DBA and Hold the Line

Howdy people!

This weekend Darkster and I got up to some gaming. In total we played three games of warhammer, 3 of DBA, and an awesome demo of a pike and shot game called Might of Arms.

My newly completed early Mycenaeans( I.18 I believe), with camp and ZOC marker.

So some background, I have found a semi decent DBA/hostorical/old-man-neckbeard gaming community in Toronto. The guys here sent me a scan of the 2.2 book army lists and I found the armies I originally wanted: Mycenaeans and the Trojan War lists in book I (Chariot era). I excitedly painted them up (above) in time for the DBA tournament at Hold the Line 2015, a gaming event in Toronto this past weekend.

Some of the DBA going on at Hold the Line in the afternoon tournament.

 So... Darkster came up friday night, we threw down some warhammer fantasy, Sigvald besting a vampire lord in a challenge, then got pretty drunk etc. We didn't manage to wake up in time for the morning games, but when we got to the legion it seemed that applied to a few others as well.

We perused the vendors, all GW and all lead was 50% off for the day, and got many elf horses, a chapel, some ancients, some terrain, and so on.

Hyksos vs. Cappadocians

Then, when the afternoon rolled around we decided not to play DBA after all, but instead got involved in a demo of a pike and shot era Might of Arms game. We played the Imperialists anf our opponent Ian took the Swedes.

This was a really fun game, with simple rules for learning, but eough depth to keep the strategy interesting. On a complexity scale from DBA to Warhammer it was right in the middle. In this game each combat only rolled a single die, but there was a table which translated that number into damage points based on the size and types of units involved.

Me taking on some Polybian Romans

The other cool thing in Might of Arms was the fatigue. You accumulated damage tokens until the unit's fatigue equalled it's number of bases, at which point it became fatigued. Further fatigue could lead to tests, becoming shaken, and ultimately routing. This way a units fighting ability dwindled as it took casualties, without the need to actualy remove models.

We started out kind of shaky, losing three groups of cavalry early to some fierce swedish lancers on our left flank. He was able to clean up all of our big guns before they could be used to any effect as well. This all while our blocks of pike and second wave of cavalry got stuck in some fenced off farmland.

Our left flank

Our bad luck early on was turned around once the tercios engaged. It was hilarious to compare 2 and 3 points of damage from the shot to the 10+ that could be accumulated in hand-to-hand. Units would become fatigued after every round of combat, and soon we were fighting to the front against three units of shaken Swedish pikemen.

Only one of our tercios routed, after witnessing their commander being shot directly in the face, bits of skull and brain still wet on the coats of his men as they scurried from the battlefield. The rest pused through and systematically routed the entire Swedish army. Tercios not having flanks was massively helpful as prolongued combats started involving more and more units each turn, and cavalry proved completely unable to puncture into a block of pike (duh).

In the end it was a victory for the imperialists, hoorah! A hard fought game with a good opponent. I will likely begin basing some pike and shot models to give this game another run through, kind of as a gateway into a full pike and shot obsession.

Tercios marching. These fences barely slowed the foot, but kept the horse out of the first half of the game.

To finish it all off we played two more games of fantasy and a DBA best of three (since we missed our DBA fix the day prior), which doesn't warrant much detailed description. What I will mention is that my Mycenaeans won the best of three despite losing more bases total between the three games (game two was a massacre, I lost 6 bases inclusing my general and got a single psiloi in return).

Mycenaean battle line.

That psiloi wasn't in the mood to fight elephants, apparently.