Little Bighorn Battle Report!

This is the culmination of a yearlong painting project - finally we refought Custer's last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn! We actually fought the battle twice - once on my birthday (that was the Sunday of the Thanksgiving long weekend here in Canada) and a couple weeks ago when Conscript Greg popped in for a visit from Toronto. Most of the pictures are from the latter runthrough.

We used the Warhammer Historical ruleset "Legends of the Old West" and its supplement "Blood on the Plains". These rules are based on Games Workshop's classic skirmish rules developed for the Lord of the Rings. We've used these rules for LotR of course but I've drawn up variants for everything from Dark Ages, to the Great War, to modern zombies, to battles on the Moon!

 

Anyway the orders of battle I drew up were a bit different between the two scenarios. LotOW counts points in "dollars", and the relative points values of the forces were about 1,000 for the warriors and 750 for the cavalry. For the first runthrough I think I'd forgotten to add in some of the cost of equipment for the cavalry, it is significant as each trooper has a carbine and heavy pistol, which are expensive. So the first battle had a lot more cavalry troopers than the second one.

 

Anyway here are Custer and some of the "Custer clan" on top of Last Stand Hill. The scenario specifies that George and his brother Tom are there, and I added Lt. Cooke, Custer's adjutant, to the group as well, along with a bugler, guidon bearer, and a couple troopers. They're taking cover behind some dead cavalry mounts. Conscript Greg took command, standing in for the General :-)

 

There's a bunch of Plains warriors attacking from a table corner. This is Lame White Man leading many Cheyenne and Sioux warriors into the fight.

Crazy Horse has the main mob of warriors coming from the village across a ford on the Greasy Grass. They initially made for Custer on Last Stand Hill but...

There was a relief force of cavalry that arrived on a random turn. These were led by Custer's brother-in-law Lt. James Calhoun (aka "the Adonis of the 7th Cavalry"), and actually came on the table in Turn 2. The LotOW rules give formed regular cavalry a bonus for charging in a line and Conscript Mike F arranged his men accordingly.

Conscript Bill sent some of his mounted warriors from the corner to intercept the cavalry reinforcements.

 

While Brian had initially also sent some of his mounted warriors against the approaching cavalry, he saw Bill's mounted warriors coming and wheeled his warriors back towards Last Stand Hill!

   

The warriors smashed into the troopers on the hill and this was never going to end well for the Seventh...

...especially as Bill's dismounted warriors were also approaching.

The troopers exacted a toll with carbine fire but as it happened, Crazy Horse ended up base-to-base with George Custer himself and a hand-to-hand fight ensued!

Fame and Fortune points were used on both sides to influence the fight...

... but at the end, it was Crazy Horse left standing and Custer died for your sins. We played a couple more turns to resolve the combats between Mike's cavalry reinforcements and Bill and Brian's mounted and dismounted warriors. Long story short, the cavalry troopers bottled out and fled the table, presumably to be killed and scalped elsewhere.

My thanks to the Conscripts for coming over. Left to right - Kevin, Dave, Brian, Greg, Bill and Mike.

Here's the end on Last Stand Hill. Custer's adjutant, Lt. Cooke (at centre with rifle), was the last man standing. 
 

Here's a pic of the table from the birthday weekend game. That game was fun too and ended a bit differently, Custer was alive and things were looking much better for the 7th Cavalry, likely because of my miscalculation of points as noted above!

Anyway the next thing to do will be to figure out the next encounter between the warriors of the Plains and the 7th Cavalry. We can of course do a scenario based on Reno's "Valley Battle" which would be fun, and will involve some slightly different terrain and of course the Crow scouts! There's also the Rosebud battle which preceded LBH by about a week, plus all of the other Plains Wars encounters about which much has been written. I'm also quite looking forward to "Bugles to the West", a forthcoming set of rules from Osprey covering the period. I understand that this is pretty much a "port" of The Men Who Would be Kings by the same author, but it'll be interesting to try the LBH battles with different (and possibly faster moving?) rules as well.

So for now... hoka hey!