For King & Parliament Again

Yesterday I took For King & Parliament along to the club for a game with Daniel. For him it was obviously a major learning exercise as he'd not played it at all, whilst for me it was a test to see how much I understood of the game after my solo run-throughs a couple of weeks ago.

I set up a 12x8 grid with some basic terrain and generated two roughly equal armies. The Royalists had four foot, two artillery and six horse, whilst Parliament had four foot, two artillery and five horse. Both sides had one veteran foot unit, two standard and one raw. That of the Royalists was pike-heavy. Royalist horse was standard Swedish whilst the Parliamentarian horse was Dutch. Two units were standard and three were raw. The armies were divided up into a centre with the foot and artillery under a commanding general, and two subordinate wings of horse.

I took Parliament and Daniel took the Royalists. Here's the deployment from Parliament's side of the field.

Both armies blundered about a little at first, especially Daniel's centre command when he found out that artillery of this period does not manuever very well. I had fired off a few shots with my artillery with little effect, but this was the first proper action when my horse closed up and fired pistols at some Royalists.

I sent my veteran foot over to assist the horse on that wing, aiming to get a nice hilltop position.

Daniel charged! Our first melee of the game. Both sides took hits.

The horse on the other flank also got stuck into each other; not unexpected in a battle of this period. I supported mine with a unit of raw militia who also grabbed a commanding position on a hill. Daniel charged them.

Daniel abandoned his artillery and pushed his foot forward, attacking my regiment on the hill in the centre. It fended off attacks by two units.

First blood to Parliament as Cully's Horse routed Marple's Horse. Unfortunately this left Cully's horse pursuing into the foot regiment behind its opponent.

However Daniel quickly evened things up, routing one of my horse units on the other wing ...

... and then the other. Colonel Scott, who commanded that wing, fled the field, but at least escaped capture.

A view of the battle. I'd brought up more foot to cover my right whilst at the other end of the field our horse were fighting in some woods and enclosures.

Daniel's Horse prevailed against the Causton Militia, routing them. This left all of the horse on Daniel's left in uncontrolled pursuits that he was unable to rally them from.

The foot were now engaged in the centre. On the right of the picture one of my regiments was in the process of moving onto the flank of Daniel's foot.

The action in the rough terrain on my left. Both units in the foreground were one hit away from breaking.

At that point Daniel had to leave. He'd lost 2 of his 13 medals, whilst I had lost 9 of my 14. So on the whole things were looking very good for him. I had two horse close to breaking on my left, which would have caused the army to flee. Daniel was going to see half of his horse leave the table, with a slim chance of recovering it, but it wouldn't count as lost.

We played for around two hours, and did pretty well, given that I had to teach Daniel the game and also look up numerous things that I wasn't totally clear about. We made a couple of mistakes here and there, but overall the game flowed well and we both enjoyed it enough to consider giving another go.