Pre-MOAB DBA

A couple of our group are playing in teh DBA competition at MOAB this year, so wanted some practice games. I'm not playing, but I tagged along because DBA seemed like a good option. 

I haven't played DBA for a while now, so was a bit rusty. I also wasn't sure what armies to bring as the others would be trying out one based on the theme for the year and I had no idea what the theme was. In the end I just grabbed a few 15mm armies - my Swiss, my Mound Builders and the Maya (who share a box with the latter, so came along for the ride).

Turns out that Dave and Geoff are also a bit rusty, so I watched the first game and offered helpful rules advice from the sidelines by looking stuff up.

Then I was up. For reasons that were not entirely clear I ended up using a completely non-historical army. My Swiss share their box with my Prester John army, which is made up entirely of  figures that look perfectly at home as a DBA army. Dave suggested I use it, so I did. It's one element short though, so some Swiss mounted crossbowmen joined.

Dave ran a Chinese army with lots of chariots I forget what dynasty it was. The theme for one of the competitions is chariot armies. 

So my army was three knights (including the general), two solid blades, three solid bow, two solid warband, one light horse and one elephant. Dave's army had four heavy chariots (including the general) a couple of bow, a psiloi and three fast blades.

And here we are, set up and ready to go.

I just piled the elephant forward, treating it like the HOTT behemoth it is. Dave brought out some psiloi to take it on . And that was the elephant pretty much stuffed, since it can't destroy them or even make them flee. Eventually they would win a combat and destroy me. My only hope was to make them retreat and have them do so through a friendly element so I could attack that instead. Dave avoided that by moving thing out of the way.

Long story short - my elephant was neutralised.

Still, we had a nice fight between knights in the centre. Also my blades took on Dave's and there was a lot of shoving back and forth.

I made a bit of a breakthrough in the centre when my general destroyed the chariots opposite him. Thus allowed me to flank Dave's general. Inevitably I was unable to convert this good fortune into a game-ending kill.

On my right my warband crested the brow of a hill and found themselves able to rush down on a pair of enemy blades. They'd end up destroying both of them.

In fact Dave converted my general's recklessness into a kill instead. So we were both sat on three elements lost piece at this stage.

This quickly became four elements apiece - a tie in other words. Next goal would win, so to speak.

My blades on the left provided it, destroying one of their opposite number.

Four of my five kills were blades on the flanks (one was destroyed by archery, if you can believe that. To be fair it took a fair bit of concentrated archery to achieve it.). I lost two knight and an elephant.

So Prester John picked up a rare win, even if it was via being a non-standard DBA army.