"Featherstone's Skirmish Wargaming in WWI East Africa" Topic

Hello, all,

If anyone is familiar with Donald Featherstone's Skirmish Wargaming (1975, reprinted by John Curry), I'd welcome suggestions. If you aren't, think of it as EXTREMELY small-scale – range and movement is measured in paces and each player has typically half-a-dozen figures. It's closely related to the Western skirmish games published by Curtis, Colwill and Blake in the '70s, which also inspired Games Workshop's Inquisitor.

Anyway, I have about 60 28mm WWI East Africa figures. I'd normally try The Sword in Africa, but there would only be about three units a side, one of them unarmed:

- 13 bearers
- 21 Belgian askaris, one with a standard
- 5 white Belgian troops
- 5 white Belgian character types (officers, a naval-looking-chap, a black farmer with shotgun)
- 1 Belgian officer on mule
- 9 German askaris and a white officer
- 10 Ruga-Ruga

I'm thinking of running this at some point for my group as it could easily accommodate any number of players. What I need is a scenario, preferably scaleable, for the period. I'm thinking Belgians invading Tanganyika and running into a Schutzetruppe column, but beyond that I'm stuck. For one thing, I'm not sure they ever did invade Tanganyika, although I'm willing to play with history to get going. Maybe patrolling around the lake, with the Germans hoping to destroy or steal a steamer…

Any thoughts?

I can't help, but I am always in favor of games with a half dozen figures per side.

with any rules the odds will not be good: 10 Germans (with 10 Rugas, maybe) vs 33 Belgians.

My local group has played East Africa games with Tanga Skirmish scenarios
skirmishcampaigns.com/tang

Well, it depends on the players and the scenario. If I have four players a side, it'll be 20 Germans and Ruga Ruga v. 20 Belgians. Or maybe there would be an asymmetric scenario – say 10 Germans (two players) in a boathouse trying to get the engine to start while outside 20 Belgians (four players) are trying to get in. Or one side is trying to capture the bearers. And so on.

Hence the scalable scenario. If I have five players, it'll be ten on fifteen; if I have 10 players it'll be 20 on 30. That sort of thing.

There are also rules for experience – maybe the Belgian figures are green while the Germans are veteran (which would probably match the actual period fairly well. Maybe Belgian leadership is poor, and there's only one officer for 20 askari vs. one for the 10 German askari.

That is a lot of figures if using the Featherstone Skirmish rules – I've played a couple of the scenarios from the book at my club and even with a handful of figures each (6-9) the details (where the individual is wounded) rapidly gets ignored. I also made some better look-up charts to speed things along (excluded anything not actually in the game).
One of the biggest frictions is identifying the individual figure and looking up his skill, wounds, etc. – that was hard enough with half a dozen figures so your game looks ambitious to me.

Belgians vs Germans in WW1 East Africa is a fascinating yet neglected period for gaming. If your Germans are weaker, simply give them defender role with some hidden ambushes?

BillyNM – thanks for your thoughts. I'm not intending to use all the figures listed in one game(unless maybe I get 15 players, which is unlikely); they're just what I have available and painted. The bearers in particular would probably be NPCs/objectives, as they're unarmed.

I definitely would create some "character sheets" for the players to make the moves and statistics clear. Do you think that 3-4 figures per player would be more suitable for beginners, then?

I found one of the original Colwill/Blake rulesets online today; it's significantly more complex than Featherstone's.

Years ago I played a few games using both the Skirmish Wargames Old West rules and the (somewhat) simplified Featherstone version for colonials. All of these proved overly tedious when more than a literal handful of figures were involved.

Ed Allen's "Rencounter" rules were a much more streamlined adaptation that proved capable of handling 20+ figures per side; these may still be available somewhere online even though Ed's Hobby Hovel has disappeared.

Eric Radey was playtesting a colonial set about 20 years ago with the working title "Darkest Africa… it's a jungle out there…". I don't know if this was ever published but it was a much cleaner large scale skirmish set using individual characters with assorted generic mooks for the non- combatant supporting cast. I still have a copy floating around somewhere.

Perhaps I'm just more optimistic. I do hope to make all the possible moves clear, leaving room on the character sheets for wounds and other changes, and would be acting as a GM. Differentiating the figures is another thing – perhaps taping numbers to the bases.

Comparing it to the original, though, which seems to have been run with quite a few figures on the table, or to Inquisitor, which is more of an RPG and quite complex but uses a comparative number of figs per player, I'm not too worried.

Yet!

khanscom: Thanks for the heads-up. I found Rencounter and am going over it, though at first glance it seems about the same complexity as Featherstone. I've also started reading Paddy Griffiths' Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun and it has an interesting and quite minimalist skirmish ruleset – D10s instead of D100s, and minor/serious wounds rather than specific body parts.

Another that just came to my mind is Tanzanica, a Darkest Africa reskin of Mordheim.

Perhaps I should start a new thread to discuss Victorian skirmish wargaming in general!

Neil Thomas's Wargaming – An Introduction has a chapter of skirmish rules which include Victorian colonial units up through the Boer War which should work for East Africa. A typical British unit consists of: 1 Hero Officer with a revolver, 4 regulars with bolt action rifles and two mounted lancers. The rules, like all of Thomas's are deceptively simple. I think they may be just what you're looking for for a game with three or more a side.