September 28 club night

We had nine guys out at the club last night with two games running. Bruce and I worked our way through a first game of Dux Bellorum, Dan Mersey's new dark-age Britain set of rules from Osprey.

Above you can see the two lines set up as well as the base-width bounds that mark movement (foot move 2BWs and mounted move 4BWs). I wanted to rtry most of the terrain types so I plunked a stream in the middle of the board, which may have affected the type of game we ended up playing.

We had the usual dark ages crash of the lines, with a nasty grind. I could never seem to turn Bruce's line despite playing a lot of leadership points on that side while he managed to get around my other flank. And interesting warrior (five dice hitting on sixes) versus shieldwall battle (three dice hitting on fives and sixes) went on in the middle and eventually my troops collapsed (extremely suddenly!).

Hard to draw any real conclusions with only one game under our belt. The rules work and the core of the game is the use of leadership points. Unit/group activation creates some interesting friction at the cost of multiple rolls each turn. A fair bit of clutter on and off the board when compared with something like DBA (rosters, leadership points, cohesion markers). It certainly felt like we were moving smaller units and that the game was gritty (which I believe was the design). The unit differences certainly encouraged specific tactics. I'm not sure we played the stream properly. Typical first outing stuff.

Dave hosted everyone else in a big WAB Rome versus barbarians game (attack on a sleeping Roman camp). It looked bad for the Romans when I left!

Up next: Some 28mm HoTT elements are being based with more being painted. I also have some 15mm cavalry that need attention.