One of my earliest memories as a 'proper' wargamer is a DB-something game on Steve K's dining table, pitting Romans against Carthaginians. So this week we got out the vanishing creature of the wargames world, the steel tool box, and extracted the Romans and Carthaginains and set them up in little groups of four and I introduced Steve to Impetus with a couple of games of Basic Impetus.
The fist games saw Steve as the defender commanding the Romans and me attacking with the Carthaginians. I choose the Elephant options as I could not resist using them, while Steve stuck with the standard Polybian Roman list. Steve set up a line of hills, which I then removed one of, and deployed his legion atop them. The velites deployed in front of this line with the cavalry on the left. I deployed my Numidians on either flank, with the Gaulic tribesmen and some skirmishers inside them on my left , the Elephants and some skirmishers on the right, with the centre held by my main infantry, with my general and his cavalry behind them.
A general advance saw me contact the velites with my Elephants but I managed to disperse them and then begin to make good progress against the cavalry with my own light cavalry attacking them from multiple directions.
However as has usually been the case with Impetus games involving Romans, to break them you need to kill, and so engage, the legion, who are a tough nut to crack. On my left the Gaulic infantry charged and initially looked to be doing well, but then where pushed back and beaten, while in the centre the legion charged off the hill into my advancing spearmen, taking the opportunity to overwhelm with with both quality and quantity, destroying the spearmen and breaking my army.
We then took a short recess while we watched the flames of war game in progress between Mike and Rick. They where playing one of the other scenarios from the rulebook and it looked like a proper WW2 game and seemed to be creating some really interesting and challenging choices for them to complete their missions, while maintaining the ease of play that has already attracted me to FOW. If there are more games like this I may have to consider getting an army...
Fortunately before I could get too caught up Steve and I returned to our own table and swapped sides. Steve again stuck with the basic army, while I again tinkered, by removing some cavalry and taking some Italian allies to act as auxillias. But it started going wrong right from the start. I had hoped to defend, but somehow managed to end up attacking, despite being heavily outnumbered in cavalry so again Steve had a hill to put his main heavy infantry on. With his infantry on the hill I had to advance my legion, with skirmishers and cavalry protecting one flank and light infantry the other.
Steve contacted both my flank guards and with shocking cohesion tests my flanks evaporated. I know just had my legion to take the fight to the enemy. As I pushed forward and tried to contact his heavy infantry to swing the battle back in my favour, but it was not to be. The Gauls attacked the legion on my left and managed to push them back, then charge again and sweep them away under the force of their charge, breaking my army while Steve Carthaginians where still quite someway from being broken.
This was another fantastci two games, I am really enjoying the Imeptus rules and Stev was very taken with them. Enought that his has signed up for our Arsuf refight at the start of next month reusing the terrain from our show game a few yeaars ago. It shoudl be quite fun.
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