Donald Trumped again

Wed 10th December

           Tonight in true pantomime form we had a game involving pirates.Actually a pirate raid on a sleepy English town loosely based on the Salle Rover raids on England and Ireland in the early 1630's.It involved hordes of Barbary pirates accompanied by some 'standard' pirates attacking and attempting to gather some slaves for the North African markets.

                                   

   The two sides squared off with Dave o'Brien and Colin Jack taking command of the Barbary pirates with Bart taking charge of the pirate crew.
                                        Donald Adamson and Hugh Wilson took the part of the local militia and randomly controlled the local civilians.

                                         The rules were written by Hugh Wilson with some addenda added by myself.The idea of the game was for the pirates to capture the most slaves by attacking the individual houses in the village where a randomly amount of locals would be in residence with the possibility of one being armed with a pistol.Once the alarm was raised by villagers spotting the pirates the militia could be summoned also by a randomly rolled dice.
                   

                      The pirates came ashore and headed for the houses.They were immediately spotted by a villager heading home from the local tavern and word was sent out to Squires' Adamson and Wilson.Squire Wilson answered the call straight away but Squire Adamson remained in his protected fortress awaiting the call to arms(he needed a 5 or 6 dice roll)which didn't appear for a long time.
                 

Colin and Dave started their own competition to see who of the pirates were going to be top dog,their was a packet of chocolates to the winner on each side.Bart just proceeded to catch slaves with the added Bart bonus of burning the houses down.

                     Hugh moved his men from his starting point to engage the pirates with great haste whereas Donald couldn't even manage a total of six with three dice rolls.We eventually had to reduce the activation dice number to give Dave's forces some worthwhile opposition.

                     Bart had to leave early as Lady Bart demanded to be picked up.No sooner had he left than Mr Ray Neal appeared to take over from Bart.This after being fortified with some of Lady Suzanne's exquisite Mac Cheese.The thing is that mister Ray is a bit more cautious than Bart but still ended up losing most of his pirates and reinforcements by the end of the game.
                   

Colin kept to his task and cleared the buildings in his part of the village whereas Dave and Donald discussed the merits of Orcadian sites of antiquity as rolling a successful activation dice was out of the question for Donald.

                       The duel between Hugh against Colin and Ray continued on with each side giving as much as they got and after being given the chance to activate his forces on anything bar a one,Donald finally activated his militia and proceeded to move his forces down the hill to engage Dave's pirates.He also successfuly rolled for a cannon with which he proceeded to take long range pot shots at the pirate ship.

                       As some of the skirmishes proved to be rather bloody we had to bring on some reinforcements to keep the game going.Colin ,Ray and Hugh gained extra forces but Dave was content to continue with what he had as he was successfully getting all his captives back to the main arab boat.What a man will do for chocolate.

                        The night drew to a close with Dave winning on the Arab side whilst Hugh was the clear winner on the English side.
                       A good time was had by one and all and this was a game that I had wanted to put on for a long time getting away from the usual Tri corne pirate games and introducing the gang to a not usually played period of history as it came before the English Civil war and English regular forces were few and far between.


                       Participants:-

                       Colin Jack-Barbary pirates
                       Dave o'Brien-Barbary pirates
                       Bart Zynda & Ray Neal-pirate crew.

                       Donald Adamson-Militia
                       Hugh Wilson-Militia
               
                       Scenario devisor-Tim Watson
                       Scenery & rule devisor-Hugh Wilson
                       Figures-Dave o'Brien,Colin Jack,Donald Adamson &Hugh Wilson

                        and the evening began with a festive meal of Mac cheese followed by mincemeat pies lovingly prepared by Lady Suzanne.
                        Another report can be found on Bart's Blog-both in English and Polish.http://asienieboje.blogspot.co.uk/
                        This will probably be my last blog of the year so a very merry christmas, a prosperous new year and a great big thank you to you all especially the ones from the far reaches of the globe who have perused my blog.I'll be back in the new year concentrating on my V.B.C.W and spy fi.Until then Hail to the Redskins.