TMWWBK - Zulus suffer costly rule error!

View at start from Zulu positions. Tiger Terrain hills and 
scratch-built Irish farmhouse which is not bad for Natal.

This was my first ‘proper’ game of The Men Who Would Be Kings, that is as an actual player. We played Scenario C - To the Last Bullet - with my friend Ian as the British defender and myself as the Zulu attacker. The defender begins near the centre but has the option and objective of legging it to a building near his baseline.

The British had an 18-point Field Force (three 6-point units of Regular Infantry). The Zulus had 24 points - three Married Veteran units with better moralle and three Unmarried Fierce units who are better in close combat, all at 6 points each.

Perspective from the flank.

If the defenders can survive 5 turns without casualtues they win. This forces the attacker  to attack.

The Zulus move in. Cetral British section begins
a tactical withdrawal.

The British deployed in line. I deployed the Veterans on my left and the Fierce units on my right. My idea was to use the Vets as cannon-fodder while the Unmarried warriors got as close as possible before charging in.

The British can now see the whites
of their eyes.

At first Ian was unsure whether to stand or flee. When he did decide to withdraw his troops wouldn't move!

View from the Zulu edge. The outcome is uncertain.

I moved all my units forward using ordinary 'free' moves but this wasn't fast enough and I was in danger of losing the game by not inflicting any casualties in five successive turns. I then switched to Doubling.

I did make contact, did inflict casualties and did sweep away first one and then the other
flank unit, At this point it looked as if the Zulus were going to win, but the central British unit holed up in the farmhouse and in order not to lose the game the Zulus had no choice but to hurl themselves at the building.

One British unit (left) is under pressure. The
other flank unit has been swept away.

Unfortunately a couple of units had by then become Leaderless and it was difficult to activate them. Every British volley swept away a few more Zulus.

The central British unit has reached the safety of
the farmhouse but the other unit looks doomed.

The Zulus did attack the building and did inflict casualties but the trade off in each attack was about 3 Zulus for 1 Brit. The Zulu waves smashed against the British rock and became wasted in the effort. A couple of hopelessly depleted Zulu units were withdrawn to take themselves out of harm's way, but then they all found themselves so depleted that it would have been impossible to inflict any casualties. It was looking like Rorke's Drift...I had lost! But the story doesn't quite end there...

The Zulus close in for the final assault.

When my Zulus were storming the farmhouse, we were converting three hits into a kill. That would have been right for shooting but not for melee. Defending hard cover in hand-to-hand increases the number of hits needed to remove a defending model by one. (Soft cover provides no protection in melee.) Increasing the number by two made the defenders impregnable against overwhelming odds. Had we got this right I think the Zulus might have won. In fact, we were wondering how the Zulus could possibly win this scenario. Now we're wondering how the British can win. We will have to find out.

Successive assaults do some harm to the defenders, but the
attackers suffer more. This is where we went wrong.

I found this game very exciting and it fully met or even exceeded my expectations of the rules.