Ten Years Ago - December 2015

Something historical for this month's Ten Year time-machine post. Back in December 2015 we played a big DBA game recreating the battle of Chaeronea, using some lovely 15mm figures.

Here's the post:

Pikes & Hoplites - Chaeronea 338BC

And here's an arse:

Monster Island

 After Saturday's Australian Outback Paleo Diet game I set up something different on Sunday. This time the setting is a mysterious island, sometime in the 17th century. Some dinosaurs are relaxing near a river.

But here's some sailors from an English ship. They are looking to bring back the head of the big meat-eater.

They cross teh landscape cautiously. An ankylosaur watches them.

They confront their prey.

The plan was to goad it into a charge. Otherwise its reactions would tend to lead it to fall back into the depths of the jungle (off the board). However the sailors milled around in confusion (lots of failed activation rolls).

One of them had brought grenadoes. In order to entice the meat-eater. forward he sought out a nearby group pf small raptors and lobbed one of his bombs at them. Two of them were blown to pieces, and the other two ran away. There was fresh meat in the area now, and the meat-eater was interested.

Even teh ankylosaur came for a closer look. Two of the sailors worked their way around behind the meat-eater. This was still part of the general plan to drive it more to the centre of the play area.

One of the hunters opened fire with his musket. He wounded the mighty beast. And also made it very cross.

It roared and one of the sailors ran away to be seen no more.

The musketeer crept froward for a better shot and the beast attacked. Needless to say the sailor was injured.

The bomb-wielder used some to try and injure the beast and drive it towards the other sailors.

It was unharmed, but did at least move.

The muketeers fired again ...

... but all they did was anger it. It ate one of the sailors.

Another bomb failed to hurt it.

The bomb did, however, make it even angrier, and the sailor was eaten. Along with his bombs.

At that point the two survivors, one of them injured, decided to call it quits and return to their ship.

The raptors and the mighty beast enjoyed their unexpected lunch.

The sailors were unlucky early on. Without wounds or any particular stimulation the T-rex has about a 50/50 chance of advancing or falling back when it reacts, and in every case it fell back. The sailors kept failing activations that allowed them to properly goad it with attacks and were in danger of seeing it fall back completely out of play. Hench the dangerous changes of plan that split their forces and saw them destroyed when the monster did finally rouse itself.

That said, the T-rex is very much a creature best engaged by weapons with a longer range and that don't need reloading after each shot.

An Afternoon In The Outback

Australia. It's a Saturday afternoon in a time before Saturdays existed. The local fauna are enjoying the abundant food and water.

We can see some dubious kangaroos at the billabong, some dromornis eating the shrubbery and a trio of diprotodon just passing through.

But this antipodean idyll is about to be disturbed by a mob of hunters looking for food. There's five of them; one has a club, one is skilled with the boomerang and three have spears. 

With a range of options the hunters decide to go after the roos at the billabong. Four of them work their way along the opposite bank of the shallow river. The fifth is tasked with convincing the diprotodons to move out of the way so that when the hunt kicks off they don't get panicked and maybe start attacking.

The hunter calls out and the diprotodons simply watch him. 

Unfortunately in trying to drive off the diprotodon he instead spooks the roos, which splash through the water away from the approaching hunters.

However one diprotodon is now isolated and the hunters change their plan. A single diprotodon will give them over half of what they need to feed the tribe's hungry mouths. The hunters move back to try and take it down.

The nearest hunter injures it with a thrown spear. The beast runs away ...

... to where the club-armed hunter is waiting. He hits it again, and it lashes out, hurting the hunter.

A second blow finishes the beast off. 

After some initial bad luck, a run of good fortune has seen the hunters well on their way to their goal.

One of the hunters has coaxed the roos back towards the billabong.

He throws a spear, injuring one. He's about to drive them towards his mates when another hunter stumbles, calls out in surprise and causes the roos to scatter again.

The hunters chase after them. A mistake now will see he roos flee the hunting grounds, forcing the hunters to look elsewhere. But if they're cautious they can finish off the wounded roo and that will give them their quota.

A stealthy approach pays off, and the hunter finishes off the wounded roo.

The dromornis continue to graze peacefully, whilst the remaining diprotodon amble about in confusion.

And here's the reason the hunters adopted the plan they did. On eth other side of the hunting grounds lurked a megalania. This is not something to approach too closely and it's also best to avoid killing things near it lest it wanders over for a look. Both kills were made out of its line of sight, so it remained blissfully ignorant of the potential easy meals available to it.

The hunters and their kills.

Thus ends a pleasant game of Palaeo Diet. The five hunters needed to score five bulk for a successful hunt and got it with only one hunter injured. They started off badly with several blunders causing teh animals some unease, they got some great attack rolls when they finally decided to take out the diprotodon. Switching back to the roos saw them blunder again, and the roos stampeded, leaving teh hunters trying to chase them before they quit the board. They managed to get one to reach their target. Both kills were made with terrain between the dead beast and the megalania, so its predatory behaviour was not triggered. This was why the hunters ignored the dromornis; they were well within its line of sight. 

The diprotodon were Large Grazers but with a bulk of 3, whereas the roos and the dromornis were Herd Grazers. The megalania was an Apex Predator.

Minoans vs Egyptians

I played in a big game of Art De La Guerre (ADLG) last night. I'm still not sure about these rules. I won't deny that the game rattled along nicely and gave a decisive result, but there's lots of fiddly factors which seem quite hard to memorise. But it's not unplayable and I'll admit that I enjoyed myself. I'll also admit that I still prefer DBA v3.0; I can live without chrome and detail in my ancients games.

Anyway, I'm not sure how many points we played, but we had four commands a side and around 34 troop elements each. Apparently that was a big game.

Geoff provided his Minoan Greeks whilst Dave brought along some contemporary flavour of Egyptians to oppose them.

Geoff and I took the Minoans whilst Dave and ... Dave were the Egyptians. Peter adjudicated.

My two commands. I had a large force of infantry covering our right-centre, consisting of spearmen and archers. On my right was our army's elite chariot strike-force. This faced their Egyptian opposite numbers and they pretty much stared at each other all game.

The Egyptians pushed forward aggressively, probably helped by the fact that their Libyan contingent was pretty impetuous. It charged my spearmen.

The initial rush saw some big holes appear in my line.

Geoff's armoured spearmen were attacked by Egyptians with various chopping weapons, and suffered pretty badly.

Meanwhile my spearmen had halted the Libyan attack and proceeded to wipe them out.

They were wiped out almost as rapidly as Geoff's spearmen

With our army hovering on the edge of a catastrophic morale failure I felt I had nothing to lose in committing my chariots. The fight was indecisive and after one round the rest of the Minoan army decided that it had had enough and fled. 

It wasn't a complete whitewash; I think we got the Egyptians to about 2/3rds of their breakpoint. Things had looked quite good on my flank. It was only when I looked to my left that I saw just how badly Geoff's troops were suffering. 

Anyway, and enjoyable game. Thanks to all who put it together.

Valour & Fortitude

We played a game on Valour & Fortitude on Thursday evening. This is not a set I've played much, but I think I picked most of it up OK. It's pretty simple and, whilst it shares some DNA with Black Powder, seems a much more sensible game.

Anyway, we played a Seven Years War action with Caesar and I commanding a French force defensing a village against an attack from a Austrian-Hanoverian alliance under Peter and Stuart

Here's the French force. Figures are 10mm.

Some of the enemy - these Hanoverians are 10mm 3D prints, rescaled from 6mm figures.

Peter massed a lot of Austrian cavalry in the gap between some wood, threatening our left flank.

On the French right my infantry managed to shoot up some of teh advancing Hanoverians. We sent in cavalry to finish them off.

Caesar joined in as well on the other flank.

The Hanoverian cavalry counter-attacked and I had to commit my small light cavalry brigade to delay them. Needless to say they were quickly routed. But it gave my other cavalry brigade time to reform.

Caesar was under pressure from Peter's Austrian cavalry on the left flank.

On our right my cavalry was suffering badly at the hands of their Hanoverian opposite numbers. In the centre we were looking at pushing our second-rank forwards before the enemy bayonets went for our shaky front-line.

My cavalry disintegrated.

An overview of the game and players (plus one guest teenager waiting for a lift home).

With the cavalry gone on my right the flanks of my infantry were vulnerable. I refused my flank and managed to hold off the first charges.

The infantry finally clashed in the centre and things got bloody for both sides.

But Peter's Austrians were now sweeping across our left. The French simply didn't have enough troops left to cover everything.

Caesar had brought his own cavalry across to try and hold up the Hanoverians, and they did have some success. But my foot fell apart at about the same time and that was most of our army gone. 

We'd run out of time by this stage and teh French still held the objective, but the Austro-Hanoverians had racked up plenty of kudos for breaking French brigades, so could claim a convincing win.

The game rattled along very nicely although we still had to look up a few things. Once units start taking hits then can collapse quite quickly, and brigades can crumble through the loss of a single unit as well, so this is a brutal game all things considered.