Vikings and Saxons with Sword and Spear

I've played a couple of games of Sword and Spear, but they were a while ago with too long between games to remember how the rules work. So Colin is organising a couple of games for me to pick up the rules and the first one was at the last Tring meeting with his 9th century armies. I commanded the Saxons against his ferocious Vikings.

We lined up facing each other, I had a wood splitting my deployment area so I put two units of select fyrd with the Captain on the right flank with 3 units of thegns and my General, backed by the last unit of fyrd across the centre of the table. Out on either flank I put my skirmishers, a unit of slingers and one of javelinmen. The skirmishers on both sides were to be totally ineffective and didn't actually hit anything in the entire game.
                                             

                                               

                                                       

 With these types of armies there isn't a lot of room for fancy manoeuvring, so the two battle lines clashed head on.

Colin very helpfully hit my my main line piecemeal and didn't leave enough room in the centre for his third unit of huscarls to make contact. By pulling my General back to chivy up the reserve unit, I just managed to pug the gap between the wood and the end of my line before Colin flanked me with a sneaky move.

The first combat went well for me and I routed a unit of huscarls, but then crap dice sent one of my fyrd units scurrying off after them!

I eventually managed to bring my flanking fyrd around the wood onto the end of the Viking line, forcing a unit to turn to face them.

Once everything was in contact everything started to go wrong for me. The dice gods were definitely against me, I could not roll the command dice I needed to move or attack as I wanted and when I did get in combat  I scored an incredible number of 1's! After about 4 turns of bashing away at each other, we had both lost 2 units of close combat troops (even-steven so far). But then I lost a third unit and then in a single turn two more! My army was shattered routing and I had to concede. It was a fun game and it certainly helped my to get a better grasp of the rules.

IMPORTANT RULE NUMBER ONE: DON'T ROLL 1'S!

Other games at the club that night.

20mm WW2 Rapid Fire in NW Europe

The Men Who Would be Kings, the first game in the new club league.

28mm WW2 Chain of Command (with an impressive Russian church).

And a 6mm WSS Black Powder game.