Mines and Counter-mining

Mines and Counter-mining: These operations are only possible to conduct on paper. A third party is necessary to act as judge of the various attempts at mining the walls or counter-mining to prevent it. The attacking player must designate certain numbers of his troops as "sappers" or miners. While the defender will always know where these men are located, he will not know if they are actually at work on a mine, or merely serving to decoy his counter efforts from a real attempt elsewhere. As battle progresses on the table top, the paper operations should keep pace. Allow the attacker to actually attempt two or three mines while allowing the defender only one or two counters to them. If counter-mines are at all near to the attackers mines (say about 6"- 12"), the mining attempt fails, and all attacking miners are killed. If a mine succeeds, a 6" wide breech is created wherever the mine strikes the wall.

Mining

If cannon or other methods are unable to breach a castle’s wall, the attackers have at least one other option: mining. In simplest terms, this involves digging under the walls of the castle and excavating a “gallery”, the roof of which is shored up with posts and wooden supports. When the gallery is large enough, the miners burn out the supports -- or blow them up, using gunpowder - which (hopefully) causes the gallery, and the wall above it, to collapse. The practicality of this technique depends heavily on the type of ground the castle is built on. Soft stone or earth are ideal, since they’re (relatively) easy to excavate and solid enough that the gallery won’t collapse prematurely. Hard rock is a problem, simply because excavation will be so time-consuming. Sand is perhaps the worst of all, since it’s almost impossible to dig out a gallery at all (of course, most castles won’t be built on sand).

Theoretically, as with digging trenches, any infantry unit can assist in excavation. In practice, however, the troops involved can wear no armor (heavy digging isn’t possible while wearing armor) and can carry weapons no larger than short swords. Thus, while a heavy infantry unit might be assigned to mining duty, while they’re actually digging their AR drops to 9, and their AD to 6 (representing no armor and only personal weapons).

The speed of excavation depends both on the nature of the ground and on the race of miners involved. This is shown in the following table which lists the volume of earth (in cubic feet) which can be mined in an eight hour shift.

In general, only one figure can work in a tunnel; more can work in a large gallery, limited by the actual space taken up by the figures and bases. Thus, three figures of dwarven workers (representing 30 dwarves) digging a large gallery in hard rock could excavate a volume about eight feet high by five feet wide by five feet long in eight hours. Obviously, mining is a slow process, made even slower by the necessity of shoring up the ceiling with wooden supports.

Excavation is gruelling work. Troops can work no longer than eight consecutive hours. After that, they must rest another eight interrupted hours before they can resume digging. There’s no reason why troops can’t work in shifts, of course.