DBA Night

With our shiny new copies of DBA 3.0 and various armies brought out of mothballs we had a DBA evening yesterday.

Geoff and Dave opted for a big battle. I'm not sue if the armies were historical opponents or not. I can't remember.

Meanwhile Peter and Gary played some smaller, 12 element, games. I think Franks featured in at least one of them.

Caesar and I had a couple of games using my 6mm Dark Ages armies. In the first I defended with a Welsh army against attacking Strathclyders. I went for plenty of difficult hills, not realising how badly they screw up your command and control in DBA. Mind you, they also screwed up Caesar's Strathclyders, it being an army made up of cavalry and spears.

The Welsh deployed to make use of the hills.

Caesar massed his spears and cavalry to make a sweep around mt flank. His spears are vulnerable to my warband, so he was trying to make sure that I couldn't rush them en masse.

As he worked around the flank I swung over the bulk of my army to counter them.

I sent other troops towards the pass in the centre of Caesar's deployment area, aiming to strike at his camp. He only had a couple of spears and a psiloi defending that approach.

The main armies met, and I discovered just how vulnerable warband are to mounted in DBA.

The Welsh worked their way through the pass, fighting the Britons with some small success.

The main Welsh line collapsed, however, giving the Strathclyders the battle. A single Strathclyde psiloi attacking the left flank of my line accounted for two of the four warband elements I had lost.

We set up a second game, with an early Sub-Roman British army (led by Arthur, naturally) fighting the all-warband Early Saxons. Caesar also went for plenty of terrain, and it all ended up in one corner. Hi massed his warriors in the woods at the top of the pictures, and it was obvious that he was going to use the woods and the hamlet to cover his advance and swing onto my camp. I deployed the bulk of my army at 90 degrees to my baseline facing the hamlet, and positioned the cavalry to either cover its flank or to threaten his camp.

Saxons massed in the woods. At that point the battery on my phone died, and I got no more pictures.

Caesar did as I expected, and the Saxons plodded down through the woods. I hit him with some Blades as he emerged and a series of scattered fights ensued. Arthur came in to support, then pick off isolated Saxons in the open. Meanwhile the rest of the British cavalry attacked the Saxon camp which Caesar had left totally unguarded. Although a few British spear died to the fierce Germanic warriors, Arthur saved the day to give the Britons a win.

We played on a 2' x 2' board which actually gives a very restricted deployment area. Both games had dense terrain as well, which made easy deployment even harder. However both battles were interesting games of manuever, with both sides trying to exploit the advantages of their own army whilst hindering those of their opponent. More effective terrain choices, deployments and tactics will come with more play, I'm sure.

Outside of this festival of DBA. Ralph and Bryan played Flames of War.