Game 1

Game 1 saw us up against Shat-o-Turks. Deployment was interesting, given Al & I had never played together (or even against each other) and neither of us had ever put a Sung army into the field - or even set one out on table.

Our Opponents were a 3 command Shat-O Turk army, with Turncoat CHinese Supporters

We were delighted to find how much of the table the wall covered, and rather disturbed to find that it was proving difficult to work out what to do with the rest of the table.

The Chinese Wall plus a wood and a steep hill managed to almost totally close off a good 60% of the table, with the only gap a line of tempting blades – who we knew the enemy would struggle to get to grips with as their cavalry would be forced to cross in front of our artillery park to get to them, due to the presence of another massive mountain range. We had left the allied light horse off table on a flank march on our left, as we saw no-where better to put them !

We started by unleashing the Cows of War.

The raging fearsome herd clattered in a thunder of hooves and cowbells over to threaten a line of turncoat Chinese spearmen.

Meanwhile, safe behind their wall the Chinese peasantry taunted the Shat-o skirmishers with impunity.

The Bovine BattleGroup was quickly in the thick of the action, as the concerned Shatos delegated some of their elite skirmishing light horse to deal with the threat. The first test of the Cows mettle – how would they fare?

Well, of course they died instantly, and to a man (or bullock). 14 points well spent.

But with the irrelevances out of the way, the main part of the game was joined – as both sides struggled to cope with appallingly low pips the two lines lurched at each other – Al’s blades moved in against the enemy spears, who were refusing to commit too far forwards given the potent threat of our inferior artillery (erm…?).

With the terrible pips they were suffering, and with the possible threat of a flank march as well the Shatt-o boys were finding it impossible to extricate their third command from its initial deployment zone and redeploy it to the far side of the table.

 With a third of their army uncommittable the inexorable maths of 12 Bw & 15 Supported Regular Blade vs 8 spears and 10 Cv (S) started to swing in our favour – greatly aided by a 6-1 to break through the spearmen at first contact!

Soon there was a huge gap into which our potent strike force of 2 Kn (F) poured to exploit the opportunity further. Soon the enemy command before them were fleeing in disarray…

Encouraged by the opportunity, some of the orange cavalry and bowmen from the wall-bound command also snuck out to play, and the flank march finally decided to put in an appearance as well to help mop up the broken Shat-o nobility. It was a race against the clock to see if we could catch enough of the remaining enemy to turn over the army.

As the clock ran down the buoyant Chinese threw everything they had to try and kill off the enemy CinC - his death would take down his command. The flank march had by now come into play as a backstop, preventing the cowardly Shat-so leader fleeing the field. Would our brave bowmen manage to achieve victory ?

No. They missed, so a 6-4 win to us.

Post Match Analysis:

The Sung Chinese had proved surprisingly effective – after a slow start (whilst we figured out what to do) we had finally been tempted to steam forwards with our 2 biggest commands, and found ourselves at a substantial advantage. The artillery had proved a huge psychological problem for both sides – we held back trying to use them and the Turks held back in fear of being decimated – both probably unfounded. The Wall had been too imposing even for the Turks to consider assaulting, and desperate pip dice had left us with a numerical advantage as our 2 (biggest) commands smashed into two of theirs, with good matchups and with no hope of the reserves redeploying to tilt the balance.

Here is the totally shocking pip dice chart, showing the dice from our 3 on-table commands, plus the enemy’s 3. Our flank march did not arrive until turn 12 so it not included, and I forgot to record our last few turns of dice. There were only 4 occasions on which either of us threw better than average pips – out of the first 24 sets of dice !

Game 2