Gaming: Longstreet

Back from Ottawa to find Bruce has rebased his 5mm ACW armies for Longstreet, Sam Mustafa's new rules. Simple rules (or so I thought). Bruce did most of the pre-game and the basics of the campaign are you follow a brigade through 9 battles.

I was the defender and had to hold the cross roads. Bruce played the northern aggressor with what seemed like a lot of damned drums (the legacy of a long-ago trade).

The opening moves (below) saw both of us use cards to hoop the other guys: my right flank charged forward into a wheat field while Bruce's left flank (in the distance) had major traffic issues. On my left, I jumped guys forward from behind a stone wall and rushed the hill to tangle with Bruce's dragoons.

I tried to extricate my guys by forming column. I also started working my mounted dragoons (unseen below) around my left flank.

Things are coming to a head on the right flank but Bruce suffered some bad dice. In the meantime, I'm over the hill on the left flank and I delivered a devastating (i..e, damned lucky) volley.

His dragoons start to disintegrate before my dragoons can even get there so I plan to continue on with the cavalry charge and attack him from the rear in the centre of his line.

In the meantime, my right flank is falling back and starting to fold up. The centre remains inconclusive. But he is losing a lot of cannon.

Eventually I managed to knock off enough units for him to signal the retreat, alas before my cavalry can charge to glory. The Northerners are knocked into a cocked hat! And the Southerners have seen the elephant! We then did the post game phases where troops become wary, die of disease and new units show up.

Overall, a nice set of rules. The cards make sense, lots of tough choices but fairly simple combat mechanics. I would definitely play again and I find most ACW to be intensely boring! I think Mustafa has hit upon the right level of abstraction. At the brigade level everyone can still have some cavalry and overall it was less fiddly than Maurice.