Bloody Big (Taiping) Battles – A full run of 2nd Hukou

My BBB Taiping project has sadly lain dormant for a long time, but I had long wanted to play out another scenario and got an opportunity this week when Neil, chairman of the Hong Kong Society of Wargamers, expressed an interest in having a go. So, on a sunny Thursday morning we met up at the game room for another run of what is so far the only scenario I've managed to get on the table (albeit not the only one I've drafted).

The essential background was covered during my report on last time, and Chris Pringle, author of BBB himself, playtested the scenario not once, but twice, so I'll skip over the generalities. For this game, I'd take the Qing while Neil took the Taiping; my dad was out for lunch but took over the Taiping left wing when he arrived.

Deployment: nothing too special here, everything just set up as written. Excuse the use of Lake Poyang as an administrative space.

The initial contact: the Qing didn't fracture as quickly as expected, especially thanks to a couple of bad movement rolls on the Taiping right wing.

Not that it would last, of course. Although the inferior quality of the Qing troops is somewhat compensated for by the terrain, there are weak points that a determined Taiping push can open up.

The Qing cavalry counterattack proved somewhat underwhelming. Most of my assault rolls were a bit disappointing and my hopes for at least one or two wins never really panned out.

The sole exception was on my left, where one of my cavalry units destroyed one of the Taiping cavalry formations and then exploited into the next and destroyed that too. This would more or less be my one lucky break of the game. In the meantime, I decided that my three remaining Trained but Fragile units, all reduced to two bases each, would be best served by withdrawing to Hukou for the extra victory point.

Still, by mid-game the Qing position was becoming seriously fragmented and Taiping losses were not mounting remotely enough to pose a problem for them.

A reckoning of the losses – almost wholly Qing – by around mid-game. Don't ask about the calipers.

By the last couple of turns the Qing field force had essentially evaporated and was being hemmed in from all sides by the long-hairs. 

My one vain hope would come from moving my garrison brigades out of Hukou and the neighbouring fort in an attempt to plug the gap, but I was perhaps overly optimistic about the prospect of managing to hold both the levee and the village at Sanli.

Aggressive pointing from the Taiping commander-in-chief.

Yet more pointing, with the second-in-command joining in.

The decision to prioritise the depleted infantry over moving the fort garrison up was a strange one in hindsight. (also I will paint up those dowels to make proper walls at some point, honest!) The D10 on the lake marks the turn counter. 3 were left on the clock and it was hard to see a draw let alone a victory. Still, with some encouragement from my opponent I decided to fight it out with what little I still had.

Why I didn't park my infantry in the village is a question I still ask myself.

Unsurprisingly, the Taiping swept through the valley despite the best efforts of my remaining brigades to keep them at bay.

Despite fire on both sides being mostly quite ineffectual owing to modifiers, my attempt to retake the village was halted before the men even made contact! Curses!

But in one final turn of good fortune, Neil's entire force failed to come into action on Turn 10, which at least saved me the humiliation of complete annihilation. Nevertheless, with just two VP in hand this was a definite loss for the Qing.

Reflections

As the Qing commander I clearly overcommitted to the counterattack at the start and I really ought to have put my cavalry in a position where it could intervene as a whole rather than piecemeal. The Taiping didn't really need to have a plan other than to simply keep forging ahead, whereas a firmer second line of defence might have bought me enough time to make a draw or even a win viable.

Two thoughts did emerge regarding scenario design. One was that perhaps a reduction to 9 turns keeps things more in the balance. The Qing had lost by that turn anyway but as stated before, a decent turn earlier in the game might have pushed it over. The other was that whereas infantry firing against infantry were fairly ineffectual thanks to adding a left shift to all troops with mixed weapons, the right shift against cavalry that all fire inherently gets in BBB cancelled out the penalty and made infantry charging cavalry reasonably viable – a 4-base unit conducting Offensive Fire without any penalties would remove a base on a roll of 11 or 12, which is only 1/12 but still fairly likely when the Qing have six cavalry units in play. Perhaps having it so that mixed-arms troops don't get the right shift helps balance things in favour of cavalry in scenarios with less modern weaponry.