More Middle Earth Melees

Mark and I had one more test run of my Soldiers of God adaptations before we play a big battle at the March TWC Games Day. Once again Mark led the forces of Angmar against an alliance of Dwarves of the Eded Luin and Elves from Lindon.

 The Angmar used their usual deployment, uruks in the centre, backed by the Bodyguard unit and some trolls.

 A horde of snaga as speed bumps on the left flank.

 And wargs and warg riders to make a sweeping outflanking movement of the right flank.

 A unit each of dwarf spearmen and archers face of against the wargs....

 ...to guard the flank of the centre battle, all dwarf axemen and the Royal Huscarls.

 Whilst on the right flank the elves form up. My intention was to try and hold off the wargs, while the centre big-hitters got stuck in. The elves would, hopefully, quickly deal with the dross in front of them and then swing around into the flank of the main action, in the centre.
Of course such a plan required the elves to rapidly move forward and engage the enemy, which require movement orders (of which I suffered a severe lack for most of the game!).

 First move of the game and I drew this card. No one was close enough to use the FEAR order, so I took a punt at the "Commander Wounded" option. A stray arrow flew out of the elvish ranks and plummeted down into the mass of snaga....and I rolled a 6. The orc commander on the left flank was dead and their army morale dropped by 3 - as they started on 15, this was a good start for me!

 I suspected the devious Angmar general was going to use his wargs' sneaky ability to flank march off table, so I used an "Impetuous Charge" card to force one of the units into contact with my dwarf spears. The wargs died quite quickly, but his warg rider unit promptly disappeared off the table on it's sneaky mission.

 The centre battles clash together! Mark suddenly realised that he didn't have enough room to squeeze both the bodyguard uruks and the trolls into the gap in the middle, so he dithered for a bit to get the trolls up in front. But his pesky warg riders turned up behind my centre and promptly charged the dwarf king!

 Mark had a unit of snaga guarding the flank of his centre, now that the wargs and warg riders were no longer there, but the dwarf archers started inflict heavy casualties. The small orcs charged the bowmen, but the dwarves rolled just as effectively in melee as they had shooting.

 Another view of the hack and bash in the centre.

 Under pressure form two axe units, one of the big uruk units routs. To the right of the picture you can just see the trolls have now engaged the dwarf unit in front of them.

 The dwarf king is cut down by the warg riders, who then charge into the rear of the dwarves facing the trolls.
I had incredible luck at this point. Each side has two, one-use cards, in the deck, which enable them to rally off all the hits from a single unit. I drew my card two turns in succession, which meant that I was able to save the surrounded unit twice when they should have routed. This allowed me time to bring one of the victorious axe units around and into the flank of the warg riders.

The final situation. The surrounded axemen and the warg riders broke at the same time, but my army morale was still good whereas the Angmar morale had reached zero. The forces of darkness fled leaving the good alliance holding the field.
It was the luck of the cards, Mark had not drawn a single Rally card once the main fighting started and if I hadn't been able to stop that axe unit from routing for two turns, it would have been a completely different battle.

Also being played at club this week.

A 6mm sci-fi game of Future War Commander.

A far eastern Chain of Command game, colonial French against Japanese!

A Warhammer 40K game.

A First World War naval battle.

And another Warhammer 40K game.

Middle Earth Angmar Battle

Mark and I took the opportunity to match up some of our Middle Earth armies to try out the latest version of my adaptation of Soldiers of God for Middle Earth battles.

The forces of Angmar encounter a mixed force of Elves and Dwarves, somewhere around the Barrow Downs. My battleplan was for the Dwarves in the centre battle to lead the main assault whilst the smaller Dwarf battle on the right would advance in support and the Elves in the left battle would hang back and use their bows to disrupt the enemy in front of them. Mark chose exactly the same battleplan but in reverse, so we were actually a mirror image of each other.

 The forces of Angmar deploy.

The left flank, facing the elves.

The main attack force in the centre.

Fast moving wargs and riders on the rightt flank.

The Elf/Dwarf alliance.

Elves on the right flank.

The bulk of the dwarf axemen in the centre.

Dwarf archers and spearmen face off against the wargs.

As the centre battles advanced towards each other, the warg battle charge forward. The warg riders attack the dwarf archers, to prevent them giving missile support to the axemen next to them. These two units would remain locked in indecisive combat for the rest of the game.

The unit of wargs charge the dwarf spears, not a good move as they take heavy casualties.

The centres grind together.
On the other flank the two big units of snaga orcs advanced at first, bringing them into bow range of the elves, then paused, not getting the activation cards they needed to close the gap for there own weapons to reach.
This continued for a couple of turns, allowing the elves to inflict quite heavy damage on the orcs who were unable to reply.

The elite dwarven huscarls face a mass of poor quality snaga, who are "encouraged" by the presence of a unit of trolls behind them.

The wargs on the far flank are routed by the spears. Unfortunately the spears are too far away to affect the fighting in the centre.

The snaga take casualties but hold on, undoubtedly due the the presence of the Witch King himself. The fighting in the centre was a battle of attrition, several times a unit was on the point of breaking and both players had to cash in activation cards to keep their units in play.

 Finally the snaga broke, but the huscarls had taken casualties and were now attacked by both the trolls and Witch King's bodyguard of large uruks.

 On the Angmar left flank the snaga units finally managed to close the range and inflicted casualties on the elves, but too late and both units routed under the weight of the elven arrow storm.

The final move. With both one of the dwarven axe units and the Witch King's bodyguard almost simultaneously routing, the nazgul decides to charge the huscarls himself to try and break the deadlock. The nazgul disappears under a mass of hacking axes and is killed (or rather dispersed and his spirit flies back to Angmar).

The Angmar army morale dropped to zero, so it was a close fought victory for the Dwarf/Elf alliance.

It was a great game and a lot of fun, with several nail-biting moments. I had tweaked the snaga, previously even large units had been just speed bumps, this time they were more of a nuisance to dispose of. We both suffered with not getting movement activation cards early on when we needed them. Once the centre battles clashed they demanded all out attention and we were constandly using any spare cards to rally units (we could discard an activation card to remove a point of disorder from a unit), so the flanks were ignored.
We are both looking forward to the next game and planning an all-day big battle for sometime next year.

Other games being played.

A 28mm WW2 game with Chain of Command.

Another WW2 game, this time in 15mm.

And a Wars of the Roses game, using a variant of Sharp Practice.

Games Day 8/10/2016 and Soldiers Of God Battle Report

Making our battle plans. Left to right:
Chris, Mark, Keiron, Ian, Bill, Henry, Graham and me taking the photo.

We had two large games at the Games Day in October.
One was a Crusades game using Soldiers Of God rules by Warwick Kinrade.
The other was a Black Powder Napoleonic game.

Soldiers Of God Game.

Mark and I played the Crusaders on the left in the photo below and we chose a Left Echelon Attack Battle Plan (Charge, March, Loose).

Graham and Henry chose a Right Echelon Attack for the Saracens (Loose, March, Charge).

So there was going to be a big melee at one end of the table and much pinging of arrows, bolts and javelins at the other.

Weekend Games Day, Saturday 8th October 2016.

Our next Weekend Games Day will be on Saturday 8th October 2016, 10am-5pm at the Great Gaddesden Hall.
It will feature a couple of games:

• Crusades game using Soldiers Of God rules by Warwick Kinrade
• Napoleonic Game using Black Powder rules. French v Russians.

I might get the opportunity to use my latest figures from Fireforge Games: Sudanese Spearmen with Command, and Arab Heavy Infantry.

Sudanese Spearmen and Arab Heavy Infantry

Our Games Days give members an opportunity to play more ambitious battles than are possible at a normal evening session. We have more time available and the games are multi-player so there is room for two or three larger gaming tables.

MONGOLS VS RUS

At last Friday's club meeting Alan and I tried another game between our Mongol and Rus armies using the excellent, Soldiers of God rules. Soldiers of God is designed to refight battles of the Crusades, but after a few games we thought that it might also work for the same time period in Eastern Europe, as all the troops types required are covered by the rules. Currently we use the cards that come with the rules, using the Islam cards for the Mongols and the Crusader cards for the Rus,

Despite a more aggressive battle plan the dice were against the Mongols who deployed first, massing the Mongol cavalry, both light horse archers and lancers, on the left flank and their, less than dependable, Volgar Bulgar allies on the right. The centre was held by a single unit of horse archers, the idea being to delay the Rus centre while the cavalry smash the enemy's right.

The Rus responded by deploying their own allies, all skirmishing cavalry and infantry facing the Volgar Bulgars, their crossbowmen and both mounted and dismounted Druzhina on the right facing the Mongol cavalry and  archers backed by urban militia spearmen in the centre with the heavily armoured Senior Druzhina cavalry. Their idea was to hold the flanks whilst destroying the centre and allowing their armoured cavalry to turn and roll-up one of the flanks.

Mongols start to surround the Rus infantry centre.