The Portable Wargame: Modern

It's been a while since I've been playing and reviewing any new free wargame rules that can be used with Army Men and Toy Soldiers now. Often when searching the internet for free wargaming rules for miniatures, I often find suggestions for The Portable Wargame by Bob Cordery when someone is asking  for free simple rule to use for their army men. 

When searching for these rules I found printed booklets for sale, but I also found the rules for free. I don't know if there is any difference between the two, but as I'm focusing on budget wargaming I'll go for and play the free version. The Portable Wargame covers different scenarios, periods and wargames, but to have something to compare it to I'm choosing an earlier used and tried scenario for my wargame reviews and therefore using The Portable Wargame: Modern rules.

I've never played any grided or hex wargames before as it's not been appealing to me earlier. So I don't have any grided  battle mat so I just used thread to divide my (ungrided) 'Battle mat' into 8" squares grids, which seems suitable for my 54mm-ish miniatures.

The scenario

I've placed this skirmish to the United Nations largest mission in both scale and operational scope during the Congo Crisis 1960-65, when UN troops 'peacekeeping' was more offensive 'peace enforcement'.

Situation:

Two UN vehicles from the UN base at Kamina were performing a reconnaissance mission on the roads  between Kamina and the city of Kolwezi. Outside Kambezi they came under heavy mortar shelling from Katangese forces and they were probably both hit as the UN HQ at Kamina cannot reach them by radio anymore. 

The UN HQ sends out search and rescue patrols to find the missing reconnaissance-unit, and it's expected that the roads in the area have taken damage and are impassable for other vehicles, and it's only reachable at foot.

The Katangese forces in the area are aware of the possible UN-wrecks and sends out patrols to find them, and to seize anything of value such as documents like the UN SOPs and codes for radio-communications.

Some houserules to this scenario seems to be required though; It takes 1 man 1 turn to search a vehicle, and it takes 1 man 1 turn to examine  a casualty. To check a casualty's condition, roll a D6, and if the roll is the same value or higher than the turn number for that turn, the casualty is alive and can be medivaced. Casualties can be medivaced at half speed. 

Forces:

To keep it simple all the units are Average units according to the rules.

• Katangese:
• A Platoon of 3 rifle-squads divided into to following units:
• 3 rifle-teams with 5 members each, armed with Infantry small arms
• 3 Machinegun teams with 3 members each and a LMG

• UN:
• A Platoon of 3 rifle-squads divided into following units:
• 3 rifle-teams with 5 members each, armed with Infantry small arms
• 3 Machinegun teams with 3 members each and a LMG

Mission:

• Katangese: To find the immobilized UN vehicles and search them for valuable things such as secret UN documents, orders, maps, SOPs and radio-codes 
• UN: To find the missing reconnaissance-patrol and save the members of the unit, and make sure no graded documents in the vehicles fall into the hands of the enemy.

AAR

Time:    1 hour and 45 minutes 

Turns:  10

Result:  UN Victory 

When the Katangese Gendarmerie spotted the 2 wrecked UN vehicles, they immediately took the initiative and an offensive role trying to secure them.

The UN forces were arriving the scene from the opposite direction and were so close to to the rearmost Jeep, that one of the squads decided to rush for it and not waiting for the other squads to secure their advance.

The Katangese Gendarmerie had reached the first vehicle by now, but the sudden UN push put them under fire so they had to seek cover behind it instead of start searching it.

The UN squad by the Jeep found that the driver was still alive and started to prepare medivac him, and they were starting to remove graded documents from the wreck...

Too bad his co-driver didn't make it. A second UN squad secured the other squads searching and medivac, and was preparing to make a push for the UN pickup. 

While bringing the wounded driver to safety the rest of the squad started an advance towards the pickup from the other side.

But they didn't quite manage to advance far enough before coming under heavy fire from the Katangese Gendarmerie. The UN advancement halted and they needed to seek cover and return the fire.

The exchange of fire made it possible for the Katangese squad which had to seek cover behind the UN Pickup to finally start searching it (under fire)

The UN fire was very effective at this point of battle as they managed to make the Katangese squad searching the vehicle to reach their exhaustion point and making the other Katangese units to slowly retreat.

The Katangese closest to the objective got pinned by the first vehicle. Searching it for graded documents were no important for them anymore as they were holding their ground and fighting for their lives.

The firefight resulted in that the Katangese squad at the vehicle was eventually completely destroyed. The Katangese squad securing their flank got pinned and were desperately fighting on...

The first evacuated wounded UN soldier was brought to safety on the UN point of deployment. The 'stretchers' returned to battle.

By this time the UN forces destroyed the second Katangese squad pinned by the vehicle, and could advance so they could start to examine one of it's casualties and start searching the vehicle. They found that this vehicle's co-driver was still alive and started to prepare to medivac him.

The retreated Katangese units manage to cause so much damage on the UN forces that they decided to try one final push. Was the tide of war changing?

By this time a UN squad had secured every important paper of the second vehicle. The Katangese fire was too heavy to start examine the driver. Besides the unit had reached their exhaustion point. Under cover they started to prepare to retreat.

The second wounded almost safe

The final Katangese push forced the ever decreasing UN forces to retreat...

But the UN forces manage to save 2 of the vehicle crew and secure all confedential documents from both vehicles.

When the UN entered the jungle they were out of sight for the Katangese Gendarmerie, and the distance were too far to succeed. The Katangese was outnumbered anyway and decided to break off, stand down and call it a day.

Pros

• It's very simple and versatile and can easily be played with any available, cheap army men, toy soldiers or any form of tokens from a lot of different periods.
• You doesn't need many dice, nor any tape-measure.

Cons

• You do need som kind of grided battleground.
• The grids makes it too simple to calculate maximum firing ranges, instead of getting any penalties when declaring targets on far or almost out of range.
• Since units of similar type or character have same number of Strength Points regardless of  the unit's actual size, it's necessary to divide larger units into smaller sub-units matching the size of the opposing units when a larger force meets a smaller one in battle. An Infantry platoon can't have the same Strength Point as a Infantry squad; The Platoon need to be divided into several squads if its facing a squad.
• Since most infantry weapons just fall into the generic category 'Infantry Small Arms' there are no difference between them regarding rate of fire and how much damage some of them can cause over another. Because of this I don't think these rules are optimal for small skirmishes of infantry units armed with various infantry weapons.

Conclusion

Initially, prior to this game, I didn't think grided wargaming was for me as I  hadn't tried it before. This game changed my mind though, and I will definitely play grided games again. -If you have a grided battle mat it's quite easy to move your units around.

The Portable Wargame is a very versatile ruleset and is not only made for a lot of different periods and scenarios but also for different type of wargames, for instance naval wargaming. 

The Portable Wargame will work for skirmishes with your army men, but I think The Portable Wargame rules would work even better for larger battles with larger units (in smaller scales)

The Portable Wargame also has it's own website if you want to know more about it or wants to download any of the free rules there. Be aware that the Modern rules on this site is slightly different than those I played found on Bobs Cordery's own blog. The Portable Wargame also have an own Facebook Group.

I'm really tempted to 3D-print some smaller scale units/tokens and do more gaming with these rules and perhaps even ships to try out The Portable Naval Wargame in the future.

Please follow this blog and find out.