Guest Battle Report - English Expeditionary Force vs. French Caribbean Militia

Last Updated on August 18, 2025

Over the course of the Summer of Plunder event, we get some great battle reports and pictures from players around the world. Now that the campaign is wrapping up, we have some more time to showcase some of the reports. This report is from Ret Talbot who did amazing work this year. Great minis, great narratives around his games, excellent terrain, beautifully painted miniatures (award winning!), and great shots of his games. This battle report was selected from all 1,800+ entries as the best battle report of the campaign!

The Scenario

The scenario is the Slave Uprising scenario used as one of the Special Events in the campaign this year. The English Expeditionary Force is defending against a raiding French Caribbean Militia Force with the Petit Goave Militia option, which allows Flibustiers to become core units and Boucaniers to become support units.

The English had three units of veteran Musketeers with a Grizzled Veteran. The English command unit had a seasoned English Army Commander and Standard Bearer.

The French had a unit of trained Milices des Caraïbes with an experienced French Militia captain, two units of veteran Flibustiers, and a unit of veteran Boucaniers.

Note: An English Expeditionary Force is not permitted to add size 2 ships or larger to their force. In this scenario, the players agreed that the English escaping on a bark (the only ship either of us owned at the time) would be the victory condition, and the English were not required to add it to their force total points.

The Game

“After the lies of freedom and the shackles had been replaced, the enslaved on the plantation would look through the windows of the main house at night and see those men, in those clothes… The drinks and food. The laughter. Those paintings that had been brought from a land across the ocean hanging on the walls of the master’s house. The enslaved would witness it all, and they made plans…waiting for their opportunity.”

“And then it happened. The same raiders appeared–the ones the slaves had been released to fight previously, but now the tables were turned. The raiders approached from the jungle. Whispered promises were made. Shackles were broken. Members of Captain Silas Redgrave’s Company were there at the plantation house that night when the alarm was raised, but confusion reigned, and orders to “Run for the Boats” went out.

The raiders closed from one side attempting to block the English retreat. Periodic shots rang out from darkened outbuildings as the units made for the safety of the bark. The first unit of English made it to cover adjacent to the dock only to find that the raiders had found cover on the opposite side.

The respective command units advanced. Units engaged in melee combat outside the front door of the plantation house, as skilled raider marksmen snuck into the kitchen door and found a window on the second floor from which they could snipe. “

“The casualties started to mount. Gunfire seemed to originate from every area of cover. Finally a unit of English made a break down the dock toward the bark. The snipers took their toll, but two musketeers made it, and they were soon joined by the survivors of a second unit that had made a suicidal dash for the bark.

The English commander, with only his standard bearer surviving, found himself pinned down by the snipers beside an outbuilding by the dock–they were the last of the English ashore. The English Commander watched as the raiding commander, with a handful of survivors, rushed the dock in a last ditch effort. Seeing his own situation was helpless, the English Commander called for his compatriots to cast off, leave him behind, and make for the safety of the horizon.

It was a bitter victory…but a victory nonetheless.”

Ret will receive a copy of The Golden Age of Piracy by Benerson Little, signed by the author! A prized possession indeed, and one to hopefully continue the inspiration!

Ret’s Notes

As a new player, I set about painting up an English Expeditionary Force in the style of Parliament’s New Model Army c. 1651. I undertook this project as part of the 2025 Great Pirate Paint Off with an eye to playing for the English in this year’s Summer of Plunder. I chose 1651 because that is the year Cromwell sent an English force to Barbados to route out the Royalists under Governor Francis Willoughby. In the coming year, I hope to paint up a Royalist force and explore what may have happened between the two sizable armies assembled on the field in January 1652 if three days of heavy rain had not culminated in the Treaty of Oistins.

But back to the subject at hand…

For this year’s Summer Plunder, I chose the year 1666 and imagined that an English company, who were veterans of the 1651-52 hostilities on Barbados, were now stationed on Antigua and susceptible to French raiders (my wife plays the French, and living in a bit of Plunder desert in Maine, we were going to be playing each other a lot!). In reality, the French took and held Antigua for several months in 1666, and I was determined to re-write history by repelling the French during SoP 2025.

One of my biggest challenges for SoP was that, as a new player, I had very little terrain besides a gun battery I made during the Great Pirate Paint Off. Starting the first week of SoP, I began crafting like a madman (with plenty of virtual help from Dexter at the Plunder Den!). My goal was to create a plantation, and in addition to many pieces of scatter terrain, I managed to build a plantation house, a stone storage building and another outbuilding, a dock, some walls, a small gun battery, and several other bits and pieces. It sure was fun to get it all on the table for the final game of SoP!

The English Expeditionary Force with which I played every game this summer was, I imagined, a member of Captain Silas Redgrave’s Company (my handle on Discord). Captain Redgrave is a fictitious English Captain. Members of the company fight under the company colours, which bears the motto “Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum” or “Never a backward step.” You can follow the exploits of Captain Redgrave’s Company on Facebook.