Queen Victoria’s Little Wars, Home Made Rules, 28mm

Next weekend is Targe 2009 – a wargame show in Kirruemuir, about 80 minutes’ drive north of Edinburgh. We’re putting on a participation game, whose centrepiece is the Dilkusha. it was a big house on the outskirts of Lucknow, which was fought over during the 2nd Relief of the city in November 1857.I spent the last couple of weeks building it, using foamboard, card, four cylindrical chocolate boxes and four little ivory lids, found by Hugh Wilson in a charity shop. Wedding cake pillars were used on the portico, and the windows were all bought ones, from somewhere on E-bay. The result is a large and fairly spectacular Anglo-Indian building.We playtested the game this week – the one we’ll be running at the show. We used a very simple “back of a postcard” set of rules, and the object for the players is to capture the building. The British players – we could run two at a time – start from across the little stream, and advance towards the house through the remains of the formal garden – trampled and ruined when the place was used as a Mutineer encampment.On our first couple of runs through it was too easy for the mutineers to gun down the British, so we tweaked their numbers a little to give the Highlanders a better chance. The end result is now good enough to try out at the show. Half the fun of this was the building of the house, even though its far to large to conveniently store anywhere. I’m sure we’ll get use of of it though, and when it falls apart we can always cannibalise it for spares, and build another one. Or, we could turn it into how the place looked after the battle…

Tags: Homegrown