Battle Report - 02 Mar 2013 - WAB GT day 1

Rocked up at Grahame's, Parthians painted, varnished and ready to rock, at 7.30am: we made it to what's officially now known as Maunsfield Games well before 9, so time for a tea and a natter with the rest of the arrivals before kickoff at 9.30.

The format is three games today (of which the middle one used the interesting scouting rules I mentioned last week) and two more tomorrow - have to say I'm very glad it's not three tomorrow, as I am already pretty wiped! For round 1 I drew Pat Lowinger (of Historical Wargames podcast fame) and his rather nice-looking Selucid army: an interesting battle, punctuated with much natter, and an agreement to meet up (with luck) when I'm in Seattle in a week's time. The Parthians once again proved to be an exercise in traffic management, which almost worked: my undoing was the opposition elephants.

Next up I drew Simon Pope's Carthaginians, which proved to be a very long drawn out fight that was called for time, rather than break point. I'd probably have got even closer were it not that my army has only two units that can hold table quarters! As it was, it was 14-18 to Simon.

Last up, I got Tony Stafford's Lydians - an interesting army in that its primarily made up of socking huge warbands. The mistake I made here was not letting him come to me, since failed warband tests would have given me a chance of breaking through his line - even then, it was always going to be tough, since my cataphracts were consistently outnumbered 2:1 or better, and thus his warbands didn't break despite losing combats by 5, nor did pouring 36 arrow shots into one do enough casualties to even make it take a morale test. Those things were huge.

So - so far? played 3, won 0. But having a blast, and not (I don't think) last.