Edgehill solo

I've had a couple of Mike Lambo's solo games for a while, but never played his Battles of the English Civil War.  Mostly it's because I don't have any hex-grid boards or cloths to use.

This week I was on the house by myself for a while, so I decided to just drop some pennies in a regular array to mark the centres of the hexes, and stand some bases of troops on top of them.  In fact I laid them out in a rectangular array, 50mm apart, then moved every other column 25mm up the table to create a sort-of hexagonal array of points.

Edgehill at the end of turn 1

The units are 1/72 models, based on 40mm square MDF.  It looks like I set them up in the dark, because the cavaliers in floppy hats and big feathers are at the parliamentarian end, while the lobsters with pistols are with the King.  But it does mean that a game got played.

The little green dice indicate wooded hexes, the card sheets and drinks coaster are the hill.  I used little red dice to mark demoralised units and little yellow dice for orders.

The photo shows the position after turn 1.  Both sides have moved forward a little from their start positions and it's about to get interesting.

The book provides a programmed set of movement for the opposition (with die rolls to keep it from becoming predicatable).  My objective as Essex is to clear the field of royalist forces within 10 turns, which won't be easy, given that they outnumber me by 9 to 7.  I will have to make clever use of the support / flanking bonuses to ensure that my attacks are more effective than theirs.

Did I beat the system and win the game?  Not quite, which is just about the ideal answer.  At the end of turn 10 the King still had his artillery in place on the hill, while parliament's forces were down to 1 unit of horse, 1 of muskets, and the guns.  My last action on turn 10 was to fire my artillery at the King's, but my dice were not lucky and the outcome was a roughly historical score draw.

The game units don't feel quite right for the ECW at this scale.  Yes, there are horse, pikes, muskets & artillery, but at this scale (2 units of horse & 4 units of foot to represent the parliamentarian force) the pikes and muskets should operate together in battalia of foot.  Even the detachments of commanded shot would not be big enough to show up as a whole unit of muskets on this scale.  But as a game it provides variety and interest.  I will definitely play this battle again and then work through some more of the 15 scenarios in the book.

The little dice were actually bought for One Hour Wargames.  I make too many mistakes with a roster, marking damage against the wrong unit etc.  So instead I mark hits with dice: if a unit takes 1 to 5 hits, put a green die on it, showing a 1 to 5.  For 6 to 10 hits use a yellow die showing 1-5 and remember to add 5.  For 11 to 15 hits, use a red die.  It's not too fiddly to change the dice on the table, and there are no more mistakes about which unit takes the damage.