Pocket Panzers

Moving through the forest while avoiding detection by man or beast is as much about sound as anything else. The city-bound think it's all about snapping twigs, but the rustle of underbrush, the clanking of a metal canteen or the squeak of a piece of leather equipment can be even more crucial. The men selected for the raiding party know this, be they Pelletier's milice  or Hardheart's Huron warriors. Moccasin-clad feet pick carefully through the undergrowth as they close on the dim glow of the camp ahead. A few of the men even shield their eyes or avert their gaze to keep from spoiling their night vision. In the camp, too, there are subtle sounds. The crackle of embers, the swish of liquor in the guard's bottle, the faint creak of the rope around a French officer's wrists. Out in the dark, the Canadiens shake out into line with as much care as they approached with. Tremblay is the first to shoulder his musket, drawing a bead. The next sound is not so subtle - the cli...

For our first game of 2024, Jesse and I returned to Chain of Command, which is probably our most-played ruleset. However, I wanted to introduce a bit of a twist by pitting him as the Germans against the Soviet fortified region machinegun platoon list. It pits a small but well-armed and dug-in Soviet force against a well-trained and well-supported German one. We set our game sometime in July 1942 on the southern Russian front during Case Blue. Jesse took command of a rifle platoon from Fremery's 29th Motorized Division, while I had the Soviet defenders. In reality, the Soviets defending the approaches to the Caucasus oilfields crumbled reliably under the German advance, but we'll see how our match-up goes.

  Sergeant Gordon, the old highlander, leaned on his halberd as the British party got into order. The soldiers tried to remain quiet with the smoke from the French and Huron fires rising less than a mile away, but leather creaked and equipment clanked all the same. The highlanders were as much a culprit as the green militia, festooned with weaponry as the Scotsmen were. He and Abercrombie, one of his senior corporals, had bickered about whether the regulars should lead or not, and if they should form in line or adopt an open order. In the end, it hadn't mattered. The fancy Dutchman insisted on taking the militia on ahead. Gordan spat as he watched them form up, wrangled between the Dutch dandy and the so-called mayor of the half-burnt village nearby. At last they got underway, marching off toward the rising smoke where their Mohawk scouts had led them. Christ, he'd seen frothing targe-wielding Jacobites with better-dressed lines. As the militiaman got out in front, Gordon glanc...

As the sun rises over the vast forests of the valley, Florian Vanderventer sits by the fire in his shirt-sleeves and studies a hastily penned message. Despite the roving bands of hostile natives and Frenchmen in the area, a courier managed to arrive with the note, having been dispatched from Albany a few days before. The militia captain notes with annoyance that the letter is addressed to "Capt. F. Venderventer," — these English colonists never could spell the Dutch "Vandeventer" correctly, and his father usually dictated his business correspondence rather than penning the dispatches himself. And it was a message from his father, one about business, at that. Requesting his input in a pending transaction concerning the fair rate for fur trappers in his father's employ, as well as the relative market prices and how the fighting with the French had affected them. Florian's father expressed concern at the fighting north of Albany, without asking after his son...

"I'll never be one of those wargames bloggers that neglects the blog for months at a time, especially in the middle of a campaign series." - me, April 2023 Well, we saw how that worked out. Instead of boring you with the reasons for my absence, I'm going to just get on with the next entry in our French and Indian War campaign using Sharp Practice. I'll save the excuses for a hobby post somewhere down the road. I haven't been wholly unproductive, but very scatterbrained.

In the dim hours just before the sun rises high enough to illuminate the forest floor, the group of French colonial troops sit dejectedly in their camp, licking their wounds. A few of them gnaw at pieces of pork in the gunmetal light, cutting from the sow they'd hauled away from Little Eden the evening before and roasted. Their sergeant broods, honing his tomahawk impotently with a stone. Moccasined feet approach from where their Huron allies had been gathered smoking nearby. At their head, the French leader spies his native counterpart. The older indian looks big and beefy even draped in his red blanket. Hardheart tugs his knife from the sheath around his neck and hacks off a hunk of pork, biting it fiercely and swallowing. "Today. We take more from them," he says flatly. The Frenchman hardly hears him at first. "We should wait for new instructions, we've done our bit," the sergeant grouses, running his thumb along the blade of his hatchet. He doesn't t...

Last weekend, I headed to the local game store intending to try out What a Cowboy , the recently released Old West shootout ruleset written by John Savage and published through Too Fat Lardies, makers of Chain of Command and Sharp Practice. There will be more on that front soon, but that plan fell through. Fortunately, an old wargaming friend of mine, Curtis, was in town. He's a pretty avid Bolt Action player but isn't as big on Chain of Command, while I feel pretty much the opposite way. We decided to roll off, and Bolt Action won.

The pleasant early-summer temperatures have drawn the settlers of Stag's Head out of their cabins and into the sunshine. While the men and boys tend to the frontier outpost's crops or scout out the next patch of forest to be harvested for lumber, the womenfolk and children tote chairs and tables out onto the grass and have a meal of fresh bread and meat pies topped with mushroom catsup. Young Miss Charity Scroggins is something of a guest of honor at the get-together outside her cousins' cabin. Her father Ichabod is an uptight schoolteacher who came west from the Puritan settlements in New England and has managed to crowbar his way into a position of influence in the valley. The girl's kin are determined to show her a proper good time during her stay, and by all accounts things are going splendidly. One of the young men has just taken a break from the fields and struck up a lively tune on his fiddle when one of the village boys comes tearing out of the woods. "Indi...

In the predawn light, shadowy figures move from tree to tree, cradling their firelocks against their bodies to keep them free of underbrush and vine. Some wear capotes and blue wool forage caps, others are stripped to the waist and adorned with fierce red and black war paint. Marius watches the men under his charge from the rear of the file, while the imposing blanket-draped Huron war chief at his shoulder has his eyes on the French officer. Balancing the hot tempers of the political dissidents that gathered in Parisian cafés kept Marius at his wit's end, but working with the crown's native allies had proved an even worse headache. "We go now." Hardheart growls in French, a language he knows only a little better than Marius knows Wendat. What the sachem lacks in vocabulary he makes up for in tone. The words are a statement of fact, not a question. The young exile nods agreement, adjusting his forage cap and checking the pan of his musket before the two leaders steal t...

Allow me to regale you with a tale of a game past. In particular, the story of my second game of the day for Virtual Lard 7, a long-distance tabletop event put on by the Too Fat Lardies community. I'll be the first to admit that this post is a bit... delayed. VL7 happened at the end of October, nearly four months ago. My post about my first game of the day was far more timely. However, as I said recently, last fall I hit a pretty bad creative slump that I'm only just new getting out of. This Sharp Practice 2 game is set during the American War of Independence — my first foray into the period after exploring the ruleset with our French and Indian War campaign last year (more on that soon). As always with my write-ups of virtual games, please keep in mind that the generous hosts have to juggle moving the forces of both sides and dealing with as many as four different players, all over internet connections that can sometimes be shady. They are very good about positioning webcams ...