Chessboard Wargaming: Full Circle

      On 4th of July I watched the miniseries; "The Hatfields & McCoys", based on the famous feud from the 1800's. After that I read the book,: "The Feud"by Dean King.  Once again the true story was even more interesting than the movie. What was truly interesting is that the feud almost lead to armed conflict between the states of Kentucky and West Virginia. After reading about the troubles between the two states, it struck me as a good scenario for wargaming.

   As we are preparing to go camping again, I wanted to get a game or two in before leaving. I decided to use my Peter Laing Boer figures for the game. To me these figures have the look that the feuding families would have looked like. I tried a few ideas using different rules. As I  wanted the figures to represent individuals, my attempts at using Battle Cry and See the Elephant rules weren't working.  In the end I went back to Chris Salander's Horse & Musket 2.0. Once again proving that these rules work well for skirmish gaming. I scattered terrain on my new tiled board. The sides the troops came on were randomly picked.  I did roll average dice to decide how many squares of figures could move in a turn, along with who moved first.   I wasn't even going to report on this, but the game proved most enjoyable.  I realized I am back to where my wargaming started 18 years ago when I originally found these rules and pulled out my old Minifigs and Heritage figures and started to play games in earnest.

I started taking photographs about half way through the game. The red average dice shows that the troops on the left can move three squares of figures.

The red troops are losing men and ground.

The black troops break though the reds center; two red soldiers retreat.

The black army wins. I do wish I could get my hands on more of these Peter Laing Boers. One of my biggest mistakes were trading some of my Boer figures, especially horsemen, when I first started collecting Peter Laing figures.