Triumph!

Geoff has recently got hold of a copy of Triumph! and suggested we give it a try last night. 

For those that don't know, Triumph! grew out of one of those interminable schisms that happen every timeWRG update a rules set. One of the DBA updates upset a group of people enough that they wrote their own DBA update, filed off the serial numbers and published it as Triumph! So, as you can guess, Triumph! is basically DBA. Part of the fun of the rules is looking at how familiar BDA/DBM terms have been clumbsily renamed to avoid the set looking the same.

To be fair it's a nicely laid out set of rules, with proper paragraphs, sections and diagrams. I don't know how tight the language is in terms of covering situations, so can't comment on whether any ambiguity has crept in whilst trying to make them readable. We let Geoff run the game. 

We played Early Imperial Romans against Selucids. Armies are built using a simple points system - elements are 2, 3 or 4 points and you build an army with 48 points. Naturally we found ourselves juggling the army structure a little when we found ourselves one point over or under. 

I did like the card-based terrain deployment system. It's a neat idea, albeit one that requires a deck of special cards or several pages of lookups in the back of the rules. You choose your terrain, then number each piece. Then you randomly determine a layout that shows where on the table each  number must go. There are 36 layouts (I think).

Anyway, here are the armies all set up. Geoff played the Romans whilst I had teh Seleucids. Dave watched and offered advice. 

My phalanx. Geoff has them based deep for ADLG, so they looked impressive and overly deep.

I started off well by losing my general. This has no battle-loss effect like in HOTT, and teh general doesn't even count as more points like in DBA. Yu jusy have command difficulties for the rest of the battle.

My cavalry-based right flank got disrupted pretty quickly.

What saved me was my phalanx getting lucky and killing the Roman general, which left both armies starved of movement. 

We fought on and both reached the point where  decent kill would see us win. I had a go at some Roman auxilia on my left. Failed to kill them. 

Geoff had now flanked my phalanx, but they steadfastly refused to die. 

A useful run of PIPs - sorry, 'Command Points' - saw my cavalry get into action and kill some of Geoff's 

On the same turn some of my phalanx dies. We were now both over our breakpoints ...

... so it went down to who had gone over the least. That was me, by one point. So the Romans lost and I won a Pyrrhic victory.

What did we think? The three of us basically felt like we'd played a game of DBA with too much extra fiddle to make it fun. To be fair the other two play ADLG a lot, and I think that's just DBA that's been overcomplicated. But I think our view was that we weren't unhappy with the latest release of DBA when we wanted a small quick game, so Triumph! offered nothing new.

We did like that there was a troop type called 'Bad Cavalry'. Dave saw in as Bad in the Michael Jackson sense. I saw it as cavalry that needed to be punished. And did just that to it. 

If you don't like DBA but want to play DBA then Triumph! might be the rules for you.