The Sword and the Flame in North Africa

Hi Kids,  The local lads got a collective wild hair and decided to have a game!  I think this is about the third this year.  I'm telling ya, 2014 has been a really non-event as far as gaming is concerned. Here's hoping 2015 is a little more lively! We didn't know what we were going to do for this battle; FoW, Disposable Heroes, Naval, the possibilities were endless...
Since we decided not to bother building armies with point values and spreadsheets the natural choice was The Sword and The Flame, and what could be easier than French Foreign Legion vs. Arabs?

 Here we have the 25mm Old Glory & Falcon Arab forces deployed for battle.  There are more of them out of the shot.  Two units of riflemen, about eight for Melee, and two cavalry. We snuck in a machine gun at the last minute. Against all expectations I decided to play the Arabs.

 The French look a little thinner, but have huge amounts of firepower, complete with two machine guns! The Frog players were crying for the other 5 crew serverd weapons too, but there's a limit to just how many bullets/shells we wanted coming our way. Most were Foundry and Falcon.

 The French move up. Those dudes with the red hats were Zouves.

 Headlong rush! The Arabs start moving in.

 The French start blasting away!

 At the end of every charge was a Frog infantry unit forming square! It would have been nice if the movement cards had some compassion, or the Frogs could have failed one of those activation roles, but (literally) no dice!

By the end of the game it was looking really bad for the Arabs; 90% dead or routed off the map, the Frogs lost a few guys but not more than 10%.  Maybe next time we'll go back to hidden set up and movement for the native forces.  I think the high point of the game was my Arab cavalry charging the French MG team from the rear and failing morale to close.  Nice. That's the MG on top of the hill on the left of the picture.

 

All crying aside, we had an astounding turnout; Steve, John, Patrick and Tom all showed up to play, and Bryan (aka "Super B") snuck in at the last minute too!  Even W stopped by to use the bathroom.* He's a gamer, so it still counts!

 

After the game everyone seemed to think we need to game more. Always a good thing, if we can just get our schedules figured out and make it happen!

 

*Ok, I wrote that cause it's funny, in addition to true.  In W's defense, he lives 100 miles away and was halfway someplace on a roadtrip.