A Stroll Through the Woods - Rebels & Patriots AAR

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you're all recovering from the holiday season.

Each week, Ted (a member of the SJGA) hosts a game night at his home and I finally got a chance to attend recently. It was an opportunity to test out Rebels & Patriots, Osprey Games' new rules for skirmish-y wargaming in North America. So we decided to set the game during the French and Indian War, which Ted and I both have collections for. 

Ted set up the table for the A Long Way From Home scenario. I took command of the British defenders, who needed to get as many units off the opposite corner edge of the table by the randomly determined end of the game. Steve, my opponent for the night, led the French attackers who needed to harass and delay the column.

The British were a 24 point company, with three Line Infantry units, a Light Infantry unit, and a Shock Infantry unit. The French were only 18 points, with two units of Light Infantry and two units of Natives that were Poor Shooters.

The British column started with a unit of Light Infantry (Rangers) in front, followed by the three units of Line Infantry. The Shock Infantry (Grenadiers) brought up the rear.

The French attack started from the farmhouse, with the French Compagnies Franches de la Marine and their Native Allies firing from cover. The Rangers split off from the column to fire back, as the rest of the British continued on.

With more Marines and Natives approaching from the woods, the British Officer's unit moved off the wood to try and force the French back. Unfortunately, the Marines' accurate fire pushed the British back. So another unit of Line Infantry was diverted to try and take the woods, while the Grenadiers chased the Natives off before they could attack.

Rebels & Patriots has a random even table for when players roll either double ones or sixes when trying to activate a unit. One of my random events turned out to be another unit entering the table!

This ended up being a problem, as there was no way the new unit could reach the opposite table corner by the end of the game, and it also increased the threshold I would need to reach to score more victory points.

While one Line Infantry unit stayed in the woods to hold back the Marines, and the Rangers skirmishing to keep up constant (if ineffective) fire, the rest of the British started to move towards the objective area after clearing up the muddle they had fallen into.

The British Line Infantry in the woods were broken by the extremely accurate fire of the French Marines, which meant the Grenadiers had to peel off to hold them back.

Unfortunately, the game ended rather suddenly, and I only managed to get a single unit off the table.

The game would have been 0-0, but I managed to score two victory (Honor) points from the random event table, which meant that the British "won" 2-0.

We had a good time, and there was a surprising amount of depth to the rules that isn't immediately apparent during a read through. I'm currently working on a 15mm AWI project to use with these rules, and I'm looking forward to playing more games next year.