Friday Night Game - Wars of the Roses with To the Strongest

Friday night at Julian's and Chris, John, Rick and I joined him for an evening of medieval mayhem, courtesy of the To the Strongest grid based rule set. This report may have the most images I have ever posted as I had 24 of my own and these have been supplemented by about another 15 from John!

You will be able to spot John's, they are generally close ups and much clearer as he obviously has a much better camera on his phone that I do!

Chris and John had a slightly smaller force - 10 army point coins - defending a village, whilst Julian Rick and I had the 12 coin attacking force. It was an enjoyable tussle that we seemed to be cruising to victory in, until a late spurt from Chris pulled it back to a closer run thing than we had anticipated - I think we had 6 coins left when our opponents lost their final 2, although we carried on for one extra turn and lost another 2 coin unit!

General view of the table Chris and John on left, Rick, me then Julian on the right (in that order heading away from the camera)

Johns troops occupying the village

Looking from Chris's flank with Rick ahead and me to the left

From Johns flank looking at Julian ahead and me to the right!

Bowmen ready to let loose an arrow storm!

John moves forward

My cavalry in the centre

Chris's "big gun" - as it could only fire straight ahead, I just avoided standing in front of it!

One of Johns close ups - my heavy foot knights

Johns archers preparing to meet the foe

Crossbowmen skulking behind pavises line the village fences - the red figure indicates they have taken a hit and are shaken

A couple of close ups of Julian's very nice buildings

Johns troops entering the village....

...and deployed to face my advance

Rick advances towards Chris

The juncture between my command and Ricks

John's men milling around in the village

The crossbowmen ready for action

Chris's professional men at arms versus...

.... Ricks peasants ... this might not end well!

But the peasants were supported by some quality troops and cavalry

I split my two mounted units off from the centre and sent the round the right wing to support Julian's assault on John. 

As usual, Chris decided the best form of defence was attack, and advanced against Rick

Ricks regular troops prepare to meet Chris's advance

Meanwhile, on the other flank, John was severely outnumbered - his crossbowmen prepare for our attack

My long flank march reached its destination and,,,,

.... the cavalry charged - nice action shot by John!

On the other flank, a titanic struggle was in full swing as Chris and Rick battled across the hedgerows

And Chris advanced his infantry against Ricks cavalry (we realised shortly afterwards that he cant do this so reversed the action)

Close up of Ricks cavalry

The last surviving unit of peasants erupted from the woods to take Chris in the flank - but failed to gain any hits!

The situation between Rick and Chris nearing the end of the game

Chris's archers observe the scene of battle

On Johns flank, Julian and I had combined to knock out several of his units

Whilst my heavy knights finally advanced in the centre to take on Chris's archers - and LOST!

The last two images are from our right flank as Julian and I mopped up what few forces remained of Johns command

Thoroughly enjoyable way to spend four hours after work on a Friday evening and the game was actually closer than it appears from my "neutral" reporting. John had some awful luck with cards (as did Chris at times - two aces in a row for activation on two occasions!) and Rick could not turn a saving card for love nor money! Julian had one unit shaken in the second turn and spent virtually the entire game trying to rally it - a task in which he never succeeded! I charged a gun with elite knights armed with lances, and took about three turns to beat the crew in hand to hand combat, so we all had a share of poor card turning, but the number of 1's and 2's that John turned was astounding.

All the troops and buildings were supplied by Julian and very nice they looked too. A mixture of ranges but a lot of them are Old Glory, showing how nice many of the figures produced by this very affordable company are!

(By the way, for anyone wondering about the left alignment of the images....I have had virtually no issues with Blogger 2 recently, however, for some reason, all the images appeared in reverse order, even though I wasted twenty minutes renaming them all 1, 2,3 etc - they loaded 34, 33, 32 and so on - so I had to cut and paste each one in turn into the correct order - and during that process, they aligned to the left for some reason)