More Lion Rampant

We played another game of Lion Rampant this week as it was popular last week and a couple of people who couldn't take part then wanted a go. Caesar set up a two-a-side Blood Feud scenario - he and Geoff ran Saxon warbands, the leader of one of which (Caesar's) was being hunted by Darren and I, playing the invading Normans. We won if we killed or routed Caesar's leader. They won is they could break our force before then.

Here's my Normans, set up and ready to go. Caesar didn't have enough figures for full 24pt warbands, so we played with reduced forces; each side had about 40pts. It didn't seem to harm the game.

My small warband - a couple of units of knights, and some archers.

The problem with the knights, of course, is that they are prone to the Wild Charge rule, which means that all the Saxons had to do was throw units in our path and force us to charge them, wearing down our strike-force. I sent one group of knights around the flank to try and avoid a frontal charge against a Saxon shield-wall.

On the other flank Darren went for an aggressive approach against Geoff's troops, charging his heavy cavalry forward.

It crashed into a group of Saxon heavy foot, and drove them back.

Meanwhile my flanking knights found themselves charging into woods in pursuit of some wily Saxon skirmishers. Amazingly the knights won the combat, forcing the skirmishers to fall back.

My knights were closing in on the warband containing Caesar's leader, but he was a craven coward, and fell back away from them, throwing other units in the way to force us to charge them.

Here's the craven dog, fleeing for his worthless Saxon life.

There followed a series of charges against the Saxons ...

... from both Darren and myself.

Gradually we whittled them down ...

... but the fighting wore down our knights as well. Caesar's leader still had a full-strength warband.

But now my leader was close enough to issue a challenge. Caesar's force was at half-strength, so its morale was wavering, and this left Caesar in a quandary - accept the challenge and risk losing the scenario on a roll of the die, or refuse it and have his remaining troops take a morale test and break.

He accepted. To be honest this was maybe not the best choice. For the Normans it was, but not for the Saxons ... not so much.

The dice spoke - the Normal leader won 2-0, and the Saxon leader was slain.

So a lot of fighting came down to a desperate 50/50 roll on the part of the Normans. It was the right thing for them to do - the knights were getting a bit fragile and a charge against a full-strength Saxon foot unit was not likely to end well. Caesar could have declined and his leader's unit would have probably held its ground; the odds of it doing that were better than the odds in the single-combat.

But a fun game once again, and thanks to Caesar for setting it all up.

(Apologies to Darren and Geoff who actually had a great fight going on the other flank which I pretty much neglected to photograph. To be fair my archers, who rained arrowy death down on a Saxon unit and were instrumental in breaking it, also failed to get photographed.)