This post is really just me mucking about, but I'm having fun.
Apart from being the 80th anniversary of D-Day, tomorrow is also the 380th anniversary of the Siege of Liverpool, so I thought I might see if I can put together a little siege game. Strictly speaking, Liverpool was attacked three times in two years, so I should be more specific and say that I am talking about Prince Rupert's siege, which was the second of the three.
I've been doing some reading about the event, which lasted only six days, and this evening I had a go at starting to put together a battlefield. Early days yet, and I had a great time fiddling about with the defences, but one obvious howler here is that my nice little medieval walls are not appropriate at all.
After the Parliamentarians seized the town in 1643, they were very worried about being able to defend the place, and they hired one Herr Roswörm, an engineer who had, I think, already done a similar job for Manchester, to get the defences smartened up a bit. What is recorded as a mud wall was built around the northern side of the town, with an impressive ditch, 30 feet wide and 9 feet deep, which looks on the map as though it was capable of being flooded from the river. The other sides of the town were protected by the river and The Pool, which was an inlet used as a port area, and the land beyond the Pool was mostly marsh (and later became Toxteth Park).
A contemporary Royalist account describes the defence as a "sod wall", and describes how Rupert's big guns knocked lumps out of it into the ditch.
OK - I'm on it. We don't really know what the mud wall looked like, but it is an important aspect of the event, so I shall work on producing some kind of representation of such a wall for my proposed game. It would be useful if it were wide enough at the top to have some kind of firing step, and probably a few gun emplacements. I'll jazz the scenery up a bit as well - sieges are always fun to set out, though it is easy to lose whole afternoons of your life setting up vegetable gardens and suchlike. The soul of the railway modeller is still in there somewhere.
I shall report back in a few days when the town is shaping up. Tomorrow I shall pick out an OOB.
I like it already. Looking forward to seeing more of this project!
ReplyDeleteThank you sir! - I've been down something like this road some years ago, when I did a lot of preparatory reading and enthusing about the Siege of Newcastle, and talked so much about it on this blog that it made it even more embarrassing when circumstances outside my direct control forced me to (very publicly) cancel the game! I shall be more appropriately circumspect this time.
DeleteSounds good, Tony! Finally found some time this afternoon to piece together an account of last week's Bassignana battle.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jon - your work in setting up and organising these games, and the fine job you do reporting on them, is an inspirational example to us all.
DeleteLooking good Tony, don’t forget to include Ye Olde Tavern Club in the town!
ReplyDeleteYeah, yeah, yeah!
DeleteInterested to see what you come up with - I need to do some siege works at some point so hoping for some inspiration.
ReplyDeleteHi Rob - the ECW offers some smaller, less complicated sieges, which give the possibility of a relatively lightweight try-out for some rules mechanisms. I hope this goes OK. There is something about sieges which, to me, suggests a solo-gaming context. A competitive, social game of this particular Siege of Liverpool might take some selling. Personally I find this stuff fascinating, but I am always reminded of Michael Peterson's lovely quote about predictable outcomes, and how the detailed play-through of a siege can run the risk of being a super-slo-mo film of someone being hit by a bus
DeleteI think that, even more so than battles, siege games benefit enormously from being set with in a campaign. Then, even when the outcome appears inevitable there's lots to play for in dragging it out to tie down the opponent while you make hay elsewhere. Even better if you can cause serious losses - especially if they suffer a disease outbreak.
DeleteHi Rob - yes, I agree. Difficulty I've had in the past goes along these lines:
Delete(1) Great to be able to fight a proper tabletop siege with a sensible context!
(2) Problem 1 - the elapsed time for a real siege would be some weeks, during which the armies would be marching all over the place; the game itself might take a couple of days to play. OK - I could leave the siege set up and play it in weekly instalments as the campaign progresses on the map. Good - not popular with the house management, maybe.
(3) Potential Problem 2 - I might need another table, to fight any battles that crop up while the siege is going on. Hmmm.
(4) Potential Problem 3 - just a minute - what if there are two sieges going on at the same time?
I confess I didn't come up with a good answer for the last one, apart from banning simultaneous sieges. I also confess that I took the coward's cop-out, and used on-paper, algorithmic sieges (in the Peninsular War, anyway). Yes, I hated myself for it.
I've mentioned here before that an absolutely critical prerequisite for a siege game is a meaningful narrative - why the troops are fighting, why they should continue to fight, what is the significance of winning the siege - all that - and some time limit or similar pressure for the besieger is good too; I think this aspect of the game comes very nicely out of a campaign, so I'm all in favour.
Verrrry nice. Bit of polyfilla painted brownish with a few dabs of house green for the mud walls?
ReplyDeleteHow well you are attuned to my usual classy output! My experience of polyfilla is that it never dried out properly if it's more than about 4mm thick. I was trying to remember how I used to make papier-maché, but then I think that maybe wasn't as successful as I like to recall. There is a mighty collection of old-wives'-tale wargame modelling tricks (think plasticene and banana-oil) which were mostly bollocks, but Featherstone knew someone who swore by them. I shall dig out the polyfilla immediately - is "USE BY FEB 2007" a problem?
DeleteI have heaps of expanded polystyrene to make this sort of thing. Chop it up with a (very) sharp knife, stiffen with a couple of coats of PVA, then flock and paint away. Most ECW fortifications were all n the star fort style, so something pointy, with maybe wood revetments on the firing platforms and fronted with turf instead of stone?
ReplyDeleteThanks for this Martin - this is the sort of handicraft project I really enjoy when someone else does it, but my own skills are so poor that I usually limit myself to daubing paint on a commercial resin casting of some sort. Having fretted over the surprising lack of pictures in the numerous books I have, I was rather embarrassed to find (in the right place on the right shelf) the Osprey book on Fortifications of the ECW, which has some nice pictures - especially of London and Newark, of course. I'd forgotten about that one.
DeleteI'm expecting some promising pieces from TSS in a day or so - I think I may only have to make them look a bit dirty, and a row of cocktail-stick palisade should help. I'll put some trench sections on the top, to provide a firing step, and add the odd gun emplacement. Rosworm's diggings at Liverpool and Manchester do not appear in the Osprey book, but I wouldn't expect them to, since the war in such regions is what used to be described as "only of interest to local history societies". Quite so. God bless them all.