Keeping the roads clear

As promised in the last post, I played a Very British Civil War game last night, using my newly painted buildings. Here they are in a quick snap before we laid out the rest of the terrain:

 

Notice the door to nowhere halfway up one of them - there's more work to do there to add a staircase to the side of the building, that'll follow in good time. Here they are from the other side, not that they look much different...

These worked really well during our game. 

We were using 40k rules, with some simple stats for the weapons and vehicles and basically treating all but commanders as imperial guardsmen.

There were three factions playing - my Handsworth Volunteers, with a single squad holding the buildings and a roadblock, and two more squads and a commander off the table in reserve (so I wouldn't know where they would come on or when). My troops were there to try to steal some vehicles from...

Brian's Liverpudlian Sailors, who were trying to get their armoured vehicles home to Liverpool from Hull. Along the way they would have to pass the Handsworth Volunteers and also get through...

Kieron's British Union of Fascists, who had their own roadblocks further along the road, lying in wait for the sailors once they had smashed through the Volunteers' barricade, which we all confidently predicted would happen quickly, leaving me to try to get my reserves into position to snatch a vehicle or two where I could.

This view was reinforced as soon as the sailors moved onto the table - Brian had no fewer than six vehicles (in a game with around 20 fighters a side), including a van with an anti-tank gun, and an old offroad-capable Rolls Royce armoured car with a vickers machine gun. 

However, nothing is ever certain, and in the first turn my lewis gun was able to wreck the Rolls, turning it into an additional roadblock and causing the sailors to leap out of their vehicles.

 

Most of them then started firing up at the Volunteers, causing a few casualties but leaving the lewis gun firing down at them, killing their commander's signaller and wounding the man himself. This machine gun nest would pick off a few more sailors over the course of the game. 

My first reserves arrived nearby and started an exchange of fire with the scouse infantry, but eventually the outnumbered Handsworth squad was wiped out in the woods behind the building. 

By this point the BUF had heard the firefight and decided to send troops to investigate - a van set off from their roadblock loaded with fascists...

... only to be blown to smithereens when my van arrived from the opposite road, and another lewis team disembarked and opened fire, downing all but one of the blackshirt passengers.

My squad then saw its own van detonated by the navy boys' anti-tank rounds, so moved towards the fight by the buildings and opened up on the offending van, hitting its magazine with a lucky shot and blowing it to pieces at the front of the column. 

It was at this point that my commander finally showed up, unwisely appearing next to a large BUF SMG squad, who were easily able to wreck his car, severely wound him, and take him prisoner. 

The sailors weren't too happy either, and sent a squad into the building, suffering a couple of casualties but eventually taking out my machine gun nest there. We ended the game at that point, so the sailors hadn't got very far at all but had now managed to hole up in the buildings, the Volunteers had suffered some major losses but taken out a couple of dangerous vehicles and a fair few of the BUF, and the BUF had captured a prisoner but taken some losses themselves.

There'll definitely be more to come here - this was a very enjoyable game, made more so by the fact that there are no points values, the scenario wasn't at all "fair", and so we all played to have fun rather than to win, and always with an eye to what made more sense in the overall picture, not just this particular engagement. More games like this please!