Project for Spring '23: Shimonoseki 1864 (2024 Coda)

[EnclavedMicrostate]

Hello all,

My club runs a show every year in early March, and I decided it would be possible for me to try and put on a participation game using some of my accumulated Boshin War figures, but with a twist: instead of doing the Boshin War, I'd unite it with my ongoing alternate-history British intervention force (images coming... eventually) and do the actually historical 1864 'Japan Expedition', a.k.a. the Shimonoseki campaign. It's been tricky finding any good detail on it for the most part, besides the relevant but brief chapters of Ernest Satow's memoirs (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/43541/pg43541-images.html#chIX), but Satow does describe quite a bit so it seems like enough to build a scenario around. Rules will be Dan Mersey's The Men Who Would Be Kings, which I've found work quite well for Boshin War as well, and are easy enough to pick up. I've also borrowed a few extra rules from the Last Samurai Rebellion supplement that came out earlier in the year.

The general plan for the scenario setup is as follows:

Terrain & Objectives

6' by 4' table, played lengthways with the Europeans coming on from one short table edge; Chōshū forces start partly on the table and get reinforced over time. The battery and barracks give cover and fortification bonuses; the magazine can be rigged to blow by the Chōshū player.

The European objective is to seize a coastal battery in the middle of the table and disable the guns, then leave; Chōshū's objective is to try and destroy as much of the European force as possible. Exact VPs are undecided at present as I want to playtest it first, but basically the Europeans will mostly get VPs from completing the objective but not as many (if any) from destroying enemy units, while Chōshū mainly gets VPs for inflicting losses.

Draft map –

Forces

The plan at present is that the Europeans will have 5 units, with a total value of 26pts:

• 2x Elite Regular Infantry (Royal Marines) – 14pts
• 3x Regular Infantry, Poor Shots (Naval Brigade+Fusiliers-Marins) – 12pts

Chōshū will have 7 units, totalling 31pts:

• 2x Regular Infantry, Poor Shots (Modernised samurai troops) – 10pts
• 1x Well-Armed Irregular Infantry (Kiheitai or similar trained bands) – 5pts
• 2x Armoured Tribal Infantry (Armoured spearmen) – 8pts
• 1x Fierce Tribal Infantry (Ronin) – 4pts
• 1x Poorly-Drilled Field Gun – 4pts

Some modification can be made if one side or another turns out to be a bit too weak: Europeans could be given some off-table artillery to reflect bombardment from the fleet, and I can probably give Chōshū an extra unit if necessary.

Progress

In terms of where I am with, well, everything, I've already got a decent chunk of terrain in hand and the club should (I hope) cover some things like trees; what I mainly need to do now are figures. For the European force, I have the Royal Marines and the French done, which means I will need to finish 24 Naval Brigade figures; for Chōshū I have everything except the armoured spearmen finished. I also need to do up the guns (of which I have three) and an embankment+entrenchments for them.

Finished Europeans:

Finished Japanese:

WIP pile:

Figure Sources

Royal Marines are the Canadian Militia from Perry's BIF range. Naval Brigade will be, er, Naval Brigade figures from Perry's Victoria's Little Wars and Sudan ranges. Fusiliers-Marins are from Foundry's Franco-Prussian War range.

The modernised samurai are Bac Ninh Imperial infantry; the militia are an assortment of Shogunate and Aizu infantry, plus one converted Lightning Brigade figure from Sash and Sabre (via Old Glory). I have full-size, uniformly-uniformed units for all of these figures, but I went with a mix and match for the militia. The armoured spearmen units will each have 12 Perry ashigaru spearmen in haori, buffed up to 16 for TMWWBK by giving each unit 2 Perry ashigaru command figures, 1 samurai(ish) figure from North Star's Bandits buntai pack as a leader, and 1 AW miniatures unarmoured ashigaru banner-bearer. The Ronin are, er, a complete mess: there's Perry, North Star, Bac Ninh, Footsore, and a Test of Honour figure in there. Gun and crew are Perry plastic ACW with Bac Ninh head swaps.

The coastal guns are from T.A. Miniatures via North Star.

I've got a decent window over the next week and a half where I have both free time and good access to tools and space, so my focus will be on trying to get as much done as possible in that time, in order of priority:

• Armoured spearmen
• Guns and battery terrain bits
• Naval Brigade
• Extra bits of terrain scatter (especially field fortifications)

The critical parts (1-3) should be viable in that timeframe hopefully, but I do technically have till early March, so let's see how it all goes.

[OSHIROmodels]

Looks promising 

[Mudyinsquall]

Look forward to seeing the progress and battle!

[EnclavedMicrostate]

So, not everything is fully painted yet, but a family friend and his son happened to be interested helping out with scenario testing, so, today was test game 1! A few pics:

Just to note, the fences around the guns will, in the final setup, be proper trench pieces; the wooden blocks were also needed to mark out a 6'x4' area on our 5'x8' table.

In the end, the Europeans... did not even reach the battery. There were a few reasons for this, the first of which is that while the Choshu players decided to evacuate their riflemen from the battery on turn 3, they failed their activation roll, which meant that from the next turn onwards, the Europeans were on top of them and so they decided they would have to stand and fight. This turned out well for them. Because the naval brigades were Poor Shots, they had very little chance of scoring enough hits on the entrenched infantry to cause casualties and, in turn, a Pinning test. The Marines, who ended up forming the European right flank, caused more casualties at first, but they exposed themselves to fire from the Choshu reinforcements and thus took the brunt of the losses and ended up taking some Pins – not ideal for the troops who are the core of the Europeans' firepower! The effect was definitely enhanced by some very good dice rolling for the Choshu players, who were consistently getting 5s and 6s, while the European player failed a number of movement activations on his naval brigades and also consistently failed to get hits during several turns of firing.

So, what needs changing?

• The Europeans can be given some naval artillery support – Cribbing from one of the Satsuma Rebellion scenarios, they will get some off-table artillery that can fire at enemy units within LOS of their table edge and which are not within 6" of their own men. I'll have it so that the battery counts as being just within Close range (thus, with the cover negation of artillery, it takes 2 hits per kill). Alternatively they could get a field gun of their own – I do have some Foundry naval gun crew that would work for that. We shall see.
• The Japanese reinforcements can be a bit more delayed – My original scenario plan had it where they got a batch of reinforcements on Turn 5 and another batch on Turn 8; as the opening moves happened it seemed like the Europeans were able to close the distance pretty quickly, so I allowed Choshu to instead get 1 unit per turn beginning on Turn 3 (though new deployments would not start activating till the next turn). In the event this allowed them to get their Kiheitai to an ideal position to suppress the Marines. So, back to the original deployment scheme.
• This also can be altered a little bit by changing the terrain setup slightly so as not to give newly-deployed Choshu riflemen an easy line of fire against the advancing Europeans, but the downside of that is that their Field Gun could be rendered entirely useless given its slow movement rate and negative discipline penalty.
• The battery might be weakened a bit in terms of its cover bonuses to either flank: it could count as soft cover rather than hard cover to flanking units. That said, the European player was a little cautious and decided to simply stop in front of the battery and unload his rifles into it, when he could have instead pressured it from the front with a unit or two and sent one or two units around the rear. Re-increasing the delay of Japanese reinforcements might make such an outflanking move more possible.

What remains to be seen is whether a single entrenched unit of Poor Shots Regular Infantry holding off three other ones, plus two Elite Regular Infantry, was a complete fluke down to some combination of good dice luck and a lack of initiative from the European player, or whether the fortification really does consistently provide such an advantage.

That said, the fundamentally encouraging thing is that the two new players, one of whom was new to Kings and the other of whom was new to wargaming entirely, picked up the rules very quickly with no issues. So the game concept is definitely viable, it just needs some work on balancing. Of course, I am now prepared for the next game to be a complete cakewalk for the Europeans and have to rebalance in favour of Choshu again. But we shall see.

Painting Progress

So last time I still had 2 units of spearmen, 2 units of naval brigade, 3 guns, and an emplacement to do. I have now ticked off one spear unit (images below) and the guns (forgot to take closeups but you can see them in the wide shots of the table).

I'll need to set some time aside to grab materials for the emplacement, so probably spearmen come next, then emplacement, and then I will be out of free time for this part of the year; at this rate Naval Brigade will get done nearer the end of the month or early February, so well on track.

[Mudyinsquall]

Liking the look of that board/matt!

More close ups when more figures are painted please 

Looking forward to more.

[commissarmoody]

Damn this is pretty ambitious.

[EnclavedMicrostate]

Been a while, but I now have a finished battery. Guns (2x24pdr, 1x32pdr) by T.A. Miniatures via North Star; terrain is scratchbuilt. The base is wood, the embankment is a polystyrene core with some plaster cloth over it for durability and shape; offcuts from making the base were used for the slats, and some wooden sticks from a local arts and crafts shop were used for the poles. The pintle mounts are MDF bases with holes drilled in them.

[Mudyinsquall]

Love the cannons - spot on from the pictures I've seen of Shimonoseki.

[Arrigo]

An interesting tidbit of the expedition was that in the landing detachment there was a chap who was teaching Math to aspirant officers, John Knox Laughton. Being a spare onboard, he was supposed to participate in landing actions... he had already done that in other Royal Navy Landings. Later on he ended up starting teaching Naval History at Greenwich and then in King's College London, basically eastblishing the forefather of what will become in the XX century the War Studies department. 

[EnclavedMicrostate]

That is interesting! There's a decent number of interesting characters involved – Ernest Satow, probably the most storied of Britain's diplomats in the Far East, being the obvious one (given that he wrote about it), but also Felice Beato, probably the most prolific war photographer of Victorian Britain – before Shimonoseki, he had covered the fall of Sevastopol in 1855, the aftermath of the Indian uprising in 1857, and the Peking expedition in 1860.

[OSHIROmodels]

Looks good 

[EnclavedMicrostate]

Been a while since the last update, but for a while it was looking uncertain if the participation game was going to go ahead. The good news that it is! The bad news is that as of posting, I have less than 24 hours to paint up the last 10 Naval Brigade figures...

But I do also have some photos of two test games: one was a pretty crushing victory for the Europeans, the other for the Japanese. So, on the whole, looks like it's decently balanced!

Album of images here: https://imgur.com/a/G1ABMJn

[EnclavedMicrostate]

Well then, game day was Sunday (at Overlord in Abingdon), and we had a good showing! Several people came along to have a go as the Europeans, while one of the club regulars took command of the Choshu force throughout – except right at the end where he went off to get a late lunch and I completely cocked up his well-laid plans!

The end result was Europeans 3, Choshu 0, but not without some very close scrapes by Choshu in all three games. The Europeans also had some interesting variations in plans of action: in game 1, all forces moved on the battery, in game 2, there was movement on a broad front to try and keep the Choshu forces broadly tied down, and in game 3, the main attack actually went down the middle, hoping to pre-emptively split the battery defenders from their reinforcements. Photos below:

[Terryb]

Saw this game at the show, and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Looked really nice

[OSHIROmodels]

Glad the games went well