Cohorts of the Damned

After a determined effort, save for a brief sidetrack to round out the artillery , the infantry are at last done. The first of the infantry were done over a year ago, back in August 2022, so the completion of the full set has been a long time coming. My decisions for the infantry weren't too complicated. In short, I wanted to get a reasonable variety of appearances while sticking with regiments that were more or less on hand. That meant the Yokohama garrison, the Hong Kong garrison, and some regiments from India. As it turns out that was actually not too tricky to do: the late George Nafziger's compilation of orders of battle includes almost yearly accountings of the locations of the regiments of the British Army, so it was easy to check who was where. It also helped that there is some information on the Yokohama garrison I could draw on, which led to me finding out that there was a changing of the guard in early 1868 as the 1/10th took over from the 2/9th. That, conveniently, ...

For the usual Tuesday game night I was very close to subjecting my sparring partners to the rather maths-heavy  Smooth and Rifled  (a set that I do like, for what it's worth), but having had a bad night's sleep I decided instead for all our sakes to go with the old reliable The Men Who Would Be Kings  instead, doing Scenario F: Take the High Road. In this scenario, one side has 12 turns in which to take control of an objective from a smaller defending force. Per the rules, this is played lengthwise on a 6'x4' table, with the attacker having a 24-point force and the defender an 18-point force. Given that I had three players and a large table, I widened the table to 6' and increased the forces by half, so the attackers would have a 36-point force and the defenders 27. I also took the liberty of setting up the terrain in advance, but giving the attackers a choice of one of three locations to serve as their objective: The terrain setup. The river at the back marks the r...