Quebec 1759

 

A boardgame evening this week, playing a vintage copy of the boardgame Quebec 1759, originally produced in 1972.

This is a nice, simple game with only 3 pages of rules... definitely my kind of game!!  It uses blocks to represent regiments and, as you can guess from the title, is all about Wolfe's attack on Quebec.  As its such a  short game we played it twice in the evening, swapping sides.

Movement is limited and players can only move one group to an adjacent zone each turn which makes for some tricky decisions and a lot of the skill lies in trying to outguess where your opponent will manoeuvre, with some dummy blocks adding to the Fog of War 

I played the French in the 1st game and quickly found myself on the back foot.  The British have to make amphibious landings across the river and should take a hammering in doing so but they made it relatively unscathed.  I dithered a lot and found myself under pressure on 2 sides.  As zones are captured the French have to lose a militia unit (to represent locals drifting away back to their farms) and once the supply area of Cap Rouge is taken by the British the French lose another unit every turn as well.  My army began to melt away without much of a fight and Qubec eventually fell with a whimper rather than a bang.

In our 2nd game I'd had a chance to work out what was going on... I'm a bit like that with boardgames, it always takes me at least a couple of games to get my head round the mechanics and tactics.  I concentrated most of my forces on seizing Cap Rouge and wearing the French down.  Andrew wasn't going to let me away with that though and concentrated most of his troops into one powerful army and attacked, leading to an apocalyptic and lengthy fight at Cap Rouge.  Thanks to some very unlucky dice, the French wore themselves out but at a huge cost to the British... I was only 2 points away from a British defeat when the French ran out of steam.

It's a nice, simple game with some lovely components... the map is really pretty and I do like games with blocks.  It is very similar in style to Wilderness Empires which I've played a few times (here  and here )  It does feel quite weighted towards the British but, as Andrew nearly proved, its not all one sided.

Games and stuff in April

 Blog posts have been a bit thin on the ground over the last month or so.  

A combination of work stuff, family crises, a trip away to Glasgow and being knackered after trying to get the garden looking less like a jungle and more like a messy semi-wild garden have meant I've had little time or energy to do any painting.  

Work has become very busy as people become more confident in coming back out into the world (I work in charity-sector community development so being out there is quite important).  On a plus side we did manage an actual, real-life team meeting for the 1st time since 2019.  Much gin was consumed and it was great to see everyone in-person rather than in a little box on a screen.

This doesn't mean there hasn't been any actual gaming though...

The fortnightly role-playing game that we started online back in 2020 is still going strong.  We're playtesting a world-setting and rules which will eventually be published and having great fun in the process.

There have also been a couple of games courtesy of Eric the Shed.  We finally played out the last of our Wars of the Roses games with a refight of Stoke Field.  There is a great write-up here on Eric's blog  This was one of the best games in the series and definitely the closest.  At one point both armies had run out of morale tokens and a single loss could have swung it either way...

All photos shamelessly nicked from the Shed Wars blog!

We also played a great game of Muskets and Tomahawks.  I managed to throw away my 2 British regular units who were caught in the open and were quickly whittled down by fire from the French and their Native American allies.  

My plucky band of locals who should have proved ineffectual actually fought much better, holding off a French column until the Rangers arrived.  Sadly the other relieving force was badly mauled so victory went to the French. A great set of rules that I ought to play more often.

Headley Heath

 An occasional series of blog posts finding tenuous wargaming connections to my local walks...

As it is the May Day Bank Holiday weekend here we decided to avoid our local park as it was busy with a weekend Fair and headed off with the dogs to Headley Heath.  This is only a few miles from home in the Surrey countryside but I haven't been here for years.

It's a huge expanse of woods and chalk heathland stretching for miles and the kind of place that never seems too busy.  Needless to say the dogs loved it and we managed to avoid meeting the cattle that graze the heathland... I'm not sure how that encounter would have gone!

Cisco inspecting evidence of cows!

So, is there a tenuous wargames connection?  As it turns out, quite a lot... and most of it I'd been unaware of.

During WW2 the Heath was used by the Canadian army for training... most of the main paths are ones that they constructed and there are noticeable lumps and bumps in the terrain as evidence of their engineering practice.  A lot of this stretch of Surrey was used to billet the Canadians and their Divisional HQ was close to Headley.

Bellasis House

Also on the Heath was Bellasis House.  This was a training site for the SOE and trained numerous agents, most notably Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in Operation Anthropoid.

The site also trained a group I'd never heard of... the BONZOS.  These were anti-Nazi prisoners of war who were screened and trained at Headley before being sent back into Germany and Austria.  Notably some were dropped into Austria to secure works of art

In 1941 2 Allied bombers crashed at Headley on the same night... both were limping back from raids but had sustained damage.  The first, a Wellington from 159 sqdn managed to land safe, wrecking the plane but with all crew surviving.  The 2nd plane, a Hampden from 44 (Rhodesia) Sqdn wasn't so lucky.  The crew had to bail out but the pilot was unable to get clear and was killed in the crash.

Finally the site had been an air observation site since 1937 and was designated a 'Granite' site... equipped with flares it would warn incoming planes of nearby high ground.  The Heath is close to Box Hill and the line of Surrey Hills that run east-west.  Post war, it was re-sited and became an Orlit observation post and then an underground nuclear observation post until 1968 when the number of posts was reduced.