10mm ACW using Black Powder

Recently I have been busy painting up my 3rd 10mm ACW army, but this time I chose to paint Confederate's rather than Union. Having painted over 160 figures in the past few weeks for this project and with Ian already having a decent collection and adding more; we decided that it was time to try out 'Black Powder' with extra ACW flavour coming from the 'Glory, Hallelujah' supplement. 

Having selected two almost identical forces it was decided that I would control the Reb's with Ian and Phil in command of the Union. In this photo my cavalry are moving to the small town in the bottom left to occupy the buildings and hold that flank. 

Ian loves to control cavalry and he soon spotted that my artillery were not well protected, thankfully I was able to get an Infantry unit across to protect them just in time.  

Some Union zouaves (how do you pronounce that?).

Phil found a wood to hide some troops in-he does this most games! (and it works too!).

Across the centre there was a slow advance from both sides and artillery was used to try and soften a few units up.  

The view from the Union line. On the top right Ian is breaking through and defeating my infantry/artillery Brigade. Yellow counters denote a 'Shaken' unit.  

Ian's victorious cavalry about to remount and try to get behind my line-things were looking bleak for the Confederates just now. Happily I managed to get a round of firing into them and rout them. 

The Union Zouaves start to advance as the Confederates fall back to reconsolidate their line... but they were not feeling too optimistic.   

Ian has painted up some lovely 10mm ACW buildings. My cavalry had spent all game lurking here whilst Phil's Union troops opted not to try and oust them. 

With defeat staring me in the face (and the end of the game close) I decided to take a last gasp gamble and charged my 2 cavalry units out of the town and into the Union Infantry on our right flank. Thanks to some tremendous dice throwing the cavalry survived some traversing shots, then closing shots from Phil and flung themselves against the Union Infantry. The dice remained good as I was able to force one Union unit back and rout the other. This resulted in that Brigade routing, the Union army breaking and handed me a most unexpected victory.  

Centre right of this photo show the routing Union troops and my victorious cavalry. 

This was another fun game and we really enjoyed our first go at ACW Black powder and aim to play again next week. The rules played well as we are familiar with Hail Caser so the game played quick. The hard thing for us now will not be getting the subtle differences between HC and BP mixed up when we switch from one game to the other.