Guess what I've been doing!

Here's a clue ...

I finally managed to throw off my recent lethargy ... and fought a small wargame!

I used Joseph Morschauser's basic 'Frontier' rules (plus his Roster System) with one major change; I replaced his turn sequence with one that used playing cards. This is a system that I had experimentally used earlier this year, and with a minor change they worked quite well in this battle.

The system works thus:

• Both sides are allocated a suit colour (British = Red, Mahdists = Black) and the Aces, twos and threes are taken from two packs of standard playing cards to produce the pack of unit activation cards.
• Two Jokers are also added to the pack.
• The pack of unit activation cards is thoroughly shuffled, and when the top card is turned over, it determines how many units one of the sides can activate.
• This continues until a Joker is turned over, at which point the pack is re-shuffled.

This time I also added the four Jacks/Knaves from the one of the packs of cards, and these were used to determine when both side's artillery units could fire. (In Morschauser's rules artillery fires at the beginning of each turn. As the unit activation card system does not have 'turns' as such, I had to come up with an alternative means to determine when artillery units would fire. In this instance, it seemed to work without a hitch. The artillery units fired about as often as I would have expected had I used Morschauser's rules 'as is'.)

I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and can hardly wait until I can fight my next battle. As this one only took about fifteen minutes to set up – and that included sorting out and shuffling the pack unit activation cards as well as finding the figures and the terrain cloth – I should be able to do that fairly soon.

As to a battle report about this wargame ... well I was enjoying myself so much that I forgot to take any more photographs. What I can say is that it was a near-run thing, and the British won ... just!