Last Practice Game Before The Challenge

One Last Practice Game Before The Challenge 05/06/16

Last Practice Game Before The Challenge

John at the club kindly offered to give me a practice game and to make it as hard as he could for me. He knew my chosen army list as we had already played a game the previous month, Later Hungarian so he went for Alexandrian Macedonian.

His army was arranged in three commands:

C1 - CinC 34 E/32 EE/11 D [25% = 8 EE]

C2 – Sub 23 E/22 EE/7.5 D [25% = 5.5 EE]

C3 – Sub 10 E/ 9.5 EE/3.5 D [25% = 2.5 EE]

Total 67 E/63.5 EE/32 B

My army was organised as follows:

C1 – CinC  13 E/13 E/5 D [25% = 4 EE]

C2 – Sub 21 E/17 EE/6 D [25% = 4.5 EE]

C3 – Sub 21 E/17 EE/6 D [25% = 4.5 EE]

C4 – Sub [Szeklers] 7 E/ 7 EE/ 3 D [25% = 2 EE]

Total 62 E/54 EE/ 27 B

John assumed that he was invading and we diced to see if this was the case. My Aggression was 2 v his Aggression of 4. I them rolled a 6 whilst John rolled a 1. It meant I was invading which threw Johns ideas up in the air. I chose no terrain and waited for John to place his. He chose two 1 FE of RGo and two 0.5 FE of RGo. He diced for them and carelessly placed the first one in the middle of my base line which meant that when he diced for the second 1 FE piece it of course fell in the same sector and would not fit so had to be discarded. The other two pieces fell on his table side and he placed them both too far from each other.

After seeing where the terrain fell I decided not to try and place any terrain.

I assumed that John might thin his Pk into two ranks because of the limited number of Kn elements I would be taking [he had seen my list]. As a result I deployed my army accordingly with my Szeklers on the far left with the infantry centre and right and the CinC’s command to the centre rear to react when Johns deployment became clear.

John deployed his army in his left corner between the RGo with his smallest command to protect against a potential flank march. As I was the invader I had to rush over all my spare mounted troops to the right flank to try and close down that side of the table whilst I pushed forward the Szeklers to ensure the open right flank was reasonably secure.

To my surprise rather than attempt to push round the open left flank John pushed forward through the RGo with his mounted and gambled that he would make it through before I managed to pin him in it. I had three LH F from the right flank command which were there trying to delay him whilst the CinC arrived. I lost 2 LH F in quick succession and then managed to form a new line. His superior point of attack meant that is was only a matter of time before I broke and fled. My infantry pushed forward to tackle his pike block line in the centre as I gambled on being able to absorb losses shared between the two commands whilst I attempted to break his pikes up. Because this was a nominal Challenge practice game fought using normal BHGS rules we checked the state of play after 3.5 hours and saw the game was tied 16-16. We then continued playing to see how things would develop.

I threw in the Banderium Kn S along with the LH at the same time I attacked his pike blocks. The CinC’s command lost and broke and I also lost a single Bd to the first round of combats.

It was then about five hours of play and we called time with me taking a 3-7 DBM loss which equated to a 10-22 BHGS loss.. I learnt a few things during this game and appreciated the time and effort John kindly put in to give me the practice against a very challenging army [pun intended]! I didn’t change the command structure of the army as I think it works well. I held back from blogging this game as I didn't want to give too much away just before a major tournament.

Below are the pictures I took during the course of the game which hopefully makes things a bit clearer when read: