Zulus – thaasands of ‘em!

Just found this unpublished post from September in my “Drafts” box!

I enjoyed with the “Old Featherstonians” a weekend of wargaming hosted by the Wargames Holiday Centre in Basingstoke, England.

The occasion was the Donald Featherstone memorial game, delayed from March 2020. In the meantime Steve, the game organiser, had been very busy and had completed 3,500 x 28mm Zulu figures to oppose his Colonial armies.

We fought in teams three concurrent battles that happened on 22nd January 1879. These were of course Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift and the lesser known Inyezane River action. The two larger battles were fought using a figure scale of about 1:5 and Rorke’s Drift as a skirmish game with the real numbers.

The rules used are a derivation of these, but the red/black card mechanism is now replaced with faster die rolling. Simple but fun.

Will Victoria Be Amused? New Colonial Rules Released

All three battles were fought with the players commanding the British and Colonial forces against umpire-controlled Zulus arriving in random but overwhelming strength from random points around the board edge.

Each game was fought to a real-time deadline, after which players moved to a different table and started again. In the three I fought we held off the enemy at Isandlwana, fought Rorke’s Drift almost from the film script and stalemated at Inyezane.

Here are a few photo’s to give a flavour of the games.

And after dinner we auctioned each other’s donated surplus books, games and models and raised a few hundred pounds for Combat Stress.