The Corlears Hook Fencibles played a game last Thursday of the 1880 Battle of Tacna, in the Atacama Desert of South America. We used 1870 French for Chileans, 1866 Austrians for Bolivians and ACW Confederates for Peruvians. We played this a couple weeks back, as the Allied player, I made the mistake of deploying on the forward slope of the heights. The Chilean artillery crucified me. This is from the first game.
This time I deployed the infantry on reverse slopes with the intent of counter-attacking the Chileans as they captured the artillery redoubts – the objectives that determined victory. If the Chileans hold at least 3 of the 4 at game end they win. Rick was unable to show. Ken decided he'd rather defend so I ended up with the slightly larger and much better Chilean army against the Peruvian and Bolivian allies. The field looked like this.
The overall action went like this. You can see the Allies had a rough time.
I marched onto the field and was met by Allied artillery fire. One of my batteries decided it was too hot up front.
I also forgot to bring on one of my divisions. No big problem, it came on during the second turn.
My right flank units moved up and began pouring rifle fire into the leftmost redoubt, aided by artillery fire from behind.
The left flank got organized while the barrage continued.
Chilean artillery dismounted some guns in the redoubt and a swarm of Chilean infantry rushed the redoubt. But valiant fighting (high dice) by the gunners and some sort of foul-up among the attacking infantry (low dice) saw the attack driven back in disorder.
The infantry stalled in front of the redoubt. Chilean cavalry saw their chance and charged through rifle fire from infantry supports to take the redoubt from the flank.
Having overrun the guns, they were shot down by the supporting Peruvian infantry
Then the Chilean infantry pulled themselves together and charged, overrunning the supporting infantry's rifle pits. I didn't get photos of the final situation.
On the left, massed Chilean infantry outshot the Gatling battery on the Allied right.
Then the Chilean artillery kicked in and the Gatling battery blew up.
Here also the Chilean infantry stormed forward, wiping out a Bolivian unit and capturing the rifle pits of two more Allied units. Ken had to head for home about this time. We'd played 6 turns of a 9 turn game. He agreed that is was highly likely the Chileans would take at least one more of the redoubts, if not both. We played 6 turns in and hour and forty minutes. Chilean losses were some 2,500 against 3,500 Allies, 6 guns and 6 Gatling guns. While defeated, the Allies didn't get absolutely thumped like the last time. I still have boot prints on my butt from that.
The scenario is a tough one for the Allies, but then they did get thrashed in the actual fight. The Chilean artillery is deadly, and the Chilean infantry is better than most of the Allied infantry.
Just like last time, I forgot about the column shift against artillery for the deep sand. I also forgot about the Chilean infantry going short on ammo on a die roll of 10. This would have slowed the Chileans down some but unless the Allied dice lit up, they were toast. Perhaps if we hadn't played 4 games of W1815 before dinner I would have remembered all that that. But that game is fun too.
Hopefully in a week or two all of our members on the sick list will have recovered and we can have a 4 or 5 player game. I am thinking of doing a Boer War scenario next time…