Spanish Civil War, Guerra Civil Actions!, 20mm

A few weeks ago we had a windfall – someone was selling their unpainted 28mm Spanish Civil War lead at a bargain price. Several of us bought lead, and ever since we’ve been wondering what to do with it. People in the club already game the Spanish Civil War using 20mm figures, but we want to explore other rules systems.Someone suggested The Perfect Captain’s Red Actions system for the Russian Civil War. An unofficial variant was posted on the Captain’s Yahoo site called Guerra Civil Actions, so we decided to give it a go, using Bill Gilchrist’s 20mm figures. The scenario (devised by Bill) was set in the opening months of the war, with a Republican government force attempting to clear the rebel Nationalists from the approaches to a pass through the Guadarrama Mountains. Against my better judgement I took the Nationalists (the bad guys), whose force consisted of a mixture of Peninsular army regulars and Falangist militia.The Republicans also had army regulars, supported by anarchist and socialist militia, and the Guardia Civil. To win the Republicans had to force their way through the thinly-held Nationalist line.To be honest, it wasn’t much of a game. Every time the attackers came within close range of the Nationalist line they were thrown back, and despite playing for about 2 1/2 hours, they never really came close to achieving a breakthrough. Towards the end they were throwing everything they had up the central road – FT-17 tanks, armoured trucks and yet more infantry, but the Nationalist line still held. Certainly the Falangists were looking a little shaky on the flanks, but so too were the mob-like militias who were attacking them.Well, this was more of a playtest than a full-on game, so we kept on having to  look things up. We’d already used a variant of the rules (Very Civile Actions) in our English Civil War games, so we knew the basics, but found that there were quite a few important differences. My biggest bugbear was that units were forced to retire all the time, which meant that nobody could achieve very much, and the game was therefore quite slow.I suppose this reflected the real conflict, but it didn’t make for a very interesting game!. Still, we’ve come up with some good house rules to get round the problems we encountered, and we’ll certainly give the rules another go.Next time it’ll probably be with our own 28mm figures. After all, I made snazzy playsheets, leader counters and troop cards for this game (see below), so we need to get some more use out of all that!