The Men who Would be Kings

[SteveBurt]

We had our first game using these rules last night; using the 'To the last bullet' scenario.
3 units of 12 British are pursued by 6 units of 16 Zulus. The British have limited ammo, and the only refuge is a Kraal at the far end of the table. The British commander opted to send one unit to the Kraal while the other two formed close order on a small hill and prepared to go to their god like soldiers.
It was an entertaining game, and a very close run thing; in the end just 8 British remained and no Zulus, but I felt that with a bit more clever use of cover (and staying out of volley fire range) the Zulus could have won it.
Very nice of set of rules; most entertaining. Next time we'll use the Officer characteristics for the British and more troops types, too.
Here's a couple of shots of the table; the first showing the British on their hill at the start, the second the view from behind the Zulus

[Eric the Shed]

interesting...how do you think the rules will work with lots more troops on the table?

[SteveBurt]

This scenario pitted 24 points of Zulus against 18 of British.
The rules would certainly work fine with up to 48 points a side (so a dozen or more units of Tribal infantry)
I have Natal Native Contingent, Frontier Light Horse and Lancers for the British (plus Naval brigade, a Gatling and an artillery piece), so I'll probably use all those for a larger game.

[guitarheroandy]

interesting...how do you think the rules will work with lots more troops on the table?

The demo games run by myself and my mate Andy usually use about 50pt per side on a 6 x 6 foot table. As anyone who has played them will attest, this has always worked absolutely fine. With corresponding increase to table size, I see no reason why the points couldn't increase further. However, it is harder to keep track of all the leader characteristics, etc, with more units. At our recent game at the Hereward show, we gave all the Beja units the same leadership value and discipline value and no specific characteristics, while the Anglo-Egyptians had the fun stuff to keep it simple (which worked), but at our previous show (Partizan in May) all the Pathan units had different stats and we kept track by using coloured base counters. Worked well... You just have to try things and see how it works. The basic rules are good enough to enable that.

[sjwalker51]

Using standardised unit characteristics as Andy suggests, it's possible to play much bigger games with very few changes: using the play test draft rules we fought Isandlwana to a successful conclusion in a leisurely and very enjoyable 5 hours - thinks there's some photos here on an earlier MWWBK thread?

We found having unit cards with the key characteristics for each really made life easier for all of us, especially as 3 of the 5 participants had never played either MWWBK or LR before.

We had 1 card per unit but that made the table too cluttered - with hindsight we could have had 1 card per unit type for each player kept in their hand rather than by the unit and that would have worked just as well.

[SteveBurt]

I'm going to make up some business card sized cards with the various unit types I'm going to be using
You still need a per-unit marker giving the leadership (5,6,7 or , and a card for the leader if you are using leader characteristics (my feeling on those is that they are mainly for the Imperial side rather than the natives).
Rather than rolling for characteristics, I'll just do a deck of 36 cards with the details written on - then the player can just draw cards for each leader, and they have all the info they need.

[Captain Blood]

Thanks for posting. I am definitely going to take a look at these. But... Blimey, yes, that is a terrible load of card clutter ruining the look and feel of the tabletop. 

[SteveBurt]

You don't actually need any cards at all on the table.
You need 'pin' markers (for which I use little MDF skulls), and for large games you need a way to mark which units have been activated this turn. That's all.
You do need a means of identifying units if they have differing leadership or characteristics.

[LCpl McDoom]

Just thought it worth sharing - Osprey Publishing has posted up the usual downloadable resources: https://ospreypublishing.com/gaming-resources/

Scroll down for OW16.

And the rules themselves are now available in PDF too.

[SteveBurt]

We played scenario C (the one where a raiding force has to destroy a village) with the British as the raiders and the Zulus as defenders.
British had 2 units of regulars, a field gun (capabale of destroying the village from a distance) and a unit of mounted infantry.
Zulus had 1 unit of rifles and 3 units of warriors on table, with another 4 units of warriors entering.
Another very entertaining game, but the Zulus were very aggressive and pinned the British long before they got near the village; the British player didn't take his chances to press forward early on, and then there were waves of attacks coming in. The British survived (just losing the mounted infantry), but destroyed no houses, so a decisive Zulu win.
I think this scenario might work better with the Zulus as raiders and the British defending the camp (maybe a Gatling and a unit of regulars as the initial defenders, and more infantry and maybe lancers coming on as reinforcements). The fast moving Zulus would have a better chance of reaching the objective.
Might try that next.
We're really enjoying these rules; both sides have hard choices and are in with a chance.