Siege of Fort Beausejour

At Cangames way back in May, Ed ran his siege of Beausejour game. I don't really recall any real details of the game (other than losing,  and rolling really badly to get the first nations forces to take any interest in helping out) so I am just going to post some pictures with comments without trying to provide any sort of overall narrative.

 Looking towards the fort from the British battery positions on the hill.

 The view from the French side.

 The British move up in their seigeworks.

 One of the buildings is destroyed by the British bombardment.

 The British in their trenchworks get ready to assault.

 More of the buildings wiped out by fire

 New England Rangers move up to the fort.

 The main British force moves up.

 The British reach the edge of the ditch.

 Storming the bastion, the British overwhelm the defenders.

Only one more Cangames game to post! -- As well as getting through my backlog of pictures, I have managed to prime all the Project Z figures I have assembled and done a little bit of painting on my Franks.

Bagotrix Strikes Back

Back in May at Cangames I ran another of my Roman - British Hail Caesar games.

In the game last year, recounted here, the Romans managed to capture a defensive dyke from the British and the over the winter have built a watchtower and are preparing to reinforce it in order to use it as a base to attack further into the British lands. At the same time, the British warlord, Bagotrix, has gathered some of his fellow kings for an attempt to drive the Romans back over the dyke.

The Roman forces consisted of the garrison at the watchtower -- Legion troops divided into line infantry, slingers, mano-balistae, and sentries as well as 2 scorpio and auxilia archer -- and the reinforcements -- a cavalry force with 3 units of medium cavalry and 2 skirmish units of Numidian light horse and an infantry force of legion and auxilia.

The British have 2 forces consisting of Warbands and skirmishers and one force with cavalry, a chariot unit, medium infantry and wardogs.

The Roman reinforcements lead by the Numidians approach the dyke.

The garrison of the watchtower prepare themselves for the British attack.

The Britsh line up for the attack.

The opening battle lines.

The British move up towards the tower with one force heading over the dyke to try and slow down the Roman reinforcements.

The Roman cavalry moves up but the Infantry is being indecisive and only moving up very slowly.

Meanwhile the British Cavalry seems very frightened of the British slingers and rides past them rather than over them!

The warbands, supported by the medium infantry move up to Roman lines.

The British cavalry take some hits riding by and the medium infantry takes care of the pesky slingers.

The noose tightens around the watch tower.

The two cavalry forces move towards each other.

 The British medium infantry press to the front door of the gate as the Legion pushes the warband back.

But the legionnaires may have moved a bit too far away from the tower as the British warbands engage it in force.

The two cavalry forces get stuck in.

They each win one of the battles so no resolution yet at the end of the dyke. The second British warband unit is moving down aross the dyke to to engage the Romans.

The legion at the tower is wiped out so now there are only a unit of sentries and and a unit of slingers guarding the outside of the tower.

The overall view of the battlefield.

The British cavalry move up to try and get the Roman infantry in the flank.

The British wipe out all the Romans outside the tower.

The Romans have a bit of good luck and defend well against the British cavalry, wiping them out before the warbands arrive.

In the mean time the surviving Roman cavalry has reached the tower and is trying to relieve the pressure on it.

The warband have reached the Roman infantry.

The remaining British cavalry engage the Numidians.

The Roman Cavalry has some success in pushing back the British.

The other warband wipes out the Roman auxila and pushes back the legion.

On the far flank the Numidians engage the British slingers.

In the centre, things continue to go badly for the Romans.

The Roman cavalry have better luck though and have pushed the British away from the tower.

The game ended with the Roman relief force almost completely wiped out but with the tower still in the Roman hands. The Romans will keep the position but they will be unable to use it to attack further in to British lands in the short term.

There will be more adventures of Bagotrix next year at Cangames, I have more British cavalry on the painting table right now (and a Roman elephant -- but I am not sure if I will use that or not)

State of the Game and Zombie progress

Well the blog might itself might have seen a bit zombie-like for most of this year. I have been quite busy and I do have some posts to finish on Cangames and my trip to Louisburg and some other odd games but I thought I would just post on what I am working on right now.

I have been very busy with work this year and my painting has been a bit start and stop but I have made some progress on painting my Franks for Saga -- I was slightly disheartened by reading the strategy discussion on the Muskets and Tomahawks forum which suggests the Franks are among the weakest factions but I still like the idea of them (and especially the special rules around Roland).

I have had 2 games in with them (and anyone who knows my Saga playing habits, 2 games with any one faction is almost a record) and I think I am getting a sense for how they work. (Not taking any Levy until the Saga dice are maxed out seems to be a key to the strategy so painting the Levy first was probably not the smartest thing to do)

Frostgrave is also high on my gaming schedule and I have started quite a few figures for it but never seem to get any finished.

I had bought the starter bundle for Warlord games Project Z in the spring and in attempt to get it actually painted and ready, I have committed to running a game in November. Although I was working for a large part of this weekend, Ed came up on Saturday afternoon and I managed to glue together all the figures from the basic box plus the Special Ops and Ed was very excited to see the Z-Mart terrain from Sarrisa Precision so he did quite a good job in getting that together and painted.

There are somethings that I had planned to paint but haven't -- My US forces for Team Yankee are still mostly sitting in their shrink wrapped boxes. I was going to buy an infantry force for my Italians for the upcoming campaign at the club and I decided I didn't really want to paint that much 15mm infantry so I didn't even buy them -- I do have some tanks that I didn't get painted last time that I will paint up and I have been sort of looking at ebay to see if there is a painted Fucilere force since I would like to have one even if I don't want to paint one.

Hopefully the blog will get updated much more often with some progress on these projects (and the backlog games as well)

Lion Rampant: A belated AAR

Last month, Stan and Mike came over for a game of Lion Rampant and of Frostgrave and I am finally getting around to making a post for it (Mike was much more timely with his description of the battle)

We had been considering putting on a Crusades game at Cangames with the Lion Rampant rule and this seemed like a good time to give them a try. Mike and I had both read the rules but no one had done any real prep work (like army lists or that sort of thing). We decided we would go for 12 points a side with the Crusader army divided in 2 with 2 commander (only one of which would be active on any given turn)

My force consisted of  2 mounted Serjeants with bows, 2 units of mounted yeoman and 2 units of foot yeoman. The crusaders had (I think) one unit of Knights and one of Crossbow and then a bunch of heavy foot.

My initial plan was to harass the crusader infantry with bow fire while avoiding the knights. This plan would have worked better if I had realized (or read) that the mounted yeomen also had bows.

I ended up getting caught in various melees which I lost, partly because I was outclassed but also because my rolls in combat were pretty poor -- I think I made nearly every command roll though

The battle continued in this vein, I became a bit more effective with the bows as I came to grips with the rules but the crusaders kept the upper hand.  I don't really remember any of the details so I will just present the rest of the pictures I took

In the end it was a fun game but the rules were a bit too simple and the special rules for each unit type weren't so special (in the way the "useful rules" in Hail Caesar can really help to add character to a different troop type).  We seemed to be in agreement that for smaller 2 player games, SAGA is much more fun (though more complicated) and if we were going to be playing a bigger game, Hail Caesar would have been the way to go. There are some good features to the rules and it wouldn't be too hard to make special rules for each unit without going overboard. The "boasts" were you get victory points for performing some act of daring are quite good.


I think the rules would be really good for a con, they are simple and mostly intuitive. After playing them I had some ideas of what I would like to do at Cangames but a week or so later, I was convinced that what I really wanted to do was run a Roman game (using Hail Caesar) at Cangames so that is the current plan!

We also played a game of Frostgrave which turned out really well, probably the best game of that so far but for some reason my camera was set for really long exposures and all my pictures ended up as blurs. (We are also going to run that at Cangames)