Finally, a day out - 

It's been an awful long time since I did anything constructive, gaming-wise, so it was with much relief I went to Aaron's yesterday for some gaming.  I had to skip a day off work to do it, but after the weekend last month when I was still at work at 1 am a couple of nights looking after student experiments, I deserved a break.

First up was a new game to me (and Aaron for that matter) - Dux Bellorum, whose raison d'etre is "Dark Age" gaming.  I've got a bunch of 15mm Dark Age stuff still based for WRG-style games, so took them along - I won the NZ Nationals once with a DBM Armorican force back in 1997 - that's the "Sub-Roman British" list with a Saxon ally, with the "British" part being French Britain - Bretagne - rather than "Great" Britain.  The Saxons caused as much mayhem  - and intrigue - in "Little Britain" as they did on the mainland, including establishing bases on some islands off the coast for a while from which to raid from.

We used the vanilla starter army lists from the author's website to represent an Armorican force versus a Saxon force.  The British one is very cavalry-heavy, although that isn't actually too bad for an Armorican force, whose infantry seem to have been almost non-existant, at least as far as source materials go.  This gave 8 units each side.  The Saxons are all foot warband - half standard quality, half high quality.  The Armoricans are half "Noble Riders", one unit of (non skirmishing) archers, and 3 of standard shieldwall.   Aaron took the Saxons while I took the Armoricans.  I parked my shieldwall on a ridge on my baseline while I sent out my horse to do the actual fighting, not too different to how it usually played out in DBM for that matter.

15mm TableTop Games figures; these are 25 years old now. 

Dux Bellorum in an activation-points style game, although the activation points are mostly used in practice to save your units from taking "hits" during combat.  You can also use them to try and deal out more hits, and to increase the chance of successfully carrying out a move, but this is usually not as useful.  It played out quite well, and gave quite an exciting game, as you can see from Aaron's account.  The main design crux of the game is clearly the balance between number of units and number of activation points (and what can be done with them of course).  It seems the authors has achieved quite a good balance here - there is a high enough number that you can have quite a big influence of the course of things, which adds to the "Heroic" feel of the period, with its focus on leaders' comitatus units to most of the heavy work - and of course, the mostly small scale of the actual battles in this period.  As can be seen from the picture, units accumulate "hits" during combat (the markers are Aaron's, are a much better alternative than having an unsightly dice tagging behind each unit showing how many hits have been taken); however, a unit fights just as effectively whether it has taken no hits at all, or has taken 5, so it's very binary. All in all, it's definitely worth a look; I feel we will be giving it another go some time.  Sorry about the lack of pictures - we didn't exactly go overboard in preparing any scenery for the day!

Next up was Shipwreck, another new system to us.  Neither Aaron nor myself own any moderns naval models (yet!  They are cheap enough...), so we just put down a couple of counters each on a blue cloth to represent the ships from the rulebook's play-along scenario.  I've heard some good things about the system from a couple of blogs, but in practice, we simply couldn't understand it!  The play test scenario was riddled with self-contradictory passages, some even in the very same paragraph, like when stating a certain ship had better radar when it actually had worse; the data cards had loads of mistakes, etc.  All in all, very frustrating.  In fact, we gave up after 90 minutes, and searched on-line for some clarifications. we found an amendment sheet, which didn't actually pick up all that many of the mistakes, let alone clarify things.  If we want to pursue this one, it looks like we will need a walk-through from someone who is familiar with the system. It's relatively complex - you have to keep track of every SSM fired individually, for example - including who has spotted it, etc.

My Armorican general's comitatus.  Scourge of Saxons!

So then we moved onto the latest iteration of DBA - version 3.0, which has some tweaks to make Dark Age gaming more interesting.  We played Armoricans versus Saxons twice, with Aaron taken the Saxons twice more.  The masochist - for warband have been really handicapped in this edition.  They no longer get rear support versus mounted, so die horribly against cavalry; I can't imagine what you would do against knights with them, which not only have the same higher factor against warband as cavalry do, but quick-kill them to boot!  They desperately need a rear support factor...  Franks wouldn't try and form up deep aganst Narses' Byzantines in a DBA world! 

One of the problems with vanilla DBA is the lack of "heft"- it doesn't feel like much of a battle with just 12 elements a side.  One way around this is doing a "Big DBA" - tripling the number of elements a side and doubling the table width to make it more DBM-ish in scope.  The other is simply doubling all the dimensions involved - including element width and depth so you just play with four times as many figures, with everything else , such as time to play, unchanged.  For our fifth game of the day, we we went this root, using some of Aaron's freshly painted 15 mm Gauls and late Republican Romans.   I took the Romans, and managed to drive my central legions deep into Aaron's warband block, only to see them all evaporate in a single bound of carnage.  Fortuna was not with Rome this day...   "Blades" (ahem: legionaries) in version 3.0 have been weakened since they now have to follow up when they win.  That's probably not too wrong, but they still look a bit silly in DBA - Romans basically should deploy in a single wide line, with maybe one or two elements in reserve.  Definitely NOT with an entire line in reserve, let alone two such lines!  I'll need more playing under my belt before I feel I can evaluate this iteration of the rules.

Big Bases -

When I left New Zealand for a "short" stint of work in Japan - this is back in early 2000, you will understand, I started work on a homebrew set of ancients rules, which I call TEXNH TAKTIKH: The Art of Tactics, or AoT for short.  I've been working on them on and off ever since... I will get them finished; I just have to quit my current job and its associated time demands first!  

15 mm Naismith xystophoroi in wedge formation.

The rules use a square 80 mm basing system, regardless of scale.  Actually, the size of the base isn't actually that important either, so long as both sides use the same size - and it is square.  But 80 mm bases are good compromise between being big enough to get a decent amount of "big unit" feel without being too big to be manageable in terms of physically making them.  I use 2 mm thick cardboard - usually sourced as artists' mounting board or similar, which is sufficiently thick it won't warp.  

One reason for using big bases like this is for the aesthetics - you can depict "formations" on a single base even with figures as large as 15 mm; of course, the opportunities are even greater with 6 mm figures.  In terms of game mechanics, big bases are a reaction against DBM-style elements.  They cut down on fiddly micromanoeuvring.  When elements were introduced back in WRG 7th Edition they didn't serve much actual purpose in the game, but that all changed with DBA.  DBA only used a few such unit-elements, which worked fine given the delightfully simple limitations of the game, but when DBM came about, the limitations of such small elements became more noticeable.  Too many "units" for a general to command basically (my Modern Spearhead gaming suffers from the same problem).

Eumenid battle line in 15 mm. 

When I think of what the sources say about ancient pitched battles, the only one that readily comes to mind mentioning any sort of "small" unit is Diodoros, when detailing Eumenes' deployment of three small groups of young household cavalry trainees (often misunderstood as grooms or similar) in front of one of his cavalry wings, each said to be composed of 50 men.  And since they are not mentioned again in the actual battle narrative, despite the importance of the cavalry action on the wing, these micro units can't have had a huge influence on the subsequent fighting...  

Some of my Naismith 15 mm Macedonian pikemen.

Not that I was ever happy with the old 6th Edition-style units with their single figures, mind you.  Phil Barker was absolutely right when he said figure casualty removal was a bizarre mechanism for non-skirmish ancients games when you thought about it - "units" (by which I mean any collection of combatants, not just those in formal regiments) don't physically shrink as they lose a few men here and their due to enemy action.  In 7th Edition you still had units, but they no longer lost figures, bases, or elements as they suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - and this was definitely a good thing.

Another xystophoroi wedge, with some Tarantines behind them,

However, the legacy of 7th Edition and its element-based successors has meant that "rebasing" is something every ancients rules designer has to seriously think about.  My 80 mm square bases are also big enough so that new players can just plop down their troops based for example, DBM, onto an AoT base and have a go.  Four 15 mm-sized WRG elements arranged 2 by 2 will fit onto an AoT base no problem to give the right sort of figure density to look right for most units.  

Of course one great advantage of any set of rules that uses "bases" as opposed to "figures" as its basic building block is that you don't actually need to use figures at all: a base with a printed out picture of the troops in question stuck on top will do the job of providing a nice visual feel. There are after all, many superb illustrations of troops on the net that can be used.  I've always thought that photos of figures would make a very cheap stand-in for the figures themselves for young gamers who can't possibly afford to actually buy their own lead mountains...

Who can pass up a picture of a jumbo?!

Of course, having rebased my Hellenistic troops on non-WRG bases, I've cut myself of from gaming with them using DBX rules (except DBA can still be done, with some simple work arounds), but that's not a huge issue.  I've still got more than a few other armies on WRG-style bases, after all!  Some are even still in New Zealand, where I've not touched them for over a decade...  Although now I think about it, one has probably gone AWOL, given I lent it to my club as a sort of "lend-out" force for people to borrow.  I suspect it has been mishandled severely in the meantime...  Anybody seen my Nikephorians?

A day out with Lost Battles -

Work's finally starting to ease up, and yesterday I headed off down the road with my 15 mm Successor armies in the boot of the car to play a couple of battles of Phil Sabin's rules (Lost Battles).  Since Aaron was keeping the record of what went on, he'll no doubt be posting a proper write up on his blog soon, but here's my brief recollection. (edit: Here's the link to his first post, on Raphia)

First up was Raphia.  We followed the scenario booklet OOB, despite my misgiving about it in several key points; most notably in that Phil arbitrarily reduced the fighting abilities of the Seleucid phalanx to give the Ptolemaic side a better chance of winning the battle.  I took the Ptolemaic side while Aaron played the part of Antiochos III.  My left crumbled as in real life, forcing Ptolemy to seek shelter behind my phalanx; unlike real life, Aaron wasn't forced to pursue my defeated troops, and thus his cavalry were free to sweep around my rear.

Young Ptolemy has managed to extricate himself from his stricken left, and is attempting to urge on his central phalanx, who are alas being sorely pressed by their Seleucid opposites.  At the top, my victorious right is taking time to mop up the Seleucid left wing.

On my right, I broke his left, although not as swiftly as was required, and the central clash of pike was resolved in favour of the Seleucids, as my army's morale was shot by being surrounded and having my camp ransacked (there is no possibility of defending a camp in Lost Battles with just "baggage guards",  a very different handling of things to one of Phil's previous rule sets: Legio ; you need to leave out some of you normal troops to do the job in Lost battles - a point I had forgotten).  As a result my entire army routed (i.e. real-life surrendered) with the exception of a single pike unit on my right, giving Aaron a comprehensive victory.

Here's the scene just before my army broke and ran.  The unit on my left didn't make it off the board in time; that pesky elephant on the Selecucid left held up my victorious right.  Not a great day out for my lads!

Next up was Ipsos.  This isn't one of the scenarios featured in Lost Battles, due to the lack of decent sources - numbers and troop compositions can be ascertained reasonably reliably, but deployment details are very murky, so we used the free deployment rules.  I took the Antigonids while Aaron took the allies.  Each side had two generals, and the Fighting Values were somewhat larger than for Raphia: 72 for the Antigonids and 79 for the allies.

Here things also went well for the underdog - which happened to me this time around...  Demetrius' charge on my left was well supported by high dice rolls, and Seleukos was killed attempting to rally his cavalry.  The Allied elephants were deployed across the battle field, but didn't achieve all that much, and my right also put in good work, so Lysimachos was well boxed-in in the allied centre.

Hmm, this scene looks familiar!  Obviously Antigonos being on a horse instead of a litter has lifted his army's spirit!

Once Demetrius's horse swept around the allied rear, with the allied elephants in front of their phalanx rather than behind it, the allied morale collapsed, handing me as big a victory as Aaron had extracted from me in the previous game.  A great couple of games.

Zombicide

Still flat-out at work, what with it being the busiest week of the year in terms of teaching hours for me, but I did manage to take time out on Sunday to go to a beer festival, and while I was at it, get a couple of my non-gaming friends introduced to Zombicide.  This is a very much tongue-in-cheek boardgame pitting the players ("survivors") against swarms of game-controlled zombies.

The game comes with 70-odd plastic minis, which is one of the reasons it also comes with a rather hefty price tag...

The photo is courtesy of one of my friends who is keen to have some more games - we couldn't play all that much given our kids running around, and other people muscling in on our precious table space under the shade (it was over 30 degrees, so being out in the sun would have been death).

The minis are begging to be painted up properly, but that of course means I now have the makings of a plastic pile to complement the lead mountain sitting in the bottom of my gaming cupboards.  Such is the price of progress, I suppose!

The Notitia Dignitatum -

Work-wise (as in "real" work), this is the busiest time of the year for me, so I've not being doing much in terms of modelling, to say nothing of gaming.  But I have spent a while pottering about in one of the dim corners of my long-neglected website - updating some of my Notitia Dignitatum pages.  The so-called Notitia Dignitatum (Latin for "Register of Dignitaries") is a unique document dating from ca. 400 AD (albeit only in various copies made a bit over 1000 years later) that describes the bureaucracy of the late Roman Empire.

And why is this of interest?  Because a great deal of that bureaucracy involved the army - by far the most important component of the Imperial machinery.  And more specifically, the document records not only the names and stations of all the many hundreds of units in the army, both East and West, but also their shield patterns.  In colour no less!  Not all of them, alas, for some units' patterns are missing for reasons still unexplained, particularly for the Eastern cavalry, but there are still quite a few illustrated.  Over 280 in fact...

Click to see the page enlarged and read the unit names.

Here, for example, is a page from the manuscript copy currently lying in the French national library in Paris, showing the shield patterns of 12 legionary units assigned to one of the Eastern central field armies, that under the command of the "Magister Militum per Thracias" - the Commander of the Soldiers in Thrace (you can also make out images showing through from the other side of the page, most notably against shields with white backgrounds).

So this truly is a unique document.  If you own a late Imperial Roman army, you don't have to make an educated guess as to which units carried what kind of shields - this thing tells you!  (Let's just ignore for the moment the almost endless possibilities of manuscript corruption over the long centuries...)

And I've been slowly adding images taken from the various manuscript versions of the document to my website, so people can compare and contrast the various versions (some are clearly better than others - but what constitutes "better" is often in the eye of the beholder...).  I'll probably never "finish" the job - because with hundreds of units, each shown in multiple manuscripts - the task I have undertaken is truly vast in scope.  But I'm clearly an obsessive idiot at times, so why not?