Tuesday 5 July 2016

Two Lions Rampant


Two games of Lion Rampant at the club as we enter training mode for the group. First game was Matt vs Jim, two novices to the rules with a number of (semi-)eager spectators.

Miniatures supplied by Dave M, who's rebased his Normans into single figures. Everybody else are still putting their plastics together.

Since it was Matt and Jim in command of the forces it was always going to be an interesting game. Victory conditions were whoever could hold the central hill for a total of 5 turns, or else defeat the opposition. Jim seized the central hill early, and Matt did not immediately respond. Preferring instead to form his footmen at arms into schiltron to protect his flanks from the enemy cavalry, while launching his own cavalry through the centre, skirting round the hill.

Jim managed to hold the hill for four turns but his force ended up breaking in the end, due to some bad morale roles.

For the second game , I got dragged into playing as nobody else would volunteer!

In this scenario I got the role of defender, trying to find an escapee in hiding from their former gaolers.

Things started badly as I failed to activate on the first term and only managed to activate a couple of units on the second. Meanwhile the attackers were advancing along the board at quite a pace being in the main light troops. Fortunately my troops finally decided to make haste and managed to check out the first and second area in quick succession. Unfortunately the escapee was in neither, and with the remaining sections in the middle of the board it was going to be a risky job to continue the search.

I decided to take a risk and advanced my cavalry units up the centre of the board this put them in direct confrontation with the enemy leader and cavalry. My leader's cavalry unit searched the central area and found our escapee, the trouble now laid in trying to get them off the board.

The big trouble with using the cavalry to pick up the escapee is the Wild Charge ability, which sort of gives the opposition a herding mechanism. Unless I could throw blockers in front of the unit, or make use of terrain to mask enemy units.

Then disaster struck my opponent, as their leader committed to a disastrous charge that greatly weakened them at little cost to myself, Although my unit with the escapee was in wild charge range of him, he was also on wild charge range of my other unit which I chose to activate first and wiped his unit out. With no one else in charge range my escapee could make their way towards safety.

The crib sheets we used, while not totally comprehensive, came in very useful, and I found them easier to use to look up activation and combat figures than the individual unit cards that Dave M provided.