Lion Rampant

At least four members of the Gong Gamers are going to Shirecon to take part in the Lion Rampant tournament there later this month, so we thought we'd get in a practice game on Thursday. We played a double-sized head-to-head fight, each running a 24 point warband with two warbands on each side. We had one set of boasts for each team though.

Here's Caesar and Keegan, with most of their troops on the table. I was teamed with Stuart, who was using another iteration of his archer-heavy warband.

I don't have any suitable warbands, but it was suggested that I could use one of my 28mm HOTT armies. So my warband was made up of small angry bearded men or, as HOTT would have it, Dwarves. It's a small force of high-value units - two units of Elite Foot (including the leader) and two units of Crossbowmen with Pavise.

The crossbowmen have a risky activation roll to shoot, but much to my surprise I didn't fail that many. Caesar led his side's advance on my flank with a unit of heavy foot, and even at long range I managed to inflict casualties on it.

More troops descended on my part of the board; I seemed to be a magnet for enemy troops in fact, since Caesar and Keegan seemed to be actively avoiding having to try and close with Stuart's missiles.

In fact the reality was that one of their boasts involved destroying one of my crossbow units, so they were literally piling in anything they could to try and overwhelm it.

Keegan charged them with some heavy cavalry, but I saw them off with only a couple of casualties.

This was Stuart's force, happy to sit in a corner and shoot. He mauled a number of Caesar's units with this strategy.

My other crossbow unit had advanced on the far left flank. and was alternating between a firefight with Keegan's archers (in which I was doing OK, thanks to the 4 Armour offered by the pavises), and peppering Caesar's heavy foot in an effort to break them. I pushed some of my axemen forward as well.

My melee troop shopped over the wall and attacked Caesar's heavy foot, pretty much eliminating them as a threat, but I also took casualties from one of his crossbow units. They kept fighting and attacking until they were wiped out.

My leader's unit was engaged by that of Keegan's leader. I came off worse in the initial melee, so decided to challenge Keegan's leader to a duel. I lost. 

With my leader gone my force suffered a bit of a collapse, and I was soon left with a single crossbow unit. This took no major part in the remainder of the fight.

Meanwhile Stuart had been content to sit and fight to the last Dwarf. But Keegan eventually got a couple of units through the woods to engage him. The warrior foot were seen of fairly quickly, leaving Keegan's leader attackign alone. He was soon whittled down to a couple of figures ...

... and then just his leader, who died rather quickly.

Caesar's last remaining unit fled the table, leaving Stuart and I in control of the field.

Caesar and Keegan picked up two Glory for their boast, but lost two for the two boasts they failed to achieve. Meanwhile Stuart and I achieved all three of our boasts; we killed an enemy leader, we had two enemy units battered at one time and we certainly killed more figures with missile fire than we did with melee. That left us on 12 Glory for a 12-0 win.

I quite liked my warband although if things go badly for it it's going to die fairly fast. We were impressed with how useful the pavises were, especially on a missile-heavy table I'm tempted to give my leader a disadvantageous trait, however, so I can have a point for the Strongbow trait, which allows him to order a unit to shoot for free each turn; a useful ability when you have crossbows.