A couple of weeks ago the Kapiti Gentlemen Historic Wargamers convened at Castle Bowman for an into game of Hail Caesar (and some general chit chat and merriment). Scott had kindly organized an intro game for Bryan, Roly and I, so one stormy night Bryan drove us both up the long, dark and dangerous newly opened highway to Chez Bowman, meeting Mijnheer Roly there.
What followed was a hilarious, embarrassing, tense, comedic and downright fabulous evening of gaming, with some of dark age Britain's most disreputable Kingdoms battling it out for possession of a tiny little bridge in the middle of nowhere. Where legendary decisions were made ("march across the bridge in column", "but they'll charge us sir!") and betrayals were rife ("how many turns have your viking mercenaries sat on that hill now Bryan?", "errr, they're having tea").
I'll let the pictures do the talking
Initial deployment, you can see the bridge in question, my Saxons bottom right cheerfully planning to run full speed to claim it with Bryan's Vikings holding my left flank on the hill. Roly was facing him and had plenty of time to ford the river to get in to position, whilst Scott was going to swing down our right flank while also pushing across the aforementioned bridge.
Hmm what happened!
Lucky command roll, my medium infantry slammed into Scott's heavy infantry while in march column, however I didn't crush them (shocker) and so had to settle for being stuck in combat. But in the plus side those heavy infantry were unable to form up on the bridge so fingers crossed for next time.
Ha, next time I pushed them back. And it only cost me my General (doh!).
Meanwhile Scott swarms my right flank with skirmishers. Luckily I had left a close order infantry unit to protect my flank as I was suspicious about those viking mercenaries I'd hired!
Rightly so as it turns out as Bryan managed to repeatedly fail his division orders and they refused to move. Luckily so did Roly so all the action was on the right flank.
However just when is given up hope The vikings surged down from the hill just as Rolys forces forced the river and it was on!!!!!
And unfortunately we kinda called it there as it was late, emotions were frayed, we'd exhausted all the tea and biscuits and our respective significant others were probably beginning to worry (apart from Lady Bowman who was possibly wondering when these boisterous old men were going to stop playing with toy soldiers and go home).
Next time, Roman's!
