Greetings…
So the chaps came round after work on Friday… And were all pretty excited by the look of the table..Hurrah!
I had decided to just use all the figures I had and the let people choose which side the wanted..I did wonder if things would be a bit unbalanced… but as the idea was to introduce some newcomers to the game I put that worry aside and got on with things…
Adam and Israel chose the Romans…. Their mission was to defend the Temple, The Villa and the Fields..
Alessandro and Steven were the Sassanids… Their mission was to try and burn/destroy the Temple,The Villa and the fields.
After we had divided up the forces… I decided to try out a card based activation… each person had a card suit and when it came up they could try and activate a unit.. It did end up a bit chaotic… but it was still fun.
I of course completely forgot to take a lot of photos… I was to busy enjoying myself 😁
Here are some pictures that I hope give a flavour of the game/action…
We are a move or so into the game here… Steven’s Asvaran move steady towards the Roman defenders and Nellie starts to make her presence felt…
I had chosen to give the Sassanids Asvaran as they had a bow option… as it happened they never shot an arrow in anger… next time I will probably just class them as Cataphracts.
This is what young people call normal dice throwing… sigh!
Things start to get “hot”…
Nellie sees off a unit of Roman Auxilia… And the Equites don’t look that enamoured by the presence of a big smelly elephant.
This where some Sassanid Light Horse surprised everyone and saw off some Auxilia …
These guys spent a lot of time looking cool but doing nothing…
This appears to have been a “thing” with the Sassanids…
“All you need is six’s”…. Sometimes the young don’t have all the luck.
Things aren’t looking good for Rome here…
These archers look cool… and they knew it… so they stayed there for the whole of the game.😁
After causing an outrageous amount of panic Nellie was eventually chased off after a concerted use of arrows, pointy sticks and bad Latin…
I think the Romans focused so much on Nellie that they left nothing to defend themselves from the rest of the Sassanid force…she certainly proved her worth.
The final moments of the game… the Romans are running out of units and are getting pressure from all sides…
So… How did it go?
It went well… a bit hectic at times…but a lot of fun.
The Romans decided to defend the buildings and fields rather than spread themselves out… this eventually led them to being hemmed into one corner with nowhere to go… the Sassanids took there time getting going…some rare poor activation dice… but once they got going they were like a steam roller…
Nellie scared the sh*t out of everyone 😂.
The guys picked up the rules really fast…
Any rule changes for the second edition didn’t do anything that reduced the gaming experience… in fact the layout of the book made it much easier to play through the game.
What would I change?…
The activation… it didn’t need to be so random… rather than each unit activating I would have each sub- commander activating their warband and then moving on to the next after they had finished their moves…
What did I learn…
I feared that the forces might be a bit unbalanced… but in the end it could have gone either way…
I neeeed more toys…
More Elephants, More Cataphracts , More Legionarii, More Archers…and …
Camels…. Armoured, Light and Cataphract… I dug these chaps out of their box and they are now high up in the painting queue…
Will we/I do it again… yes of course I/we will.
The army lists came from the I Live With Cats Blog…
There are a lot of good “Rampant” army lists here and it is also a very entertaining blog.
The Terrain and Toys are all from my collection and are all painted by ….Me 😁
All the best. Aly
