State of Play: Commands and Colors Tricorne: The American Revolution - Yorktown

 

 

 

Initial assault on Redoubt No. 9; an inauspicious start.

We had our last game of 2025, and I told T to surprise me. And surprise me he did. For our diversion, he’d set up the Yorktown scenario from the French and More! Expansion (Compass Games, 2018) for Commands & Colors Tricorne: The American Revolution (Compass Games, 2017). The full game of the scenario is Yorktown (Assault On Redoubt #9 & #10)  14 October 1781, the last scenario in the set. It sounds like hard work, and it was.

Seeing French troops set up on the board, I realised this was the first scenario we would have ever played from the French and More expansion. This is an embarrassment as I’ve stated several times here in the blog that C&C Tricorne is probably my favourite flavour of the Command and Colors family, and not just for the eras it covers. It brings a few tweaks that add a little swinginess to the proceedings that I enjoy. The lack of plays from the expansion is something I plan to remedy in 2026.

Opening positions: some manoeuvre required.

T had set himself up to be the British/Hessian defenders manning the stout redoubts, and I took the Continental Army and their French allies. The antagonists have a stronger force going into the game – fifteen infantry units, supported by three artillery formations, against the British eight leg units and one not inconsequential heavy cannon unit – but the two redoubts are tough nuts to crack. Under the Tricorne rules, units behind fieldworks can ignore the first retreat flag in a ranged attack and the first symbol hit of a melee attack.

I was fortunate to start the game with a decently strong hand, offering
some options for proceeding.

But first I had to get my fellas up close enough to make any kind of worthwhile attack at all. This took three turns. The Continental player goes first, and the early turns involved edging Colonial and French units into position to advance on the enemy’s works. Meanwhile British potshots had some success in thinning out my troops. Cannon proved wholly ineffective against T’s lobsters. Whoever engineered the redoubts deserved a commendation.

At turn four I was finally in a position to make a concerted effort against Redoubt No. 10 (Continental Left). Three Brave French Line attacked on a Bayonet Charge order, throwing themselves against the desperate British defence... to an inconsequential result. No casualties on either side. This initial strike set the tone for the whole game.

The initial French assault on Redoubt No. 10, with
the road to Yorktown visible on the right.

Over the course of the next eight or nine rounds, we both took some hits, but neither of us had lost a unit (or gained a banner). Fearing the possibility of the No. 10 Redoubt being overrun, he had begun to T had begun to bring his heavy cannon down to lay fire on the French attackers. It was already a good way toward the redoubt when I saw my chance. I’d moved two Light troops up to the tree-line between the redoubts, attempting to bring them behind No. 9 for a clearer shot – Light units are better at range than regulars, and can move more quickly if they forgo combat, but other issues kept cropping up needing attention.

Mid-game: much blood spilt, with nought to show for it.

At turn fourteen, I had my lightbulb moment. By this time, we’d both taken some hits and scored off one another. I’d managed to get a much-diminished Regular unit behind the No. 9 battlements, and to replace it with another the following turn, when T’s counterattack finished off the first. The tide had begun to turn, but no end to the game was in sight (it was starting to get late by now, and it was a school-night). I’m not proud of my actions, but something had to be done, or we would have to call it a draw short of any clear victory.

I interspersed my following actions between maintaining the gains I’d made (the Continental player gets (or keeps) a Temporary Victory Banner for each fortified hex they occupy) and double-timing my two light units up the road to Yorktown and its two vacated Fieldworks hexes. I held two, and we had by now two legitimate Victory Banners each (T was about to get is third).

I didn’t announce my intentions to take Yorktown, and T was too distracted with the redoubt action to notice until the final move. By the time my Light troops entered the vacated fieldworks at the edge of the occupied city, I had managed five Victory Banners, and this action gave me the last two to win the game.

End state. Yorktown Occupied, but at a cost.

It felt like less of a victory than it might have, but the game had been a twenty-two round slog, and I come back to my earlier comment; the Yorktown defences are a terribly hard nut to crack for the Continental player. I think I may have still won if I’d gone ahead with my original intention of flanking Redoubt No. 9 and likely capturing its attendant officer, but this may have taken another five or eight turns. T tends to feel that a win is a win, but to me this felt a little gamey to take too much pride in the success.

 

 

Not Created Equal: a Block Wargame Primer, Part 1 – Commands & Colors

  

 

Note: this was originally going to be a single post about various types of block wargames. But as sometimes happens, the further down the rabbit-hole I went, the more I found I had to add. Rather than try to trim it down excessively, I’m going to write this as a short series.

I know Commands & Colors is an odd place to start, but of all the block wargames available, it’s the one I have the most familiarity with, so it seemed like a good launchpad.

I don’t have a schedule for this series, but I anticipate maybe one post a month or so  until I run out of things to talk about.

C&C: Napoleonics - EPIC Napoleonics: Austerlitz

This post – or post-series – was prompted by a comment on Facebook. When I posted my first Ten Game Challenge AAR on the Tac-UP group, Napoléon 1807 (Shakos, 2020), a fellow group member commented that the game looked interesting and mentioned that they had never played a block game. This got me to thinking about block games and their place in the hobby.

The term “Block wargame” seems to conjure different pictures for different people; everyone can agree that Columbia’s Julius Caesar (Columbia Games, 2010) and Hammer of the Scots (Columbia Games, 2002) are definitely block games, but can the same be said for Churchill (GMT Games, 2015). Are games from the Commands & Colors family block games? Wooden blocks make up nearly all the moving parts of the game, but they don’t function like the blocks in a traditional block game, like Julius Caesar. And then there’s Atlantic Chase (GMT Games, 2021).

 

Setting the parameters

For the sake of this rabbit-hole-dive, I’m going to cast the net particularly wide, taking in pretty much anything that uses wooden blocks within the game’s parameters. From the get-go, I should also define what I mean by blocks. I’ll be specifically looking at games that use wooden pieces to convey meaning beyond the merely being a marker for a presence (like the Control discs in WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020), or numerical superiority (as in COIN games, or Academy Game’s Birth of America series). This isn’t a criticism or dismissal of these games – it’s just not what I’m interested in here. The wooden components in these instances could easily be replaced with punchboard counters or another kind of marker (like the little resin cubes in Pandemic (Z-Man Games, 2008)) without the game suffering any playability issues.

To try to head off some of the arguments at the pass, I’m going to apply a broad but simple definition of what I’ll go into here. For the sake of this discussion, a block game is a game that uses wooden components (regardless of precise shape) that present information further to their placement on the board. All the games for consideration will feature individual blocks as units or several blocks comprising units. The blocks tend to be of a uniform size, but not always. It is rather broad in scope, but I wanted the opportunity to talk about block games in their configurations and contrivances.

At this point, it may be useful to address what I won’t be considering in this post. I decided to disregard COIN Cames at the outset. This is not an indictment of COIN games – I’m not very good at them but I nonetheless enjoy playing them and even own a couple – but the information conveyed by the blocks in a COIN-system game is solely numerical and locational. After some deliberation, I decided to leave out Levy and Campaign games as well; There is more information conveyed by the colour and shape of the pieces, but it comes down to tiered numerical values.

I’m by no means an expert on the subject either. I‘ve played probably a couple-dozen block wargames of different stripes, but there are a lot I haven’t played, and still others I probably haven’t heard of (suggestions for future exploration welcome). This series isn’t meant to be an exhaustive survey of block wargames, or a cook’s tour of block games I have known. What I hope to present is a broad brushstroke look at what different styles of block game are trying to do and how they go about it, and maybe some thoughts abo what they’ve brought to the hobby and how they’ve influenced hex-and-counter games and vice-versa. I don’t expect anything earth-shattering to come out of this, but maybe a post will nudge a reader toward a type of game they haven’t tried before. As ever, comments, criticisms and recommendations are welcome.

 

C&C : Ancients: Marathon, BC490 - not going so welll for the Greeks.

Commands & Colors - basic blocks

Anyone who’s been keeping up with A Fast Game knows that I’ve played a LOT of Commands & Colors in a number of flavours. When I started thinking about this as a post subject series was in two minds about including C&C, but it does fill the requirements of the earlier stated definition, and it seemed like a good – if chronologically unsound – place to start.

My first experience with Commands & Colors was an introductory game of Commands & Colors: Ancients (GMT Games, 2006), with two guys from my long-standing Wednesday group. I wasn’t aware of the game’s lineage, sharing the DNA of Battle Cry (Avalon Hill, 1999) and Memoir ’44 (Days of Wonder, 2004), but my initial reaction to seeing the battle (Cannae - 216BC) set up was “This is a minis game without the minis. That’s so cool!”

Commands & Colors is something of an aberration in the world of block games. Where most block games use the block mechanism to ensure certain information is hidden from the opponent, such as the current strength or even the type of unit, the units in Commands & Colors games proclaim much of their information for all to see. The blocks themselves have matching stickers, front and back, and the number of blocks conveys how many steps the unit has left (how much more of a battering it can take before losing cohesion). And if they didn’t declare themselves, you could at least make some educated guesses at to what you faced by the size and shape of the block.

The multiple blocks making up a unit act as hit points for the unit. When a unit takes a hit that it can’t otherwise soak, it loses a block. This is another point of separation from the traditional Columbia-style block game, which uses the individual unit to keep track of losses but tries to keep that information from the opponents. This, of course, doesn’t mean a for block unit loses a quarter of its functional strength as a fighting formation with each hit – Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) is the outlier here – but the loss represents a combination of reduction of troops, cohesion and morale, with the final loss representing the unit’s breakdown of cohesion and cessation of effectiveness as a fighting force.

C&C Tricorne: The American Revolution,

So, what’s the game trying to do? The whole idea of blocks for manoeuvre units, back with the very first block wargame, Quebec 1759 (Columbia Games, 1972) was to replicate the lack of adequate intelligence on both sides regarding opposing strengths during the French and Indian War. In Quebec, movement was also simultaneous. This was accomplished through the necessity of writing orders for your troops, while trying to second-guess your opponent’s plans. This creates a sense of what is referred to as “fog of war”, the creating a facsimile of the limited intelligence all tactical commanders have had to deal with since the dawn of battle.

Commands & Colors accomplishes something similar through the use of Command Cards. Rather than try to hide each player’s units or intentions from their opponent, the game system limits the ability to act on this intelligence by limiting what actions you can take in a given turn. You can see the enemy readying to strike on your thinly defended Left flank, but you can’t respond unless you happen to have a card in your hand that allows you to order your units in that section. While it’s not perfect, the mechanism offers a fair simulacrum of the confusion of battle, with orders being misunderstood, if received at all, and in the era of Commands & Colors: Napoleonics and Commands and Colors Tricorne: The AmericanRevolution (Compass Games, 2017), or for that matter, Battle Cry), the very real fog of spent gunpowder, obscuring friend and foe alike.

This is a vector for criticism of the C&C system, with folks complaining of never being able to do what they want to do at any given time. Well, welcome to life during wartime. This artificial limitation of options is much closer to the realities of warfare than many hex-and-counter wargames can reflect. It’s all well and good to prefer games that let you move all your pieces each turn without such hinderance, but don’t tell me it’s more realistic.

 

No minis

For me, a big strength of the C&C system that it allows a miniatures-style experience, but with movement regulation (via a hex-grid) and without actual miniatures. The truth is, if all the Commands & Colors system games had come out with minis representing the units, I probably would never have bought into the system so thoroughly. I know Memoir ’44, Battle Cry, and the fantasy-flavoured BattleLore (Days of Wonder, 2006) all have their fans, but it’s not for me. I don’t need plastic laying pieces to transport my imagination, and the lack of scale adhesion between units and such in Memoir ’44 is like fingernails on a blackboard for me; I really find it hard to look at (this is why I was never interested in Axis and Allies or Tide of Iron either)

GMT's C&C: Samurai Battles. No brittle figures to real with.

As I’ve said previously., I enjoy miniatures games. Our Wednesday game night host has an impressive collection of them, and we’ve played out situations from 4^th century Britain to 1980s Africa on his big table, but I personally don’t possess the talent or the patience (or the money, or the storage space, or frankly, the desire) to pursue the miniatures hobby myself. I came very close at one stage to buying Russian model and plastic figure company Zvezda’s Samurai Battles (Zvezda, 2012), which used Zvezda’s excellent 20mm (1:72 scale) feudal Japanese warriors instead of blocks, but ultimately decided against it. Imagine my delight when GMT re-released the game in a block version as Commands & Colors: Samurai Battles (GMT Games, 2021). It turns out the high-impact plastic Zvezda minis (the same quality plastic used for model planes or ships) are prone to breakages and very difficult to store, so I dodged a bullet there.

 

The Romance of Loss

Which brings me to another joy of block games generally. The pieces offer a tactile experience in moving – and in removal – that cardboard counters can’t replicate. This sense of weight and of loss is increased in a Commands & Colors game by the removal of blocks with each successful hit. It makes the audacious attack or dogged defence conducted by a reduced unit that much more valiant; it creates a mini-narrative withing the unfolding story of the whole battle.

C&C: Medieval. This battle was from the Crusades expansion.

I worked professionally with wood for some time – my father was a carpenter and my brother a cabinet maker, and I spent about two years as a machinist – so maybe I feel an affinity with wood. To me it feels like a natural fit for games. My earliest childhood games, draughts and dominoes, were made from wood. And in wargames especially, you can’t get away from it. Cardboard and paper are just radically transformed products made from wood. Coloured blocks with stickers applied aren’t comparable to ornate, hand-carved chess pieces, but to me they still bring a gravity and sense of connection beyond their basic function. This is probably, at least in part, what prompted me to pursue this series.

In the next part, I’ll go back to the beginning, starting with Columbia Games and the revolution the company began with Quebec 1759. There’s a long road ahead – I keep stumbling across other games where the designer has chosen three dimensional blocks instead of two-dimensional tiles to achieve some or other effect. And at least one case of the reverse, but that will be for another post.

 

 

State of Play: Commands and Colors: Tricorne – Bennis Heights

    

 

Monday we played at T’s place. “What do you want to play,” he said. “Surprise me,” I said. When I got there, he’d just finished placing the last block of Commands & Colors Tricorne: The American Revolution (Compass Games, 2017), Bennis Heights scenario. I’ve got a feeling we’ve played this at least once before – when I first got hold of C&C Tricorne we went pretty hard on it for a while, but I don’t think we played through all the scenarios. Still, a game is a game, and there’s almost always something new to learn from a C&C game.

Opening state (the Hessians and light cannon were brought up
to full strength before we started).

Bennis Heights is a six-banner scenario. Normally I would expect any other six-point Commands and Colors game to resolve itself in around forty-five minutes to an hour. That was not to be the case in this instance.

Every iteration of the Commands and Colors system from Battle Cry (Avalon Hill, 1999) on is its own thing. They all share the same DNA, but they’re closer to cousins than siblings. Commands and Colors: Tricorne has traits not carried over into the other games, and that’s what makes it sometimes frustrating, but always interesting.

C&C Tricorne’s closest cousin it Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010); they are set in historically and technologically adjacent eras, and share some similarities between unit profiles. The American soldiery was trained and structured broadly on the British model, and many of the Colonial officers had fought in the French and Indian War alongside the very British officers they were now facing in battle. After the close of hostilities in North America it would barely be fifteen years before British troops were battling the French Revolutionary Army under General Napoleon in Egypt and Syria.

The Hessian attempt to roll up my Right flank was blunted, then reversed.

The central difference between C&C Napoleonics and C&C Tricorne is one of scale. While it’s never really spelt out in such terms, a unit of infantry in C&C Napoleonics is usually in the ballpark of a brigade or division, whereas the unit size in C&C Tricorne is much smaller. This is reflected in the differences in ranged combat. In both games, combat with a unit in an adjacent hex is considered melee of close combat. Ranged combat takes place between regular infantry at two hexes distance in C&C Napoleonics (with the notable exception of the British Rifle Light). In C&C Tricorne, the standard maximum rage for musketry is three hexes, while the American Rifle units can reach four hexes, though at extreme ranges the quality of fire is reduced.

Which brings us to the second difference in C&C Tricorne (which is an artefact of the first), the dice available in combat are effectively halved. A Regular four-block unit engaging an enemy unit in melee or at two-hex range will roll two combat dice. The results are the same as in other C&C flavours, hits on symbols and, in melee, on crossed sabres. This is where it gets interesting though, A flag result will force a retreat, unless the defender can produce a reason to ignore said retreat (say, leader proximity, or being supported on to sides). If the unit takes the retreat, however, the owing layer must roll a number of dice equal to the blocks remaining in the unit (an intact unit gets one extra die to roll). This is a Rally roll, a check to find out whether the unit’s commanders managed to maintain order and cohesion in the face of said retreat. If the owning player doesn’t roll at least one Flag symbol (“rally around the flag, boys!”), then the unit is lost, assumed to have made for the rear, broken. That’s work a Victory Banner for the opponent as assuredly as if the unit was pulverised in combat.

All this has been by way of explanation for why last night’s game took nearly two hours. Bennis Heights was a qualified win for the Colonials historically. The British troops and Hessian mercenaries tried to turn the Colonial forces (superior in numbers but thin on experienced professional soldiers), but could not better the determined American forces.

This general result played out last night. After an ineffectual opening cannonade and some minor manoeuvring on both sides, T’s British forces began to move up unevenly, pausing to take pot-shots at my American regulars (the ones not tucked safely into forest groves), until a Line Command card allowed him to get his Hessians all adjacent to my Right and Centre-Right troops, hoping to turn my flank and roll up my line. Much of the fire thus far had been ineffectual; T had taken first blood with a lucky shot at one of my Regular units at the left of my Centre in the third round, but it was the sixth before anyone – also T, as it happened – managed to actually score a Banner. This wasn’t for lack of trying. With Every ranged fire I managed to push units either at back with withering fire (rolling a flag or two) but every time, even at reduced rolls of to or three dice, T seemed unable to not produce a rallying flag to keep the unit on the board.

Around turn ten or eleven. Colonials 4 to British 3.

The game began to shift in my favour around about turn 8. T was up three Banners to my one. With the play of a Line Volley order I was able to hold my ground (remain in position) and fire at range. It took some tricksy shooting but I was able to reduce the Hessian Grenadiers to one block and push back a reduced (three-block) Hessian Regular formation, forcing the first Rally check of the game that T failed.

Even though T managed to gain a block (Reform combat card), for his Hessian Grenadiers, I was able to destroy what cohesion remained with an Inspired Leader order, and – most embarrassingly for T – with my one engaged Militia unit (Revenge came wiftly when the Militia were run off the board on the next card play with three Retreat results from the avenging Hessian cannons). That was the last unit loss in combat on either side. Due to some remarkable Rally rolls, mostly from T, many units managed to stay in the game when they would likely have been destroyed outright with the higher damage rolling of a C&C Napoleonics game. This is why a what we thought would be a one-hour game ran to nearly two-and-a-quarter. But this isn’t a complaint, though; aside from the distraction of a couple of work calls, we were both fully engaged in the action and the unfolding narrative on the board. You can’t really ask for more than that from a game.

Of the six banner I won, only two were for units destroyed in battle, and only one of T‘s three. The rest on both sides were the result of failed Rally rolls, and most of those, only when the unit had taken hits over two or more combat actions and had been reduced to one or two blocks.

End state: a hard lesson for the British.

By the end of the battle, Bennis Heights was strewn with dead and wounded Hessians and Colonials. While the exchange’s victory went to the Colonials, the British did manage to preserve his cannon and some of their national forces in good order, with no loss of leaders. Some small comfort for the officer required to explain the lack of success against the insurrectionists.

 

 

State of Play: Commands and Colors: Tricorne - Bunker Hill

 

Ah, the best laid plans. When I declared last week that we would get to the sixth game of Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2019) this week, I’d forgotten I had a prior Monday night commitment that meant I wouldn’t be home to set up. The prior commitment was a public lecture on space archaeology and the legacy of the various moon programs, presented by the History of Science, Ideas and Technology Group (HSITG), on which committee I sit (I contain multitudes).

Given this commitment, I asked T is he’d mind hosting the game that night, after the talk, and told him to surprise me. When I arrived, T had set up a game that, oddly enough, I’d been thinking about just recently; the Bunker Hill scenario of Commands and Colors Tricorne: The American Revolution (Compass Games, 2017). I’ve had my interest in that war rekindled recently with the receipt of Maurice Suckling’s Freeman’s Farm 1777 (Worthington Publishing, 2019), a sparse, clever, and fast-playing game I suspect I’ll have to write about very soon. Anyway, if we couldn’t close off another 6x6 game with the final run at Napoleon 1806, this was a welcome distraction.

If you know any Command and Colors game, Tricorne will look familiar, with the same stickered blocks, mounted hex-grid map, terrain tiles, and fancy symbol-faced dice. There are a few changes under the hood, though. The block cluster generally represent much smaller bands of fighters. This is reflected in the hit dice and the range; most units will at best roll two dice in melee and the elite ones will do that at a two-hex range. All units have a maximum range of three hexes, though at that distance, you’ll only be throwing a single die, so it will usually take several tries to reduce a unit to nothing. The points don’t come quite so easily in Tricorne.

Another change to the system is the Rally rule. When a unit is forced to retreat, it must roll dice equal to its block count (intact units get a one-die bonus). This is called the Rally roll, and you’re needing to roll a flag, just one, on your handful of dice; if not, that unit leaves the battlefield, and your adversary receives a victory banner for your trouble.

That's a lot of Redcoats.

Bunker Hill is historically the first force-on-force battle of the Revolutionary War, and it is the second scenario in the game. Like most C&C early scenarios, it is more or less designed to introduce or reinforce the key concepts of the game, and to highlight the differences form, say Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010). It seems one-sided, but so did the actual battle. The British forces are a mixture of Regulars and elite forces, while the Colonials are Militia in the main, with a couple of Rifle units peppered in. Historically the British numbered around 6,000 men, while the Colonials probably had between 150 and 250 souls, but they held the advantages of high ground looking over a fairly clear, gently undulating field before them. General Gage ordered a frontal assault, probably thinking a strong show of force would put fear into the hearts of the rebels and they would be less inclined to engage a numerically superior force. The hopelessly outnumbered militia nonetheless held their nerve, under orders not to fire until they saw “the whites of their eyes.” The British attacked in waves, but the hereto untested militia held their ground, inflicting heavy loses on their assailants, before pulling back, if not in good order, at least not in complete disarray. The Redcoats claimed victory, but were in no fit state to press their advantage.

In our reconstruction, T took command of the British attackers, who have the initiative in the Bunker Hill scenario. He immediately pressed froward in his centre-left, bringing a line of Regular troops under the command of Pigot, up the rise toward the forward redoubts manned by my Militia, using the wooded hex as meagre cove for his soldiers. T’s troops held their fire; at that range (three hexes) each could roll a single die, but behind their fieldworks, the Militia could shake off a single ranged hit.

British main assault (round 1), Colonial centre-right. A stout defence.

There was no way I was bringing my Militia out to confront the redcoat onslaught, so I satisfied myself with sniping from cover. All my musket and rifle units were at extreme range (three hexes) for the full first half of the game, but I managed to get a couple of singles on different on T’s Light troops on his right (my left) and pushed a couple of his centre regulars back as they tried to probe forward. My first banner came when T tried to rush his Light troops on my left; both were pushed back (forced to Retreat), and one failed their Rally roll and dispersed. Nearly half of the casualties I inflicted were the result of failed Rally rolls, as well as one of my own losses. It’s a good rule that reflects the brittleness of the formations involved (though I can already hear some people complaining about it before they’ve ever played a game).

T’s attack was concentrated on the centre for the majority of the game. This was at least in part due to the cards he was dealt, judging by what he played. One complaint about the Commands and Colors system I’ve heard and read fairly often over the years, nearly as often as how unbalanced many of the scenarios are (but’s that’s a discussion for another time), is the lack of player agency, or more precisely the imposition of the order cards on player agency. It’s usually couched in terms of the cards limiting a player’s opportunities to exploit an opening or a favourable situation. Anyone who has played a good number of C&C family games will have met with the situation of simply not having the cards to hand to activate their troops in one or the other flank for a significant portion of a game. It can be frustrating to have massed French cavalry within striking distance of plump Spanish line formations but lack any orders to spark their attack. But this is just how commanders would historically face a real battle; inadequate or misleading intelligence, intercepted orders, officers misinterpreting or straight-out ignoring orders, these were all part of what made the execution of a battle so difficult, and this is what is mimicked by the vagaries of the card-draw order system. I think it’s actually a strength of the system; I believe it forces me to be bring my best game, having to compensate for the unforeseen difficulties that fate hurls in my way. That's it; sermon over.

Grenadiers under Howe pushed back.

Anyway, it remained a mystery to me why T didn’t activate his Grenadiers under the command of Abercrombie, preferring to lead the attack on his right with the light infantry at his extreme right (except may that bringing the Grenadiers forward would potentially put them under fire from three separate redoubts). They ignore the first flag rolled against them, and get an extra die to their Rally rolls, and they are devastating in melee. In the end, it seems to have come down to Abercrombie’s desultory leadership, that the Grenadiers didn’t get into the fight, until Howe himself rode over the take command of one of the units.

The Militia and Rifles of my left-most defences held their nerve under cannon fire and repeated attacks by the T’s probing Light Infantry. Play of Coordinated Advance, Assault Center, and Leadership (Center Section) orders in swift succession allowed Pigot to send forward a line of Regulars up to striking distance for melee combat, but my militia and single cannon battery held firm. In their return fire, the Colonials chewed though the British ranks, pouring withering fire down upon them, and and causing several units to break and flee.

It was another round or two before T could bring Pigot's remaining forces back up to line; I used this time to try to whittle away the Redcoats’ resolve. Remarkably the Militia on the Colonial right, under the steadying hand of Prescott, held firm in the face of a battle-hardened enemy.

Game-state, roughly mid-game (Americans four banners up). Pigot reroups.

By roughly the middle of the action, I was up four banners, having lost none. I was fortunate in that T’s card draws never revealed a Bayonet Charge or Line Command. As it was, I don’t think my hard-pressed citizen soldiers would have held up against repeated melee attacks, regardless of their superior breastworks. The bulk of the work in thinning the ranks of the British came down t the superior marksmanship of my Rifles, which had earlier in the action made short work of T’s left-probing Light infantry.

The spoils of victory? Pigot's second thrust.

While Pigot was still dressing his line, Howe had become so disillusioned with Abercrombie’s performance – or rather the lack thereof – that he personally took command of a unit of Grenadiers and pushed them up toward my centre-left works, but they were (thankfully) pushed back.

When the end came, it came quickly and like a hammer-fall. Pigot brought his men up to the breastworks and no quarter was given. One Militia unit broke after sustaining heavy losses but managed to Rally after retreating. The remaining rifles and cannon took a heavy toll on Pigot’s brave men, with one troop annihilated, and another two sustaining losses and being forced to retreat. One of these did not manage to Rally and were lost to command.

Sniping rifles reduced the British further, but the survivors now had a taste for blood. Pigot led a charge on the reduced cannon position and destroyed that unit, while another pushed the Militia out of the centre fortifications. Clearing the breastworks, they were in a fine position to sweep up my remaining Militia, were it not for Prescott’s indominable verve; he seized the moment, leading the remaining armed citizenry to the task of seeing off the hated Lobsters. In the fray that ensued, brave Pigot fell prey to an anonymous musket ball. The retreating survivors were allowed to carry their leader away from the carnage to the victorious cheers of the surviving Militia. The day was theirs.

The final score for the game was Americans 7 to British 4, for a six-banner scenario. The seventh came with the failure of Pigot to successfully roll for his survival in the action with Prescott. 

End-state. Comprehensive American victory, and a boost the the nation's morale..