Friday, April 5, 2013

Hotlead Game Photos #1 - Dux Britanniarum (Friday)

It's been a long while between posts, mainly because everything on the painting table's been in a half-finished state for months now (but progress is being made). I'll try to kickstart things a bit with some after-action photos from the Hotlead convention two weekends ago; these would have been up sooner but I came down with a wicked case of influenza (rather than everyday stomach flu) that laid me low for a week and I'm still catching up at work.

Up first is from Friday night at Hotlead - a game of Too Fat Lardies' Dux Britanniarum (hereafter called Dux B, even though I know there's also Dux Bellorum, another set of Dark Age rules) hosted by Cain of the Kent-Essex Gaming Society (KEGS). Three of us played the Saxon side, versus those evil Romano-British types, as played by Mark and "Chicken Boy".
The table at game start, with my two units of warriors, plus some bowmen, on the bottom right. You can see we had a bloody forest right in front of us to start - I blame that for all subsequent traffic jams! Not my fault!

Our elites were in the middle, and then we had another two units of warriors and more bowmen on our left. The R-B's kept their bowmen on their right (our left), with their elites, while they had two units that formed shield walls on us in the centre and left.


My forces. Like Ty Cobb, they were like a coiled spring...but with a dangerous flaw.


And this is "me" - hmmmm, a tubby blonde-haired guy - pretty much spot on...


So here we start moving forward, and I find that for some reason, my right-most unit refuses to roll well for movement and lags behind. Because I'm supposed to be protecting the right flank of our elites, I need my other (left) unit to keep moving.


I believe this is where our glorious leader and his champion taunted the other side's elites.


And so instead of fighting our elites, their elites attacked our warband on the left, and routed it in a couple turns. They also captured the warlord, and rather than ransom him later like civilized folks, they killed him on the spot!


Meanwhile, remember those other two R-B forces (each of two) - well one moved up and came down on my guys, catching one unit still alone and ahead of the others (however, I did keep them from flanking our elites, they didn't have room to turn). My unit played the Evade card, but evaded 1" (aka "one bloody inch") too short to form up on their compadres, and also too bloody short to escape the shieldwall coming down on them. So, basically, they got whooped (that's a technical term) and are already off the table in this picture.


Elsewhere, however, our elites hit their elites in the side, and while this pictures is mid-battle, routed them pretty quickly. We captured their leader (and killed their champion, as I recall), and in a fit of revenge offed him, just as our warlord was offed. However, the Romano-British still fought on.


Meanwhile, both of the R-B shield walls are on the move and have hit my final unit, and are in the process of wiping it out here. That pretty much made the game, and we called it at this point (or our morale bottomed out - same difference).

It was a fun game - our Saxons were rather disorganized to start and I think that cost us, the R-B's grabbed some good terrain early, and then were able to get a better 2-1 result than we did.

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