War of 1812 with Combat Patrol

Buck

Long shot of the War of 1812 game

This weekend our club got together for a series of game in my war room.  The second game of the day was Duncan’s War of 1812 skirmish game using Combat Patrol™.  Duncan has been working on an adaptation of the Combat Patrol™: World War II for the Napoleonic era for some months.  A purpose of this play test was to work through Duncan’s artillery rules.  While we think that artillery doesn’t really have a place in a black powder skirmish game, since its effects are sort of “nuclear” in a game with just a handful of figures, several Combat Patrol™ players have asked for artillery rules.

This skirmish game involved several British units converging on an American supply dump in the upper Niagara area.  The British and Canadians had to gather supplies from the cabins and wagons while we Americans had to stop them.

American artillery position

Because we wanted to test the artillery rules, part of the Canadian objective was to capture this American gun emplacement.  The story was that the Canadians could bring a small ship to the dock to haul away supplies if the gun was silenced.  I was on the other end of the table, betting slapped around by Canadians, but I understand that the two shots of canister that were fired had a devastating effect.

The action begins to heat up

A couple of my defenders facing off against the Canadians in the woods in the distance

One of the things that is different between this set of rules and the base WWII rules is that between shots, figures must spend an action to reload.  You can see some white pipe cleaners in the pictures.  Those were used to mark when a musket had been fired and needed to be reloaded.  In this picture you can also see a white rubber band around one figure (marking him as wounded) and a black rubber band (marking him as stunned).

There was a lot of fighting around this field.

With the small modifications that Duncan has made, Combat Patrol™ is working very well for the black powder era.  We have accounted for the differences between close order and open order units, cavalry, and now artillery.  This supplement is getting very close to being releasable.  Stay tuned.

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