Sharpe Practice

Club night again and I was taking a back seat, nothing to load into the boot and only my trusty 'manbag' of dice, tape measure, laser and 45 deg angle thingy, just in case. I had watched two games of Sharpe Practice being played in the last couple of weeks and the games looked very nice because the soldiers looked nice and attractive, so I asked to be included in this weeks game.

The Lardies have brought over their innovative deployment method from WWII and welded it on to SP, right away it looked like we would be crammed into a corner of the table with the rest being controlled by the Frenchies, we were playing French and Indian Wars. This did not sit well and a good twenty minutes were spent checking the deployment rules, the upshot of which was a more equitable sharing of the table. You have a deployment marker which you put down and then you have a mobile deployment marker which you can move around in certain circumstances, your troops then deploy within certain distances of those markers.

Perhaps I should have got these guys into the trees, but I was stuck with the deployment marker.

We were the British and naturally I had the Scots, we thought we would hold and probe with the Indians on our right then see how the game progressed. Each unit has a counter and they are all put in a bag, also in the bag are flag counters, you can do extra things with the flag counters and the more you have the better your options. There is also that other Lardy trademark, the card or counter which ends the turn immediately it is drawn. Once all the counters were out we had two lines facing each other at long range, both blasting away, this went on for the entire game.

Lovely troops painted by Stuart.

I tried to move my Indians forward to engage some irregulars on the French left, but as I thought would happen they got shot at, took shock and then were pretty much useless, taking shock off at the rate it was being accumulated was impossible, the Frenchies actually lost a unit to this as their shock climbed to double the amount of men they had left, my Indians were getting that way by the end. I lost my small bunch of Scottish skirmishers near the end as well, but I think they mainly went down to kills. 

This was the starting and end positions.

We also tried to get Rogers' Rangers to move against the French right but apart from that little else happened, which from my experience with TFL games, apart from Dux Britanniarum, is what usually happens. I can hear the howls of protest as I type.

We also play the French and Indian Wars with Muskets and Tomahawks at the club and yes it has its odd moments but it is a far more interesting and enjoyable game in my eyes and not nearly as complex as Sharpe Practice which has oodles of rules pertaining to everything imaginable, if you like to micromanage a game and don't have a memory like mine then good luck.