In the bleak midwinter

On Tuesday afternoon the weather finally turned to snow in Rugby.  About 2 - 3 inches fell in under an hour.  I was about to head off to an evening's wargaming at Trebian's (The author of the excellent blog 'Wargaming for grown ups' (which you can find via this link http://wargaming4grownups.blogspot.com/) so I was slightly worried that if it got much worse I would need to cancel.  As it happened once I was a couple of miles out of Rugby and on to the A14 the amount of snow fall was much less.  For anyreaders who don't follow Trebian's blog it is worth the time to read.  He writes his own rule sets and I was looking forward to his take on the Russian Civil War (1918-21).  A full write up of the game is on his blog titled 'More Russian About'.

We used his rules 'Return to the River Don' which gave a great game with all the chaos and uncertainty I expected from a RCW encounter.  The rules are straightforward and focus on command and control problems.  Each turn players dice for initiative and then try to activate commands alternatively between the two sides.  Poorer quality units are harder to activate then good ones but none of them are guaranteed to do what you want. If a unit fails an activation test the Red player must coerce them into action (commissars shooting people to motivate them sort of thing)  that gets the unit moving but they now carry a penalty for future activation and have less actions available once they are activated.  The whites don't have to coerce units but can do so if they wish and they have officers available to do it.  If a unit fails activation all the units in the parent formation stall and play passes to the other side to attempt to activate a formation.

Once a unit has been activated the player verbally states the actions he wants to take.  These may be changing formation, moving, firing, charging to melee, reserving fire and so on.  Each unit has a number of actions once activated but having specified what these are and the order they will occur in dice are thrown and depending on the result you may not get to carry out all the actions you declared.

It quickly becomes clear that you need to lead off with the best quality troops in a formation to prevent the entire parent formation stalling and that the order of taking actions is crucial as it is always the later declared actions that are lost if the dice are against you.

All in all enough fun was had for me to consider buying some Peter Pig 15mm WW1 Russians!