Last night, John, Chris, Nick and I joined Julian for a Friday evening game of To the Strongest. I usually quite enjoy this ruleset but last night, we all seemed to suffer from atrocious luck with the cards. This affected us all equally (Julian failed to activate more than one or two units per turn on several occasions, our light horse archers defeated Templar knights in combat etc) so that no one had a particularly satisfying game I suspect! We ground our way through the action to the conclusion, which saw Nick and Chris win the game when they finally got rid of the last of our "morale coins" but an indication of how the game went was that throughout, we seemed to be matching each other coin for coin, so that the last move started off with our Muslim army outnumbering the Crusaders 4 to 3. They were just fortunate to get the right cards at the right time to win the game, as we could just as easily have done the same to them in the previous or following turn!

Anyway, we had a pleasant interlude of an hour over Chinese takeaways in the middle of the game and it was still all over by 2130 so it was still a good evening in excellent company.

Here are a few images of Julian's 15mm collection that we used for the action

 The Arab right wing commanded by John

 Opposing them, the Templar left, commanded by Chris

 The Templar right, commanded by Nick, opposed me, with Julian commanding the Arab centre.

 The point of the game was to seize control of the oasis in the centre of the table

 Above and below, the centre of the Arab army - horse archers and heavier cavalry

 John advanced rapidly with our right wing, driving off the first batch of Franks

 The centre advances towards the oasis...

 ...and are met by a wall of Templar horsemen

 In the top right, John has advanced right through the Templar line but is now isolated and surrounded as Chris turns a unit on the high ground to take the victorious Muslims in the flank/rear

 View down the length of the table midway through the game

 The Templars and Arab horse archers clash in the centre of the field

 Several Arab units evade the charge of the heavier Frankish knights

 The Templars follow up, pressing the Arabs back

 On the right flank, John takes a Templar unit in the flank

 A solid line of European soldiery

 A general view of the table as we neared the end of the game

 Templars driven off by Arab foot archers - next turn, they were destroyed by the same unit!

 Disordered Arab horse archers about to be charged and wiped out by Frankish cavalry to win the game for the Templars.

Final position on the left flank - a disordered unit of knights on the heights, next to one of my Arab units and confronted by another full strength unit of Arab heavy cavalry. If we had survived one more turn, I might have dispatched this unit and won the game for Allah!