Sittangbad: How Many Ways?

  I've played this scenario twice, once in 2012 via email, when rambunctious kittens brought the game to a premature close, and again via email in late 2015.

Earlier this morning, while enjoying toast with lemon curd and a mug of fresh strong coffee, I engaged in that favorite of wargamers' pastimes: daydreaming.  Taking a cue from the late Stu Asquith's idea of favorite tabletop scenarios, I lighted on the following theoretical question.  How many different ways might we play the fabled Battle of Sittangbad, as presented in Charge!  Or How to Play War Games (1967)? 

Brigadier Peter Young and Colonel James Lawford based their tabletop encounter, I believe, on an actual battle between British and Japanese forces in Burma (???) during the Second World War.  The battle waged in the pages of their delightful book was set squarely in the mid-18th century, which devotees will know already.

It strikes me that The Battle of Sittangbad scenario might lend itself well to other times and places too.  For instance, what about WWI (the Russians in East Prussia 1914)?  Or possibly a WWII (a late war scenario as the allies made their way into Western Germany)?  A late Napoleonic clash, say during the 1813-1814 period, would work equally well.  So too might parts of a Roman legion with supporting troops somewhere in Germany way back when.  Sittangbad could also work nicely without too much fiddling, I think, when placed in either an 1866, or 1870 context.

I am being terribly Eurocentric, of course.  Without a doubt, there must be other places, periods, and eras for which the battle would provide an ideal setting.  The ACW comes readily to mind, but there must be other settings too for which Young and Lawford's tabletop affair would work easily.  

The thing I like most about Sittangbad is that the scenario is large enough to be interesting to those of us who hanker after grandiose spectacles.  Yet it is achievable as far as painting, collecting, and modelling are concerned.  If doing it by yourself from the ground up, you can amass the necessary forces in two or three years.  Especially if unit size is kept in check.  What I mean, of course, is that one need not feel bound to paint an entire French corps from Napoleon's Army of 1812, for example, consisting of 60-figure units before any troops can be set up on the table, sides chosen, and dice rolled.  If you can rope a like-minded friend or small group into the "madness", as The Wargamers demonstrated at Partizan way back in May 2006, faster still. 

Stepping back a bit from the stirring account and photographs within Charge!, the Sittangbad scenario, then, provides a considerable degree of versatility even if one's 'thing' is not the mid-18th century or large units.  But how about you?  What are your own thoughts?  To how many different eras might Sittangbad lend itself? 

 -- Stokes

 

P.S.

Thanks everyone for your very kind sentiments following my mother's death last week.