested but it didn't represent the easily spooked nature of inexperienced regiments so we switched it out for Wavering.

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  7. Outstanding tale Cod, it was a blast to get back face to face and I had missed our talk across the table.

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  8. Yeah, it was a lot of fun- I look forward to next month no matter what we end up doing.

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  9. Lovely table and good to hear of increasing numbers starting back with the joys of face-to-face.

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  10. Marc, Norm, thank you very much.

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  11. Looking most excellent. The mat really adds to the effect of the game! Luckily, I've got some ECW myself this week...

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  12. I might have commented on this report elsewhere if Murdock posted it as well, but it's great to see this engagement played out as it took place just around the corner from my pad. Claverton and Monkton Farleigh are definitely on opposite sides of the river but at quite different elevations (MF is a lot higher). You may know this already of course but when workmen were cutting the canal which now runs between the river and Claverton, they did exume skeletons, one of which still had a hefty piece of shot from a small artillery piece still in its chest. Looking forward to the next installment....

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    1. That's pretty interesting, I did not know that. The next installment is a 'What If' battle based on the Royalists winning Monckton Farleigh (which, in reality, they did) and following it up with an advance on Claverton (which, in reality, they didn't). So not sure if we will skip that scenario or not.

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    2. Yes, they carried on on their side of the river, tried to approach Bath from the North, and after getting stuck in the narrow lanes finally realised Waller had run rings round them and entrenched himself North of Bath.."thus the Foxe stoode gazing at us...". I'm looking forward to seeing how your campaign develops.

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    3. Lol classic Waller, classic Royalists. It's a wonder the war lasted as long as it did!😆

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  13. Great looking game! Planning a pike and shot game in the next couple of weeks, nice inspiration!
    Best Iain

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    1. Excellent, I look forward to reading the AAR!

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