FRIDAY NIGHT GAME - ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

Yesterday evening, Chris, John and I went over to Julian's for another run through his latest rule set - "For King and Country". Once again, Mark was unable to join us so we were restricted to the number of troops by only having my collection - and the number of units was reduced further by the fact I left on file box of infantry at home! On the plus side, as it is a square/hex based system, we can reduce the unit sizes considerably, so all my 6 base cavalry regiments became 2 base units instead - thus enabling us to have 11 cavalry units per side!. The infantry need to be a bit more "meaty" so they remain at 4 pike and either 2 or 4 shot. I managed to provide enough troops for 7 infantry units per side, so we had a reasonable size force each.

The game was based on the battle of Naseby but with reduced numbers on each side. John and I were the "Parliamentarian" side and Chris and Julian the "Royalist". We had two more "Victory coins" than Chris and Julian (16 to 14 I believe) and our infantry had more fire power.

The Royalists prevailed in the end but only just, as they were down to the last two coins and were about to lose a unit to my cavalry if we had survived to the next turn!

 Initial Deployments

How the two forces advanced

 Position after a few moves

Roughly the position at the end of the game

I took quite a few photos but once again a lot of them were of indifferent quality when viewed on the screen of a PC - what is left are the better ones, and some of them aren't that great - so apologies for the quality! The figures are a mixture of Front Rank ( no longer in production) Dixon, Foundry and Warlord hard plastics.

 Royalist left wing cavalry

 The main Royalist force in the centre

One of the Parliamentarian infantry units

 A general view of the field from the Parliamentarian side

 A spectacular success - from 5 cards needing 8+ to hit, I got four - and destroyed one of Julian's cavalry units

 Parliamentarian cavalry (left) charge Royalists

 The cavalry melee on the Parliamentarian right lasted the whole game

 Both attacker and defender are disrupted in this clash

 Another lucky turn of the cards - and another Royalist cavalry unit quits the field!

 Parliamentarian infantry on the hill

 The Royalist infantry assault the centre of the Parliamentarian line

 Same situation taken from above - the artillery would not stand much longer!

 Parliamentarian (Covenanters really) infantry face off against their Royalist counterparts

 A Cavlary melee from above

 Above and below - view from behind the advancing  Royalist infantry

 The Royalist cavalry were dominant on their right wing

 Royalist cavalry versus Parliamentarian dragoons

 View from the Parliamentarian left flank - four of the original six cavalry units are still on the field

 Penultimate move of the game - my cavalry ready to charge the flank of Julian's infantry

But it was all too late as Chris's infantry smashed another Parliamentarian unit in the centre and our last two coins were removed.

Another fun game and these rules seem to work quite well, although we are going to look again at how cavalry engage infantry. Unless we were missing something, a fresh cavalry unit could charge a pike block and fight with 5 cards to the defenders 2 - which does not seem to reflect the defensive advantage a pike block would have against cavalry? Maybe we missed something in the rules......