The Back of Beyond,   Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond,   28mm

This week we played a small “Back of Beyond” game involving the Reds and the Whites, and for once the Whites were creamed. None of the lead was mine  – the Reds belonged to Dougie Trail & Bill Gilchrist, while the Whites came from the collections of Colin Jack & Dave O’Brien. As Dougie took these pictures, they tend to feature his Bolsheviks.The gist of the game was that the two forces met in a fairly nondescript part of the Azerbaijan countryside to the north of Baku, where the two sides were fighting for control of the region. Both sides had infantry, cossacks, artillery and machine guns, whuile the Whites also had the use of a plane, which spent much of the game strafing the Bolsheviks as they fought for control of an isolated farm, stuck in the centre of the table. It was eventually driven off though, and the Red advance continued.The game reached a climax with the Red partizans holding their own against a White “coloured regiment” counter-attack, while the rest of the Bolshevik army drove all before them, helped by some excellent use of machine guns. In the end it came down to a spirited charge by the Red Guard, who wiped out Dave’s last White units defending the farm. With that in Bolshevik hands, victory was assured.Six of us played the game – Colin, Ray and Dave sharing the Whites between them, and Bill, Dougie and I doing the same for the Reds. It was all great fun, and a

Tags: Contemptible Little Armies