Oxford Doubles '03

• Our List - Alex Imperial with Indians

This was a huge mess of Bowmen, who were hoping to shoot us down by standing next to a river we placed on our left, whilst the rather vulnerable auxilia hid across the river. Unfortunately we chose to deploy our Kn F command on the left as well, allowing us to place it mostly across the river...and the auxilia command lasted about 3 turns - very messy indeed. The bowmen almost caused serious trouble for us, but what our Thracians clearly lacked in shields they made up for in two handed cutting weapons, and dispatched the enemy command in short order once they got in.

We spent a while messing about to eliminate the expendables before they could crash into the pike block, and then even longer to prevent the Seleucid pike block (with integral Wb (S)) from hitting the main Alexandrian block as well, whilst fighting a sad war of attrition between our Indians and Companians and the later Auxilia and elephants, and getting very few places. Eventually the Wb (S) were squeezed out of the Seleucid pike like jam from a harshly-bit doughnut to impale themselves on our pikes, and I think in the end we won marginally.

This game was great fun - or maybe I just forgot some of the other detail of previous games after a night out in Sticky Carpets All Night Disco.....? After not much mucking about we had the real deal going on, Pike battles, Companians dying to 6-1 combats with double overlapped LH (F), in fact the whole nine yards.

We were a command up when the LH (F) in the allied command got eaten by elephants and warwagons, then it swung back as our Pk (S) block pursued into far too much trouble and got flanked and killed. The game ended on the very last dice roll (time had been called you clever buggers out there) when we rolled +2 with a double overlapped un-recoilable elephant killed a Kn (X) to take out the command that took up over half of the Selucid army - if we had lost we would have gone down 8-2 but instead won by something similar!

The Persians hid in a corner with 2 commands and flank marched with the third. We saw it coming and set up with the main Pike command screening the flank off, and hoping to run over someone else with the Pk (S)/Ax (S) and Indians before they arrived.

They were Early Achmenid Persians however, and arrived in turn 2 or 3.There was a lot of shooting against my pikemen which was all unfeasibly bad, and somehow we hung on for a 4-6 defeat after the Indians died.