PWG Action at Twin Farms

Introduction

Some fantastic recent posts by the Archduke Piccolo and Ross Mac inspired me to have a go at a Portable Wargame in the "Modern" period. I have some pdfs of Charles Grants' articles in Meccano Magazine (1969-70) and chose the Action at Twin Farms as a scenario as it only involved infantry so should be easy for me to get a grip of the rules with (I haven't played a Modern game for many years).

I have one of these half-tracks somewhere...

Charles Grant had a beautiful style of writing; here is his dry description of one side in his conflict


In other words, Airfix WW2 Germans

Whilst I'm rambling on about inspiration, Mark the Man of Tin is doing great things with ultra cheap plastic figures on his blog so I thought I'd pay tribute to this by using some of my son's old toys. I have set this game in the Colony of my 19th Century Imagi-Nation that is referenced here - It is the early 1950s and The Kingdom of Albiona has granted independence to its former colony (Albionan Uqbal). The democratically elected government is headed by the DPFU (Democratic Party of Free Uqbal). Almost immediately fighting breaks out between ethnic factions from the North and South of the country. The Albionan Army still controls the Capital but fighting breaks out across the rest of the former colony...

Game Mechanics

For this game I have used the rules in Bob Cordery's first Portable Wargame book (ie without Pinning and unpinning) to keep things simple - I still managed to forget the 3 dice rule for machine guns, so have since written myself a crib sheet in Large Friendly Letters for the hard of thinking.

Game

I'm going to start this with a quote from Charlie Wesencraft; "I had learnt my first lesson in warfare: men under cover are more difficult to hit than men in the open" (Practical Wargaming 1974).
A small force from the People's Democratic Front (PDF) from the South of the country have crossed into the North's territory and occupy a position at Twin Farms to use as a base for reconnaissance. A patrol from the Northern army arrives and is ambushed.

Twin Farms setting - RH Farm is already burnt out

PDF troops in position - Commander embedded with recoilless rifle unit

First vehicle to arrive is knocked out and its occupants take a hit

I treated the recoilless rifle like artillery and decided that a hit on a soft vehicle was going to be enough to disable it - unluckily for the Northerners, the first shot of the game brought their motorised advance to a halt. Not knowing what they were facing the entire force disembarked and advanced on foot...

Turn 2

Machine gun behind cover but out of range

Turn 3

Turn 3 - Advancing through the open to get in range

Turn 5 - all the attacking troops are forced into the open to get in range

Fierce fighting continues

The machine gun (hampered by my forgetfulness) finally starts to do some damage

Turn 10 The Attackers have reached Exhaustion Point 

I used a roster to record SPs lost so you can't really tell from the pictures how many casualties each unit had taken; suffice it to say, by Turn 10 the Northern troops had suffered too many losses, reached Exhaustion Point (set at 33% hits) and withdrew to go and look for a tank.
I will have to play more games with the first set of rules before I start introducing pinning etc.

The PDF Commander celebrates

Firing Line in the open