Cohorts of the Damned

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 ...

Just as the Ōtomo clan forces had begun  mopping up the rebels in the south , a new threat came from the north. Vassals of the Mōri clan on the mainland spotted an opportunity to strike, and so a force under Captain Hiroji was sent out to secure a beachhead as a prelude to an invasion of the island. They took the risky approach of an opposed landing, moving to capture a coastal outpost and thereby challenge Ōtomo control directly. The Ōtomo outpost is an austere one, simply comprising a watchtower to provide early warning of pirate raids. On the beach below are the last crumbling walls of an old estate, built by a long-forgotten nobleman on what was once dry land even at high tide. The Mōri forces would land on the beach directly and attempt to sweep away the defenders in a daring night attack. We ended up playing two consecutive scenarios. The first was to be Seize from the core rules. Three objectives are placed on the table, with victory going to whoever controls the most at the...