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)