Relief of Luckpore - Campaign and Battle Wargames Rules for the 1857 Indian Rebellion

Every so often a set of wargame rules comes out of the left field and gets me all excited about a period. This time it is Relief of Luckpore by Real Time Wargames.

Now regular readers may remember the name of the company - the first posts on this blog were about a Franco-Prussian War campaign we played using their rules for that conflict. I also own their rules for Wars of the Roses, the Shenandoah campaign, and the Sudan campaign.

I already own a sizeable army for the Indian Mutiny, but as I haven't found a set of rules that I really enjoyed to use with them, the figures have sat at the bottom of my stack of boxes of figures until this week. What drew me to the rules are the grid-based system and a relatively simple movement and combat system.

I do have a little quibble with the rules though, specifically in the rating for Sikh and Gurkha troops, as well as some ambiguity over how skirmishers are deployed, and close combat resolution.

I also liked the terrain generation rules, which is what I used to set up the solo test game table (substituting walls for ditches/trenches). As you can see it provided a rather believable terrain which gamers of the Mutiny period will find familiar. The mat has 15cm grids, which is a little small for my 15mm figures on 40mm wide bases, but it is still serviceable.

Like their Sudan rules, the game aims to provide different experiences for both sides. The mutineer player will almost certainly have a numerical advantage, but will also have troops of lower quality, as well as limited command initiative.

The British have high-quality troops, more "command points" per turn, but their troops accumulate Fatigue as they act, which will make them less effective as the battle progresses.

The victory conditions for both sides are also different. There is no "break point" for the British - they give up when the player decides he cannot win. The mutineer commander has a chance of leaving the field whenever a unit is routed. Both sides thus have very different strategies: the mutineers need to wear the British down until they become ineffective and give up, while the British need to break the morale of the mutineers by routing as many units as they can before that happens.

The rules are fun enough for me to want to refurbish my army and perhaps add a few more bases. It is also suitable for multi-player games, and I hope to run a game for the gang in the near future.