Isandlwana Refight

Anthony and I met up in his games room to christen the new gridded battlefield he had ordered from me and I had recently delivered. This is based on the style of battlefield I created for the Portable Wargame demonstration game but with 5" tile rather then the 100mm ones I used. He gave me a copy of the Battle Cry map for isandlwana and we converted that to a grid from the hexes used in Battle Cry.



Anthony contemplating the battlefield and the initial British and Zulu deployments.

The game was played using the Portable Wargames Rules, the sudden death variant, as usual. We rated Zulu units as raw and the British as Elite. Each side had 3 commanders.

The British are heavily outnumbered and there surrounded on 3 sides. The river is fordable but a unit has to stop when it enters the river, melees at -1 whilst in the river and can only move one square upon leaving the river.

The game started with the British firing their gun and forcing a Zulu unit back a square (The Zulus needed a 5 or 6 to retreat rather than dying and I managed to roll a remarkable number of 6's). The Zulus needed to kill 6 British units to break them and the British to kill 10 Zulu units.

In the end, the game was very close with the Zulus getting victory having lost 8 units to the British - a number of poor British shooting rolls and the outflanking by the Zulus lost it for the British.

It was a fun game completed in 1.5 hours.