Cohorts of the Damned

Unfortunately, Gareth had a last-minute work meeting on Tuesday so our planned game didn't go ahead, but James from the HKSW came over on Friday and we had a go with my Burma figures. It was James and the HKSW who gave me my first proper introduction to CoC a couple of years ago (though I have vague memories of playing a 1940 game at Abingdon around 2019), so both of us were relatively experienced players and we agreed to include enough woodland to bring jungle rules into play. After a bit of dicing, we ended up playing Mission 6: Attack on an Objective, with James taking a Japanese platoon on the defence while I had British on the attack. I ended up with a 14 point support budget (which I proceeded to then miscalculate and only spent 12) while James got 10. For my part I went with a Sherman, a sniper, a Red Die, and an adjutant, and had I realised I had two left over I'd probably have grabbed engineers as well. James put everything on two minefields and an anti-tank bunker. Th...

At long last, time to resurrect this blog. After spending a fair chunk of the last year or so playing what I'd call a prodigious amount of Chain of Command 2, and finally getting to a point over Christmas where I had two opposing armies to field, it seemed like a good time to see if Gareth, one of my usual opponents in Hong Kong, would be interested in having a go. He said yes, and the rest is history. The two forces would be clashing somewhere along a more open stretch of the India-Burma border in 1944, with an Indian platoon under my command receiving an attack from a Japanese platoon led by Gareth. The scenario would be Mission 2: The Probe (which I find much more useful as an introductory game than Mission 1), which involves the attacker trying to capture an enemy deployment point and exit one of his sections off the table before time runs out. Gareth managed to get the maximum support budget possible (10), while I would get a third of that, plus one to account for different pl...

Preamble While this blog has generally been devoted to Japanese subjects since its inception, with a smidge of WW2 thrown in, my actual historical specialism has generally been late imperial and modern China, with my graduate research having focussed on the Taiping. Unsurprisingly, then, the Taiping have been a long-considered but also long-dormant wargaming project of mine, unfortunately abandoned during Covid when I was separated from my collection (a mix of Irregular, Khurasan, and Blue Moon minis that I had eagerly acquired in the closing months of 2019) and pivoted to the Boshin War. Inconveniently, this was also the same time that a set of rules came out that, had I actually gone and painted the figures I had, I might have made some use of:  Taiping Era by Graham Evans, a.k.a. "Trebian" . I still want to have a go at these one of these days, but in 2023 I started corresponding with Chris Pringle, the author of Bloody Big Battles, who himself also had  a dormant Taiping ...