This past weekend, I got to spend an hour or two at a local convention ("Gathering of Tribes" at Little Wars), and though I didnt' have enough time to actually participate due to a bunch of previous commitments, I did get to watch the end of an amusing British Colonials game.

Now I don't know much about the British Colonial period, aside from "The Sun Never Sets On The English Empire", but this game was set in the North West Frontier region of India, and features a British supply caravan being ambushed by a ravine by a bunch of Afghans (or Pathans if you prefer).  The rules being used were the battle version of G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T, which is a Victorian Scifi game.  In this case, they stuck to historical forces.  The terrain setup was barren (as you'd expect) with two huge mountains, a few hills, a town and a road, and the figures were all 15mm, individually based.  In case you were wondering, the Afghans won, though a few Brits and two camel teams made it through the pass alive.

From watching this, I learned a few things - 15mm figures based individually still are pretty cool, G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T seems like a really fun and fast game, and apparently I like the NW Frontier Colonial setting.  The iron discipline of the "Thin Red Line" against the fierce mountain warrior tribes of Afghanistan makes for an interesting conflict.  (Why is it that everyone who tries to fight in Afghanistan gets the sharp end of the stick?  Should we learn something from that? ^_^)

Unfortunately, the G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T rules are very expensive ($20 basic book, $20 for the "battle" supplement), and they seemed to run best with a game master, so I think I won't be getting into them for my own purposes.  Though I'll happily play them at the club if I get the chance.

Given my criteria of "fast, fun, easy", my primary rules choices are The Sword And The Flame, which is an old but popular game, and some version of the "Colonials 40k" that Jervis Johnson scribbled down a few years ago.  "Colonials 40k" adapts the popular 40k game to Colonials, and seems like it could give a reasonable game.  (Shouldn't it be called "Warhammer 19C?")

However, 40k has its issues (as does TSATF), so I've naturally turned my mind towards adapting my favorite rules, "Chain Reaction" to the task.  But a big part of the Colonials feel is the rigid formation of the regular infantry units.  CR is a skirmish game, and while it would work fine for very small battles, it could not (for example) refight the game I watched in a reasonable time.

Well if you've been reading this blog at all, you know I seem obsessed with writing and modifying rules to suit my own needs.  So I wrote a "small unit CR" game yesterday evening.  Basically, I slammed the 40k unit structure into a CR framework, removed a lot of the reaction checks, and slowed the pace of the firefight substantially by making most troops fight in a more deliberate (i.e., not reaction driven) way.  I'm still working out some of the sticky details, but I think I might have something interesting - a trimmed down, unit based Chain Reaction that is optimized for 19th Century (and maybe 18C) combat.  It wouldn't work in the huge battles of the Franco Prussian conflict, but it would do for the smaller skirmishes and battles of the British Colonial or American wars of the period.

When I get the whole thing cleaned up, and I try a game or two, I might propose it to Ed (the "Chain Reaction" author) as a Colonials game. Or maybe a "Mexican American War/Texas Independence" game, though without bolt-action rifles, that setting will be a little clunkier.