First Post Covid 19 Lockdown Game

On Friday 5 June 2020, history was made as our group got together at Julian's place for our first Friday night game in about three months. To be honest the lock down seems a pretty distant memory to me now, as when we moved to L3 here in NZ, I went back to travelling to and from work every day, rather than working from home as I did under  L4. As this occurred on or about 4 May, I have probably now been back at work for as long as I was working from home - the whole of April basically - so my period of working at home seems a long time ago now!

Our group has had (and continues to have) a mixture of experiences around the lock down - a couple have returned to near normality like me, whereas others are still being required by their employers to work from home. None of the group have been impacted at all - as far as I am aware - but I did find out that a number of people I know through work had caught the virus and two had been hospitalised, including a fit 32 year old, who was so affected he genuinely thought he was going to die at one point - scary stuff.

We played a scenario based on a genuine battle I believe but I cant remember what or where and neither can I remember who the protagonists were supposed to be - I do not think any of the troops on the table represented who they should have been in reality - they were just a mix of all Julian's Dark Ages collections, with some of my Valkyries in the centre on our side (having been told he intended to run a Dark Ages game using To the Strongest rules, I requested Julian allow me to use my own figures!)

Following are a number of images of the game - basically Chris on our left won the game for us by steadily whittling away Nicks light troops and reducing the other sides coin count (army morale). In the centre, I had some initial success against Julian's screen of archers but then had some bad luck with morale turns that resulted in most of my front line units being disordered. On our right, John had the worst of it in a duel with Mark, so that although we killed off enough enemy units to get them down to zero, we carried on one further turn and reached zero ourselves, with the enemy army in a better tactical position than we were....without the artificial army morale coin count, we could not have claimed any kind of success at all!

Most of the images concentrate on my figures but I did manage to get a few shots of other areas of the battlefield - all the male figures are Julian's from a variety of manufacturers

First few images show the initial deployment

It was a real "line them up and charge" type of game 

My light horse archers after dispensing with one of Julian's archer units

Marks cavalry advance ominously against John

The view of my advance from behind Julian's diminishing archers screen

A couple of close ups of my advancing front line units

The view from the rear of Johns position on our right flank

Julian's heavy infantry prepare to join the fray

A very bloody combat quickly developed between Nick and Chris on our left wing

The centre and right of our position mid game

Julian's heavies advance on my disordered front line

Mark was doing the same to John to my right

A big gap opens as Julian dispatched a couple of my front rank units

On my left, Chris knocked off a couple more of Nicks units and technically won the game for us

A couple of close ups to finish - my Shadowforge archers above and Julian's Gripping Beast (I think) post Roman Britons below

No my finest hour on the gaming table to be sure but certainly great to get back together with the boys after around ten weeks without a physical game....apologies for the average quality of some of the images, I do find that the slightly subdued lighting in Julian's dining room tends to result in poor definition of some of the pictures I take...