Back from OML4

Home sweet home.

A very pleasant day with Lard-dom assembled in Evesham, organised by the stellar Ade Deacon, in which many games were played, a very large curry and beer bill willingly incurred, and much cheerful bollocks talked :D

I took a couple of scenarios from the Dux Britanniarum for play testing - the White Hart (as it seems to now be be titled), and the Pilgrimage, which Andy's written up from our playtest on Thursday but I haven't yet.

The White Hart (thinks): "oh shhh..."

So. In the interests of preparation, I read through the Dux B combat rules on Saturday morning before the hotel opened for breakfast. Now, you have to understand that normally, Andy kind of manages combat when we run games, so I figured it would be a good idea to make sure I understood what he was doing before I had to run it. Imagine my horror when I read through the post-combat results table and realised that we'd apparently been doing it wrong for the past gods know how long! Time for a double-check with Rich!

Stag at bay...

The fun thing about Dux B raid scenarios is that there's no pre-setup required, as the players set up the scenery. My first lot were Pingu, Bob, Matt and Stephen, who got to quest for the White Hart. It worked, I think, really well. The deliberately chaotic setup (where it's, for example, possible for a leader to turn up half the table away from any units he might choose to command...) made for some i interesting initial moves.

Meatgrinder...

One high spot was a massive sheildwall meat grinder of a scrap that lasted EIGHT rounds between 3 inits of British levy and a group of Saxon hearthguard backed by some warriors, before the levy finally broke.

"If you go down to the woods
today..."

The other was a brilliant flash of tactical genius by the British, who'd basically managed to hold up the entire Saxon force with the aforementioned levy and one group of elites, leaving two groups of warriors to head off and kill the stag. They then very deviously split off one group with the stag's carcass, leaving the other (with a noble) to act as a roadblock while the stag was carted off through the woods. Brilliant and a victory for the British.

British warriors get seriously
thumped by the Saxons.

In the second scenario, played by Paul, Jason and Andy, the Saxon vanguard got two moves jump on the British with four groups, and proceeded to smack HARD into two units of warriors in shieldwall and, by dint of some preposterous dice rolling, break them in the first turn.

The British try and rescue the
situation.

It was all a bit of a struggle for the British from there on, but they very nearly pulled it off with an incredibly cheeky use of an Audacia plus a Hero of the Age card to turn a British noble into a one man killing machine.

Ade's WW2 snow table

I was understandably a bit busy to check out everyone else's games, but two I did noticed were Ade's fantastic snow table for CoC, and Jim's paint and grassing job on a Citadel Realm of Batle board, which has inspired me afresh.

See, no skulls!

All in all a fabulous day amid great company - thanks to Ade for running it and everyone else for coming and making it awesome.