I remembered while reading H.G. Well’s Little Wars that he struggled to come up with quick and easy rules for simulating musketry, I thought if you go back before muskets, and have say knights fighting each other with ballistas and catapults or trebuchets instead of cannons, problem solved eh? Well, no… for some reason I overlooked bows… alas the Amazon order was already in and a little while later all this stuff arrived.
Among the sets of knights there are two different working war machines (which is why I bought these sets originally), a trebuchet and a ballista. The ballista is going to take a little work to be effective for little wars, the trebuchet however is a real win.
The figures are also really great, I’m most likely going to have to come up with a decent basing solution, one which keeps them stable without adding too much weight so the war machines are still able to knock the figures over.
The figures are really highly detailed considering the price.
I excitedly set up a table and got playing. I decided to win one side would have to knock out the other side’s trebuchet by killing all four of its crew. Each figure moves 9″. For combat rather than using H.G. Well’s rules I went for a simple roll off between combatants, high roller wins, when a draw is rolled both combatants die. Regular infantry fighting archers would get a +1 to their die roll. Archers could also fire their bows, and would kill their nearest enemy on a roll of a 6.
Everybody moved up, and the black trebuchet even managed to score some early kills in the top left, and the silver archers killed some black infantry on the bottom right.
The archers steadied their bows and waited for the order to fire!
Men started falling as the two armies clashed in the centre of the field.
Black swung the battle in their favour, but some silver knights pushed through the black centre, hoping to charge the trebuchet and take it out.
The battlefield at this point.
The black assault on silver’s trebuchet was looking good after the infantry butchered the silver archers on the ridge.
The silver knights pushed on through…
But the black artillery crew counter charged and cut them down.
At this point I decided that Silver’s morale had broken and the remains of the army routed.
Deathzap 