The Battle of Steinkirche: Wargamer Show 11/12/11!

Wargamer has been and gone for another year, and much fun was had by all. The culmination of five weeks of (slightly frantic...) work from Gary and myself was put on public display for the first time as we ran our Battle of Steinkirche game, and a good game it was too, with members of Stafford Gamers turning up to join in with the playing. 

The game itself, as I've mentioned before, is based on the Battle of Steenkerke (1692) where a daring Anglo-Dutch force attempts to launch a dawn assault on the French camp besieging the town. For our purposes, we backdated the scenario sixty years to 1632 and set it at the town of Steinkirche during the Thirty Years' War. The Swedes would take the place of the Anglo-Dutch in launching a dawn assault on the besieging Imperialist camp. In the end, the victory went to the Swedes (C-in-C'ed by yours truly!) in a very close fight that was decided in the final turns of the game as the Swedish Yellow regiment gained themselves the honour of Men of the Match by ploughing through first the Aldringen regiment and then the Jung-Tilly regiment to smash through the Imperialist right flank and provide the victory. They were only to be surpassed by what was quite clearly the best action of the whole game - Baner's Lifeguard (at two-thirds strength - 4 figures) meeting the charging veteran Pappenheim Kurassiers (at full strength - 12 figures) on the edge of the Imperialist camp, and not only defeating them but pursuing the fight into the camp itself and routing the Kurassiers off the board altogether! 

And just to make victory all the sweeter, we were rewarded for all our efforts with the award for BEST DEMO GAME!! We were blown away by receiving the prize (as both myself and Gary thought there were far better looking games than ours...) and it truly made our day. To win such an award with our first outing of the game is really fantastic, and just adds even more fuel to our ambition to build on this display and take it around more shows throughout 2012. 

But enough waffle from me. Time for some pictures! Now, there are a lot of them and the quality is not great (the venue is a sports hall, which means it has those horrible huge bright orange lights, and thus the pictures are completely washed in yellow...). I've done what I can to correct as much of the colour as possible, so hopefully they do the game some justice. This post will be the "Lite" version, with a few snapshots to give a flavour of the game. I'll be uploading lots more in another post (maybe even two or three!) 

The table after set up, from the Swedish deployment area

And the table diagonally from the other end. 

The Imperialist camp, with various supernumeraries

The Swedish advance...

The first Imperialist units wake up!

View of the Swedish advance as the first Imperialists emerge from the camp

The battle lines close together...

The big pile-up, as the Imperialists get in each others way as they march out of the camp,
 and the Swedes struggle to deploy into line in the enclosed space.

The cavalry begin to arrive!

The Swedish Yellow regiment (right), about to give the Aldringen (centre)
regiment a damn good thrashing in the critical combat of the game