The first game in the Back of Beyond club campaign turned out to be a complete debacle for the Third Workers and Peasants Shock Brigade and its commander, Comrade Colonel Igor Tubugerov. Although accompanied by Vladimir Proletarski, the ace Soviet secret agent and rabble rouser, the Bolsheviks got off to a bad start by failing to win over the enemy’s Mongol cavalry contingent to the revolutionary cause.

The British Museum Archaeological Expedition then proceeded to run rings around the Reds and shot them to pieces, using a combination of machine gun armed improvised vehicles, a heavy armoured car, an HMG and a mountain gun, whilst the Bolsheviks ran for the nearest cover in the woods. The Red’s Schneider tank and fighter aircraft were knocked out early in the game leaving the infantry scrambling into the treeline under a hail of machine gun bullets.

Meanwhile, the British Museum expedition party enjoyed a lovely picnic in their own neck of the woods, with Brigadier Cholmondely-Warner providing a very decent lapsang souchong to accompany the scones. The picnic was disturbed at one point by a low flying Bolshevik aircraft but this was dealt with by Ms Muggins of the Asian Antiquities Department, using her Lewis gun. This was the only taste of action for the British expedition team itself, so they settled down to their refreshments and politely ignored the awful din.

In the end the Reds were cut off and surrounded by Mongol cavalry, Chinese coolies and the advancing British improvised armoured vehicles, which seemed to be virtually invulnerable to the machine gun fire and artillery shells of the Bolshevik defenders. At the end of Turn Four, Comrade Colonel Igor Tubugerov decided to do exactly that, with a full retreat from the field of battle before the whole army was bagged by Cholmondely-Warner’s tea party.

I’m sure that a slightly different and ideologically correct version of events will be presented by the Third Workers and Peasants Shock Brigade mobile propaganda concert party at some point very soon?