From my side of the table...A Song of Drums and Shakos... Lockdown and Livestock.

Greetings...

Mharaid and I have had a go at playing a little Lockdown skirmish game using a Song of Drums and Shakos...

We chose a Song of Drums and Shakos because its a flexible rule set that we are both very familiar with...

The scenario was fairly simple... Two groups of foragers have to round up as much livestock as they can and collect them at their starting point...

Mharaid (Sgt Shirley) led the British force of Six Light Company men.

I (Sgt Baptiste) led a French force of Six Voltigeurs.

When I say livestock I mean chickens and geese... I couldn't find my pigs and sheep... The Prussians probably got to them first...

The livestock and a couple of surprises were allocated numbers and placed randomly around the table.

We initially used Email and Texts to play our moves... using photos and Photoshop for the visuals, This made things feel very similar to an old school play by mail game...Of course we remembered that we both live in the modern world and fairly quickly moved over to playing live using FaceTime.


The game played out much like our normal games...
Mharaid organising herself and her troops with typical efficiency and rolling most of the good dice...

She did however have a few moves where she rolled some of the worst dice that I have seen from her in quite a while... Leading her to say that she now knows what it feels like to be me.... Ha! Cheeky sod...

I of course floundered around in my usual style and struggled to see any dice rolls over a 3...

There is an old legend that says that there is a side of a dice that has 6 dots on it... This is obliviously fake news... Next thing... people will be saying that the world is round.

So... On with the game... I took a lot of pictures and we played quite a few moves... I won’t use them all but will edit things to give a good flavour of the game...

The initial set up... I used a 4ft x 4ft table as I could get everything in one shot with my iPad.

Names are fun and also make it easy to see who is who.

Mharaid's first move.



A nice orderly advance... Only Tom refused to move.

Here we see Mharaid making good use of  'Group' moves... I failed miserably every time I tried to do this and in the end gave up.




My men wandering all over the place... as usual

Mharaid presses on steadily... The yellow question marks show where the livestock is to be found... 

A double fail... which this is... means that your turn is lost...
So I went no where...

We continued on with mail based moves for a bit longer...

Theo found something.

Jules ended the turn for me.



Fortunately Mharaid's Dino dice let her down.

Baptiste couldn't hit a farm from here.

Theo found Geese.

This is where we really got into using FaceTime... so we started moving along at a decent pace...
I've taken a couple of casualties and Mharaid is herding lots of stuff towards her starting point.

Even when Harry found a very angry goose...

It chased him dutifully in the direction he wanted to go...

The angry goose would chase you in a random direction until you subdued it... Random in Mharaid's case means... back to my place...

A single red button means resting/wounded.

I continue to make stunning dice rolls.

The action moved towards the farm and a protracted fire fight breaks out...after a lot of misses Baptiste managed to shoot Dick.

Dicks demise

As Mharaid's men move towards the farm...

Baptiste gets his brains blown out... Three red buttons...
This triggers a moral throw...

Dutifully failing... Hugo, Henry and Theo don their chicken suits and do a runner...

Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!

WOOF!

When Spot the dog was revealed he would chase his unfortunate victim until he was outrun and then move around the table at random until he found a new toy to play with... Spot could not be fought or subdued...
In the end he was easily out run and then spent the rest of the game visiting all his favourite trees.


This was really good fun...
We spread the game out over quite a few days and spent a lot of time laughing... mostly at my spectacular lack of luck...


I can see us trying this again...


All the best   Aly