The Continued Adventures in Gaul of Pickupstix and Weetabix

 Join us for the scintillating final instalment in the six campaign between the Gauls lead by the chief Pickupstix and his rival Paulus Nuitini. As the Gauls had won the previous engagement I was to pick the scenario, and for perhaps more cinematic reasons, I thought it would be thematic for Pickupstix to corner Paulus Nuitini and have a fight to the end. So the chosen scenario was Fall of Heroes, were the attacker has to seek out the oppsoing leader and make them a casualty within ten turns.

I had the cunning idea of completely surrounding the Romans who would have to huddle in the middle of the battlefield in complete terror.

Turns out Paulus's lads weren't for having any of that and the cavalry tore off immediately towards my naturist tribesmen and engaged them solidly

Being on the end of a charge fairly nullified their bonuses and their lack of armour and clothes became an issue

meanwhile the rest of the romans supported the cavalry and they moved in closer to my slinger tribesmen perched on the cliffs

The additional lethality of the slings didn't seem to materialise as the romans made save after save

The bare bummed Gauls were feeling the squeeze as the casualties mounted from the cavalry so it felt like i needed to help them out a bit and charged the boss and his massive block of troops into the cavalry to relieve them a bit

While it felt on one hand the noose was tightening around the Romans, it actually meant that all their squads were able to focus on one part of my army whilst the other other had to trudge across the battlefield to engage. Darn it!

At this point Paulus had all three squads engaged with my warlord, so I couldn't use the ranged attacks. this was perhaps strategic error #67 on my part. I chose to withdraw my leader and his merry band and voluntarily retreat. this I hoped would allow a couple of volleys from the slingers and bowmen to wreck havoc

This havoc never really materialised, the understrengthened cavalry managed a savage charge into the slingers who failed their hit and run tactic that had worked so well for me in the past

the other two infantry squads hid in the trees

Bringing my javelins up I was hoping for a sneaky shot at the cavalry, after a very poor round of shooting from them and another brutal charge from the cavalry, my nobles also piled in to the cavalry

Eventually the cavalry broke and left the field. I had fully intended to pepper Paulus from a distance and hope for a couple of round of very lucky shots but his 2nd in command had other ideas and Spagetti left the cover of the wood to engage the archers after seeing off the nobles very quickly

All the while cheered on by the completely unharmed boss as he cowered in the woods

An extremely exciting end to our campaign, the roman cavalry were utterly terrifying as they romped around the battlefield but the tactics used by the romans in focusing on one part of the surrounding army worked very well

Ultimately the goal of the campaign was to have the largest warband at the end of six turns. After this  game we calculated the denarii and diced for the casualties and replaced them, then worked out the total denarii amount for each warband. The final scores were pretty close

Romans: 1341

Gauls:    1271

Very enjoyable campaign, all in all. SPQR gets a fair few knocks in reviews. but we felt it really comes into it's own in a campaign, it allows you to see where the army is weak and beef it up and is a really good excuse to paint at nice rate. The characters also take on little personalities once they begin to level up and its hard seeing them take damage. The rules are quick enough to play on a weeknight and don't require a huge brainload which we appreciate more and more.

Adventures in Gaul

 

We've had a little break from big battle scenarios, but have been amusing ourselves with smaller skirmish rulesets, in our recent SPQR campaign we're five games in to our six game stretch 

those pesky Roman were attacking our gallic village. The bounders! Plenty of tactical manoeuvres at the start to get the extremely powerful Roman cavalry in a position to cause the most harm and keep them safe from archers. The nudey boys had a not so tactical party near a standing stone, which seemed to draw them closer into range of a big group of better dressed and armoured lads was able to suprise them with a mega toot toot of their horn and a quick charge. Once pinned down and unable to pull off charges the cavalry were destroyed. By this time the Roman infantry had joined the fun and wiped out the nudey boys in very quick order. This unfortunately left them exposed to a javelin attack to the back. 

At this point the Romans remembered they had to get to the village to pillage it and started to trudge off to do their robbery. Soon after we had to call the game as night was descending and it was unlikely the pillaging would have been effective

very excited about the next game for the finale, i think our warbands are ending up around the same size so theres everything to play for