Sharp Practice Northwest Frontier British v Afghans

Having tried MWWBK for our second Afghan war armies Gary and I decided to give Sharp Practice a go and see how that worked. After some consideration we went for rifled muskets for the British rather than breech loaders so my force consisted of three groups of Sikh infantry, two of skirmishing Ghurkhas and a mountain gun.

We went for the encounter scenario around an Afghan village:

The Sikh's advance onto the table:

In the distance vast hordes of Afghans appear:

The Gurkhas occupy a gulley and open fire. Hitting on 3's their fire should be devastating but is in fact ineffective:

As the Afghan cavalry attempt to outflank them the Gurkhas continue to shoot badly: 

The Afghan cavalry are now a serious threat and the Ghurkhas are under pressure: 

They are charged by some Afghan Ghazi's:

The Ghazi's are repulsed but several Gurkhas go down as well:

The Gurkhas are down to half strength and barely holding on:

The Gurkha officer reorganises them into a single group:

Fire from the Gurkhas when they were not fighting off the Ghazi's and a group of Sikhs has given the Afghan cavalry more shock than they can cope with:

The rest of the Sikhs press forward to support the Gurkhas:

Masses of Afghans charge home:

They are repulsed by the Sikhs:

The mountain gun finally arrives:

More Afghans pour through the village:

The British attempt to halt them with firepower:

The fail to and the Afghans muster another charge:

Again, it is repulsed and Afghan force morale fails giving the victory to the surviving Sikhs and Gurkhas:

A game which showed that the Afghans are very different to the Dervishes I've used when playing Dave. While the Dervishes fight well and shoot awfully the Afghans are more balanced, shooting quite well but not doing so well in close combat.

Gary's wonderful village didn't in fact do the Afghans any favours as they would probably be better off using their numerical superiority to engage in firefights, because of the buildings they couldn't use much of their firepower and were outshot by the Gurkhas and Sikhs.

The other thing the game really showed was that the biggest issue with SP is that there is little point in moving for groups with decent firearms once you can shoot at something, the British hardly moved from their initial deployment and just shot away at the Afghan attackers. I'm not sure which set of rules I prefer for this war at the moment!