The Battle of Barnet - A Second-Hand Report

Owing to my holiday I haven't reported on any games at the Gong Garage Gamers for the last couple of weeks. I did make it along this Thursday, but owing to a confused afternoon and evening beforehand, I forgot my phone and, therefore, a means to record pictures.

Fortunately our umpire for the evening, Peter, did manage to get a few pictures, and also put together a report. Ralph beat me to it in publication, so I'm just linking to it.

So what did we do? Well we played a DBA v3.0 big-battle version of the 1471 Battle of Barnet. Whilst some of us had played DBA or its variants before, it was a first go with this particular version for most of us. Here's the report, with Ralph's comments:

Sparker's Wargaming Blog

I was quite impressed with DBA v3.0, having given up on earlier versions in favour of HOTT a long while ago. Whether I'll buy it, or rejig armies for it I don't know (I certainly have the armies and figures for it if I desire), but I'd be keen to play it again. The faster, or longer, move distances seemed to work OK, although to be fair we were using a deeper table than probably recommended.

How well the DBA 3.0 mechanisms would translate to HOTT I don't know - a few of them looked like they might work. Obviously people have looked at incorporating ideas from the game into HOTT; I have adapted the terrain rules for example. But there's nothing official. Personally I'd be wary of any version combining the two rules that didn't either come directly from the authors, or at least came with their blessing. Other attempts seem prone to shoe-horning in personal house-rules onto the back of the attempt - ill-thought out new troop types or tweaks to the game to remove bits a particular person finds irksome. However I can't see a new, official, version of HOTT ever happening, so it's all academic.