Down on the Farm - Donnybrook Old West scenario AAR

Details of the scenario and forces can be found here.

I'm not going to do a turn by turn round up but just focus on the main events.  The first couple of turns the Lewis clan were deploying around the homestead as Captain Pew's men closed in on the farmhouse.

First blood was drawn by one of Captain Pew's unit of sailors.  The rabble were trying to outflank them and got caught in a musket volley.  It could have been worse but as they were skulking round the back of a building they got a saving roll.

The other unit of sailors advanced past the barn and engaged in a firefight with the unit of henchmen.

Meanwhile back on the other side of the farm the sailors and Sergeant Matthew Bonney were engaged in a fierce melee with the rabble of the Lewis clan.

In their fruitless search for the Governor's missing son, Master of Hounds Charles Aldridge and his hapless mutts came into contact with Big Herc and then William Lewis himself.  Big Herc fell to a savage dog attack.  Seeing his brother fall William Lewis shot a hound and then advanced on Aldridge.  It did not go well for the Master of Hounds who was beaten unconscious by William's vengeful attack.

By this stage the sailor unit by the barn had been wiped out by good musketry from the henchmen. 

And the other unit of sailors were surrounded and fighting for their lives against the rabble who were relishing in this dirty fighting (especially the woman with the full chamber pot)!  Spurred on by the devilish banjo of JD Lewis, their numbers told and the surviving sailor broke and ran.  

We were now entering the final acts.  After rendering the Master of Hounds unconscious, William Lewis now took a shot at Captain Tracey Pew.  He hit but it 'twas nothing but a scratch.  However, a fusillade from the henchman on the flank caught the captain and he was rendered unconscious.  The day went to the Lewis clan.

This was a really enjoyable game.  It's tradition for me to play a New Year wargame with my wife.  Alas the tradition of me getting soundly beaten also continued.  The cards and dice were in her favour as she led the Lewis clan to complete victory over Captain Pew's mercenaries.  She enjoyed the random and narrative flavour of Donnybrook far more than IGUGO games we've played in past years.  Quantity over quality definitely told.  But what happened to Captain Pew and Charles Aldridge?  Did Lewis despatch them?  Perhaps we'll find out later.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City ruins scatter terrain

Image
2024 and 2025 will see the 80th anniversary of many of the great city battles of the Second World War, such as Warsaw, Budapest, Königsberg and Berlin to name but a few.  With this is mind I've been looking at my terrain collection.  My city terrain is centred around some marvellous 20mm MDF buildings I got from Commission Figurines at Salute back in 2014.  I built some rubble piles a few years ago, but when I got it all out of the loft it didn't look very impressive so I decided to make some more. The first job was to sort the base materials.  I used four different materials: cork board; 5mm foam board; old plywood bases and old credit cards.  The cork board and foam board are great materials for this type of terrain proving height, being relatively strong, easy to cut and very lightweight.  I started by pulling apart pieces of cork board to the rough sizes I wanted and then set about the pieces with a Stanley knife and an old screwdriver.  It's very easy to carve irregul
Read more

28mm Victrix Late-Roman Archers and Slingers

Image
When I first embarked on my Late-Roman project a year or so ago, I bought a few sample sprues from Gripping Beast, Wargames Atlantic and Victrix.  The Victrix one was from the Late Roman Archers and Slingers set.  The quality of these convinced me to choose Victrix for the project and I duly ordered up some sets.  After working my way slowly through these I finally went back to this original frame.  These are absolutely lovely models.  There's loads of variety and they go together beautifully.  The instruction sheet which I got from the Victrix website makes a massive difference in this regard.  I really enjoyed working on these.  They were quick to assemble and quick to paint up being in a uniform of sorts.   I only have the one frame, but I took a couple of the bodies from some of the Dark Age Archers that I was working on at the same time ( here ) and added some spare arms to make another pair of staff slingers.  This worked pretty well adding variety to the poses.  I'll do
Read more

More 28mm Dark Age warriors

Image
As a bit of a palette cleanser while working my way through the 15mm Landsknechts, I started on a half dozen Victrix Dark Age Archers.   I'd completed a  first batch of these in January and it was good to get back to them.  The original intention was to use these as Norse warriors for my Ragnarok project.  Since then though I've been looking at making them more useable for a longer period of history.  Therefore, with the exception of the sword armed warrior who is very Viking, I've tried to make them quite generic.  As before nearly all the parts came from the Victrix Dark Age Archers set, with a few extras from the Victrix Viking sprue.  These were used to make the sword and seax armed figures.  There was the usual amputations and other bits of minor surgery to make things fit and that's all part of the fun with these plastic figures.  I followed the same process as before and methodically took notes of what parts I used for each figure.  This helped to make sure that
Read more